It was the turn of the century and Americans had begun their love affair with the automobile. Henry Ford would introduce the concept of building cars on an assembly line in 1913, but there were thousands of small local builders across the country making “small batch” automobiles in a fashion not that different than today’s craft beer breweries.
As I traveled North from Bean Blossom, I noticed an unusual concentration of automotive attractions around the city of Auburn Indiana. When I saw there was a Cord museum, I was hooked. I’d always had a soft spot for that huge coffin hood pierced by sidepipes and emblazoned with a glittering SUPER-CHARGED badge. A few miles away, Chain O’ Lakes State Park was well positioned to be my base camp for Northern Indiana exploration.
The park was kind of neat in it’s own right, especially if you have a canoe or kayak. The park gets its name from nine small lakes that are all linked with a creek that can be used to navigate from one to another (if you’re in a small boat). I could have rented such a craft there, but the weather was muggy and raining on and off, so I chose to go explore elsewhere in the city of Auburn.
I arrived at the Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg Automobile Museum in the late morning. Directly behind it is another car museum called the National Automotive and Truck Museum, and the area is also home to two other car museums and two military museums. Quite a lot of offerings for a little city I’d never heard of before! The Cord museum was deceptively larger inside than it appeared from the street, thanks to the fact that half the building contains three stories.
The building itself was interesting as well. The front part was the showroom, where the elite of the Roaring Twenties would shop for new luxury cars in high Art Deco style. Here is where the museum keeps some of the rarest of their collection, and what a setting it is to display the extravagant Duesenbergs favored by the Hollywood stars and millionaires of a century ago.
And that’s just the building. The cars themselves are equally spectacular, nearly all completely restored to the nth degree. Amazing examples of how design and craftsmanship produced rolling works of art in a time when priorities were much different in the auto industry than they are today.
Toward the back of the museum’s upper floor they had a gallery with some oddball vehicles that were interesting. Most had some connection to either Cord or Indiana. During Indiana’s heyday in the automotive industry, there were a fair number of “assemblers”. These were manufacturers who purchased chassis, motors and other parts from larger companies and assembled them into their own models. While they were low output, they were true manufacturers, not custom builders. Some of the assemblers produced a fair number of cars each year, like Hupp/Graham who put out 300 of the Skylark/Hollywoods shown below.
I’ve always had a bit of an infatuation with round things. There’s just something about circles and orbs – it’s the best shape ever, in my opinion. A psychiatrist would probably say I was weaned too early or whatnot, but I don’t care. So here is a series of round things. I took these pictures because I liked the way they looked. Call this gallery the evolution of the wheel, an automotive design study, restoration guide, or whatever. I just think they look neat. (The captions are silly lyrics my sister made up when we were very small. It was a song about a wheel broken off some long lost toy car that we used to play with.)
I ended up spending over four hours at the Cord museum, about twice what I anticipated. There was just so much interesting stuff to see (way more than I’ve shown here) and no crowds to push you along. Really a good place to spend at least half a day. My original plan to see the car museum next door was modified, as my feet were tired from standing on hard floors and my brain was overloaded with automotive trivia. Plus I now only had about an hour to get to my next stop before they closed for the day – a quirky place I had stumbled across on Roadside America and didn’t want to miss before leaving the area.
Insanely Kool! Love Them ALL.