From Here to There

The card from John Horsman’s Chevron station showed a 1908 Benz. Drew Ford in La Mesa sent another with a 1911 Coey Flyer. On the back: a service reminder. Your oil is due. Come in soon.

The cards arrived with calculated regularity. Each addressed to the same house, each featuring a different antique automobile on the front. Curated from private collections and museums, these postcards were reproduced by the millions as stock advertising for companies across the country. Depicting automobiles from a bygone era, the trade cards themselves were designed to be collectible.

The man most responsible for preserving those automobiles was born in Venice, California, in 1911. Bill Harrah opened a bingo parlor there as a young man, moved to Reno in 1937, and built a casino empire that made him one of the wealthiest men in Nevada. He was meticulous about his clothes, his restaurants, and especially his cars.

His first collector car was a 1911 Maxwell, and Harrah bought, restored, and accumulated automobiles for the rest of his life. He acquired Winthrop Rockefeller’s extensive collection for $947,000, including 68 motorized vehicles and three horse-drawn carriages in a single transaction. It was a passion he pursued, and almost couldn’t contain.

By 1962, Harrah rented a huge brick building in Sparks to display around 150 cars. The cars moved in convoys. His mechanics restored them to running condition. When the restorations were finished, they test-drove the vehicles up and down Glendale Boulevard in Sparks, sometimes dressed in the clothing of the era.

The Harrah’s postcards in this set were produced from his collection’s photographs, shot when the restoration program was at its height. A glass company in Detroit printed them. An auto glass distributor in Phoenix mailed them to customers in the state. Though lovingly housed in Sparks, this 1913 Garford traveled through the postal system to Prescott, Arizona, tucked into a stack of bills and circulars.

The collection eventually spread across thirteen warehouses. His executive Lloyd Dyer put it plainly, “We owned thirteen hundred automobiles at that time. Bill wanted to have a perfect museum to show his cars.”

Harrah never finished that museum. He died in 1978. Holiday Inn purchased his hotels, casinos, and automobile collection in 1980 and announced plans to sell everything. Harrah friends and fans pushed back hard. Holiday Inn agreed to donate 175 cars if money could be raised for a museum.

The National Automobile Museum opened in downtown Reno on November 5, 1989, and is still operating with more than 225 cars on display. That gift became the largest corporate philanthropic donation in the nation’s history at the time.

In a small Michigan town called Hickory Corners, another collector built a museum for different reasons. Donald S. Gilmore ran the Upjohn Company, the pharmaceutical firm his family had founded in Kalamazoo in 1886. As the story goes, one day his wife told him he needed a hobby. Most people know what that means.

She gave him his first project car in 1963 as a retirement gift, a 1920 Pierce-Arrow. Within three years he had accumulated 37 cars, a steamboat, a steam tractor, and a biplane.

Eventually, he bought a farm up the road and the Gilmore Car Museum opened to the public on July 31, 1966, with 35 cars on display. That farm now covers 90 acres. The museum exhibits over 400 vehicles and motorcycles from all eras in several vintage buildings. A staggering scale for an effort that began because a his wife wanted him out of the house.

Then there’s Burton H. Upjohn, whose name appears on the backs of multiple cards in this collection. From a different branch of the same Kalamazoo family, he collected cars of his own. In the cards we see here, he loaned the 1908 Packard, 1911 Empire Racy Roadster, and the 1931 Ford Model A to Henry Clark for photography.

Henry Austin Clark Jr. started buying cars at Harvard in the late 1930s. After naval service during World War II, he and family settled in Southampton, New York, into a life of collecting, rallies and tours. The cars outgrew his sheds. He opened the Long Island Automotive Museum in 1948, in large part to house his collection.

He also photographed nearly every notable collector car in America. That’s not quite an exaggeration. Clark comprehensively and precisely documented a vanishing world with attention to what would matter later. He co-authored the Standard Catalog of American Cars with Beverly Rae Kimes. He participated in Glidden Tours for decades. He served as vice president of the Bridgehampton race circuit. He rescued the Thomas Flyer that won the 1908 New York-to-Paris race from a junkyard.

By the late 1970s, the museum’s operating losses forced him to begin selling. In 1979, over two hundred automobiles were auctioned. A year later, the museum closed. Clark died on December 15, 1991, the day after his collection of automotive history began to move to the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford in Dearborn.

The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum opened in 1974 after community leaders and volunteers spent years raising funds to restore the company’s old showroom and factory in Auburn, Indiana. The National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark in 2005. It holds the cars photographed by Nicky Wright for the 1991 postcard set in this collection.

A network of institutions now hold what these private collectors assembled, including the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, The Henry Ford in Dearborn, the Revs Institute in Naples, the Gilmore in Hickory Corners, and the LeMay in Tacoma.

We can see in this collection where the credit lines overlap. These men likely knew each other, and certainly inhabited a postwar American world of inherited wealth, mechanical passion, and enough acreage to store what they acquired. Though the original collectors have passed, the images, trade cards, archives, museums, and the cars themselves are evidence of an American pastime that lives on today.

To Read More

National Automobile Museum (The Harrah Collection), Reno, Nevada — automuseum.org

Gilmore Car Museum, Hickory Corners, Michigan — gilmorecarmuseum.org

Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum, Auburn, Indiana — automobilemuseum.org

Henry Austin Clark Jr. Photograph Collection, The Henry Ford — thehenryford.org

“The Pioneers of Automobile Collecting,” Seal Cove Auto Museum — sealcoveautomuseum.org

Henry Austin Clark, Society of Automotive Historians — autohistory.org