Thomas Curtis Gafner

In the forests of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the paper birch gives way to stands of jack pine and the ground stays soft underfoot well into June, there is a certain kind of machine you still see now and then on the old logging roads. It is squat and rugged, with oversized wheels and an articulated frame that lets it pivot where no truck could turn. Loggers who know it call it the Iron Mule. And for decades, if you wanted to know where it came from, you had to find your way to a machine shop on Ninth Avenue in Escanaba, where a man named Tom Gafner and his father had figured out how to move pulpwood out of places most people could not even walk.

Thomas Curtis Gafner was born on April 12, 1936, in Escanaba, the son of Emil and Alice Curtis Gafner. Emil ran Gafner Automotive and Machine Company, a shop at 2301 Ninth Avenue North that served the loggers and millworkers of Delta County. It was the kind of business where a man's name was the business and the business was the man. Tom grew up among lathes and welding torches, learning the geometry of metal before he learned much else.

On May 19, 1956, Tom married Jean Ann Arnold in Detroit. That same year, he enlisted in the United States Air Force, serving four years before receiving an honorable discharge on March 31, 1961. He returned to the Upper Peninsula and went back to the shop on Ninth Avenue, where his father had been developing something new.

In 1957, Gafner Automotive and Machine began manufacturing the Iron Mule — a short-wood forwarder built on a Massey Ferguson industrial tractor chassis. The concept was deceptively simple: take the rear end of a farm tractor, flip it around so the big wheels led, add articulated steering that pivoted the whole frame on a central hinge, bolt on a hydraulic loader, and send it into the woods. The result was a machine that could haul a cord and a half of pulpwood out of terrain that would swallow a conventional truck. Massey Ferguson supplied the power units and sold the Iron Mule through their own dealer network, but it was the Gafners who designed the vehicle — the articulated steering, the heavy metal canopy that protected the operator, and the Gafner Hydra-Loader system with its grapple.

The Iron Mule found its market among the independent loggers of the Upper Midwest — men cutting pulpwood for the paper mills in Wisconsin and Michigan, working woodlots too small and rough for the big skidders. Later models, the 4500 and 5500 series, were built on Ford tractor chassis as well, with three- and four-cylinder Perkins diesel engines that sipped fuel and ran for years. The company also developed the MB 411 Mini-Skidder, a light machine built around a Mercedes-Benz diesel drivetrain, which Gafner licensed for manufacture in West Germany and England.

Tom purchased the company from his father in 1974 and renamed it Gafner Machine, expanding operations with an additional plant in Eufaula, Alabama. By 1983, he had consolidated back to a facility in Gladstone, just north of Escanaba. Five years later, in 1988, he sold the company to Valmet, a Swedish-Finnish forestry equipment manufacturer whose early forwarders bore a clear family resemblance to the Iron Mule.

In retirement, Tom lived the way a man of the Upper Peninsula lives when he has earned the right to slow down. He snowmobiled. He traveled by motor coach. He took his yacht out on the Great Lakes and through the North Channel in Canada. He golfed. And for sixty consecutive years, he hunted deer at Scott's Camp on Drummond Island — a streak that speaks less to any obsession with the sport than to a man who kept his commitments and loved being in the woods. He and Jean split their time between Lake Bluff and Palmetto, Florida, where Tom was named Elk of the Year by the local Elks Lodge in 2022.

Jean preceded him in death on November 18, 2020, after sixty-four years of marriage. Thomas Curtis Gafner died peacefully on March 25, 2026, at Sunnyview Assisted Living in Gladstone. He was eighty-nine years old.

He left behind three children — Tim, Scott, and Laura — eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. He left behind a name on the side of machines that still work in the woods, hauled out of retirement by loggers who trust them the way they trust an old pair of boots. On the equipment forums, someone is always asking about the Iron Mule — where to find parts, how much it can carry, whether the center pins have been replaced. A shop in Escanaba, they say, still has the prints.