Now & Then | Remembering early automobiles

Cars are so much a part of our lives these days that it is hard to imagine life without them. Most of us who are alive today have lived during the times when automobiles have been the common means of transportation. It is interesting to me to be reminded that the automobile as an invention is just over 100 years old. Before the beginning of the 1900s, trains and horse-drawn vehicles were the usual ways to get around. Some of our parents and grandparents who lived before 1920 will probably remember when cars were rare and were mostly owned by wealthy people.

One of the most influential automobiles of the 1920s, one that started big time changes, was the Model T Ford. The Model T was mass-produced and affordable, and turned out to be a rugged and adaptable car both in towns with paved streets and out in the country with all the rutted, muddy and unimproved farm roads of the early days. The Model T was available as a sedan, as a coupe, as a small pickup, as a flatbed truck and so on. Some enterprising folks even found a way of making a conversion kit to turn a Model T into a tractor.

Other enterprising folks found ways to run machinery from a belt powered by a make-shift pulley on the rear axle of a Model T.

These days we are accustomed to cars having either stick-shift or automatic transmissions. The Model T didn’t have synchromesh gears; it had pedal-operated friction bands which gripped certain planetary gear cages. You had lo and hi and reverse, and that was it. Interestingly, though, the automatic transmissions that became common in the 1950s relied on friction bands and planetary gear systems somewhat like the old Model T technology. