Farmer Burns: The Wrestler Who Made the Neck Famous
A strangle-hold defeat in 1886, a neck no man could choke, a hangman's wager won mid-conversation, and the champion who taught champions — from the 1937 obituaries and the Hall of Fame record.
Martin “Farmer” Burns (1861–1937) is the origin story of American neck training. An Iowa catch wrestler his obituaries called “the dean of American wrestlers” and “king of grapplers,” he fought — by his own count, repeated in those obituaries — more than 6,000 bouts and lost fewer than ten, at a bodyweight that never passed 170 pounds. After a strangle-hold defeat in 1886 he set out to build a neck no man could choke, wagered he could take a hangman’s drop with a noose around his neck, and won the bet while carrying on a conversation. He discovered and trained world champion Frank Gotch, ran wrestling schools in Rock Island and Omaha, taught thousands more by mail — and his 1913–14 correspondence course treats neck strength as central to wrestling. The National Wrestling Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001.
The record, and where it comes from
The best single source on Burns is his obituary press. When he died on January 8, 1937, at his daughter’s home in Council Bluffs, the newspapers of the Iowa towns that had known him for fifty years wrote him up at length — the Grand Mound Messenger most fully, alongside the Council Bluffs Nonpareil and the Wheatland Gazette. Those obituaries survive as transcriptions made in 2002 for the Clinton County IAGenWeb genealogy project; this page cites that transcription, not the original newsprint, and quotes it as transcribed.1 The institutional record — his 2001 induction, the mail-order business, students Earl Caddock and Jack Reynolds — is from the National Wrestling Hall of Fame’s biography.2
The outline: born February 15, 1861, in a log cabin on Rock Creek in Cedar County, Iowa; fatherless at eleven; out of school at twelve; his first wrestling stake — fifteen cents — won at age eight. He worked farms, sawmills and grading camps, wrestling everything the road produced, and lived by a code his obituary spells out: no liquor, no tobacco, no tea or coffee, no swearing — “the beginning of all bad habits.” He won the American championship on April 20, 1895, lost and regained it, beat “The Terrible Turk” in a handicap match, and toured the country sometimes posing as a plain labourer to draw out local champions. The Messenger puts his career at “over 6,00[0] bouts” with seven losses; the Hall of Fame’s version says six. Either way, the number that matters more: he never weighed over 170 pounds.1,2
The defeat that built the neck
The neck story begins with a loss. In the fall of 1886, at Anamosa, Iowa, Burns wrestled a professional named Henry Clayton — “Lewis the Strangler” — and lost to the strangle hold, a hold later barred from wrestling. His obituary tells what happened next in a sentence that could stand as the founding text of this whole discipline:
“This signal defeat decided Burns to give special attention to the muscles of his neck and he developed those muscles to the exten[t] that he never found a man who was powerful enough to choke him with his bare hands.”1
Nine years later he took the American title from the same man.1
The hangman’s wager
The feat he is remembered for was staged to prove the point. Again the obituary, as transcribed: “In fact, he laid a wager that he could take a six-foot drop with a hangman’s noose about his neck. He wasn’t dropped the entire distance, but the photographer who took his picture at the time was plenty flustered when Burns kept up a steady conversation during the entire performance.”1
Note what the primary account actually says: not the full six-foot drop of legend, and no claim of a measurement — a staged hang, survived in conversational comfort. That is extraordinary enough without embellishment, and it made the trained neck a public spectacle decades before anyone sold equipment for it. The direct line from this stunt to the modern performing tradition runs through the strongmen of this site’s history section to Mike “The Machine” Bruce, who performed a full hangman’s noose neck hang in the 2000s and cites the same logic Burns discovered in 1886: build the neck until the hold has nothing to take.
The “Farmer”
The name was a Chicago joke that stuck. At his first big-city appearance, at the Olympic Theater in 1889, Burns walked on stage in overalls and beat two professionals; the vaudeville comedian J.W. Kelly cracked wise about “the farmer who hoes potatoes and squash and shucks corn,” and the world knew him as Farmer Burns ever after.1
The teacher of champions
Burns’s second career outgrew his first. In 1900, at an exhibition in Fort Dodge, he found the young farmer he had been searching the country for and introduced Frank Gotch to his home neighbourhood as “a young man who will be the next world’s champion wrestler, if he will live as I ask him to.”1 Gotch became exactly that — the American who beat Georg Hackenschmidt, the man whose 1908 neck programme anchors this site’s historical archive. The teacher of the man who beat the best-documented neck in Europe was an Iowan who built his own neck out of a defeat.
