This is the type of neighborhood where house numbers aren’t that necessary. Sometimes you can just look for the line of tractors in the yard.

Vic Wells, 93, is pictured Tuesday with his collection of antique tractors that he has been collecting for decades at his home in a part of town known as Wells Acres. Wells, who says he is giving up the hobby of tinkering with the machines, plans to sell them during an auction on July 19.

Signs out here can get confusing anyway. One street has two different names. On one side of the street there is a fancy city sign that says Minnesota Street. On the other side of the street is a less fancy county sign that says E 1338 Road.

No, the Lawrence City Commission and Douglas County Commission don’t come out here and re-create a scene from West Side Story to settle a turf dispute, although hopefully somebody will have a video camera if they do.

Instead, this is just the way it is done in a little part of Douglas County called Wells Acres.

If you don’t believe me, you can ask 93-year old Vic Wells. You can find him by looking for the 15 tractors parked in his yard.

The subdivision is named after Wells’ family — his uncle Jess Wells who had a farm on the property that is just north of the Kansas Turnpike. But by the late 1950s, development came knocking. The Santa Fe Industrial Park, with businesses like Lawrence Paper Co. — where Vic worked for 37 years — Westar Energy, and Kmart distribution is just a bit west of the property. The demand for houses increased.

But instead of your traditional city neighborhood, people built middle class homes on big lots of one acre or more. If a fellow wanted to have a machine shed in his yard, he’d build a machine shed in his yard. If he wanted to have a tractor parked by the bird fountain, he’d park a tractor by the bird fountain. Or 15 of them.

“I started out collecting Internationals,” Wells says of his hobby that began in the 1970s. “Then I got a better idea. John Deere. I’ve just always liked the way they sound. Putt-putt.”

For more than 50 years, the pressure of Lawrence and its more traditional neighborhoods has been getting ever closer to Wells Acres. The little community of a couple dozen homes is still outside the city limits, mostly. A couple of homes had to join the city in order to get hooked onto city sewer service when their septic tanks failed, thus the reason for dueling street signs.

On a light traffic day, Wells Acres is just a little more than five minutes from downtown (take Michigan Street north until it ends, and you’ve basically found the area.) But it feels like you are farther away.

“You are not living on top of one another,” says Linda Wells, a daughter of Vic’s who lives with him. “But they’ll get us in the city one of these days.”

Indeed, change is coming to Wells Acres on July 19. No, not an annexation or anything like that. The tractors are leaving. Vic is selling his tractor collection via auction. (The auction is the main reason they are out in the yard. He has two machine sheds where he normally keeps them.)

“I always liked riding them,” says Vic. “But I can’t do anything with them anymore.”

Vic uses a modern John Deere riding mower to drive out to the row of old tractors. He’s still plenty good at driving, but starting them is another matter these days. Most of the tractors are from the 1920s and 1930s, before electric starters came in vogue.

“All of them have a hand crank,” Vic says. “Sometimes they are easy to start, and sometimes you had to cuss them a little bit.”

At 93 and recovering from a broken hip, Vic can’t easily start them. Vic estimates he probably hasn’t ridden the tractors for four or five years. They now mainly provide memories, and he doesn’t need to own them to keep those.

“Most of these tractors, you had to carry as much water as you did fuel,” Vic says. “If you let them overheat and killed them, you may crank an hour or two before you got them started again.”

But out in dry and dusty Phillipsburg, where Vic grew up, farmers weren’t complaining about those inconveniences because they knew mules could be pretty stubborn too. That’s what his grandfather was farming with until he bought a brand new 1934 Farmall F-12. Vic still has it, but it too will be for sale.

What farmers did complain about back then were rubber tires, Vic says. Several of the tractors in Vic’s collection still run on the steel wheels, and there was a time that many farmers thought that was the only reasonable type of tractor tire.

“When rubber tires came out, all the farmers said they won’t work,” Vic recalls. “Won’t work. It is like everything else though, it eventually changes.”

It makes you wonder whether that holds true for Wells Acres and the handful of other such neighborhoods — think Western Hills and Miller Acres — that dot Douglas County. Both Vic and Linda are optimistic that some aspects of the neighborhood won’t change much. It would be difficult to redevelop the area into a traditional city neighborhood, unless the current homes were torn down, and that doesn’t seem likely.

But as the past couple of decades have shown, it is certainly easy for Wells Acres to become surrounded by such traditional neighborhoods, where machine sheds aren’t full of tractors and putt-putt is a form of golf, not a sound to be cherished.

Maybe that is what will change about Wells Acres. Maybe the lots will remain big but the city lifestyle will take over. But who knows? It took awhile for rubber tractor tires to catch on.

In Vic’s garage, there’s a handful of old hit-miss engines (think of them like a precursor to electric generators.) He will sell the engines at the auction, but not the whole host of hand tools in the garage. Vic was on the floor earlier in the day working on those engines.

“I don’t know what he’ll tinker with when he sells them, but I guarantee you he’ll find something,” daughter Linda says.

It may even be a tractor. Vic let’s it slip during our talk that there is still one out in the machine shed. At 93, he’s going to keep that one.

Thankfully, some things are still tough to change.