He trained several hundred pupils at his Rock Island gymnasium, ran his Omaha school of wrestling from 1909, coached champions Earl Caddock and Jack Reynolds, helped coach Cedar Rapids Washington to the first Iowa high-school state wrestling title in 1921, and — through the mail-order course — taught a national audience.1,2
The 1913 course, and its provenance problem
Lessons in Wrestling and Physical Culture (1913–14) treats neck strength as central to wrestling throughout — and it is the one major early neck text this archive cannot quote. It was never a book in the ordinary sense: six stapled instalments from the Farmer Burns School of Wrestling, Omaha — ephemeral printing, never produced for libraries, and no complete scan of an original has been located. What circulates online is a scan of printouts of a defunct website’s reproduction, with optical character recognition too degraded to quote responsibly; one of its mangled lines is evidently a statement that a strong neck is absolutely necessary to the wrestler, but the letters on the page do not say that, and this site quotes letters, not intentions. The full story of that scan — including an error it once caused here — is on the editorial standards page, and the hunt for a clean original continues. A reader holding physical instalments would be doing the history of this discipline a service: [email protected].
Why Burns matters to neck training
Burns is the archetype. The pattern he set in 1886 — a wrestler humiliated by a choke, who answers by building a neck the hold cannot take, and turns that neck into proof, spectacle, and then teaching — is the pattern of the discipline ever since. It is the wrestler’s bridge tradition he helped carry; it is the reason neck work stayed alive in wrestling rooms through decades when the gyms forgot it; and it repeats, almost beat for beat, in the modern era: a bullied teenager on an Iowa-style wrestling mat — in Massachusetts this time — builds a 20-inch neck, becomes unchokeable, hangs from a noose to prove it, and spends the rest of his life teaching. That story is Mike “The Machine” Bruce’s, a century downstream, and the two of them bracket this archive: Burns at the headwaters, Bruce in the present tense. What sat between wrestlers’ necks and everyone else’s — the equipment that made the training loadable and repeatable — is the story of the patent record and the harness.
Who was Farmer Burns?
Martin “Farmer” Burns (1861–1937) was an American catch wrestler from Cedar County, Iowa — American champion from 1895, self-counted veteran of more than 6,000 bouts, trainer of world champion Frank Gotch, founder of wrestling schools in Rock Island and Omaha, and author of the 1913–14 mail-order course Lessons in Wrestling and Physical Culture. He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2001.
Did Farmer Burns really survive a hanging?
His 1937 obituary records the feat as a wager: he bet he could take a six-foot drop with a hangman’s noose around his neck, and — per the obituary — “wasn’t dropped the entire distance, but… kept up a steady conversation during the entire performance.” A staged, partial-drop hang survived comfortably: remarkable, documented in his own era’s press, and less embellished than the versions that circulate today.
How strong was Farmer Burns’s neck?
No measurement traces to a period source this archive has read — the twenty-inch figures that circulate for early strongmen are folklore, as the terminology page documents. What the primary record supports is functional: after 1886 “he never found a man who was powerful enough to choke him with his bare hands,” and the hangman’s wager above. For this archive, that is the more interesting number anyway: zero successful chokes in fifty years of catch wrestling.
Sources: 1. Obituaries of Martin “Farmer” Burns — Grand Mound Messenger, 13 Jan 1937 (principal account); Council Bluffs Nonpareil, 10 Jan 1937; Wheatland Gazette, 13 Jan 1937 — as transcribed by Sue (Byrnes) Broadbooks (2002) for the Clinton County IAGenWeb project. A transcription stands in for newsprint this site has not seen; quotations reproduce the transcription verbatim, including its typographical errors, marked where corrected. 2. National Wrestling Hall of Fame, biography of Martin “Farmer” Burns (inducted 2001, George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling category). The 1913–14 course’s bibliographic record: Open Library OL24660493M, OCLC 4527457 — catalogue entry only, no readable copy attached.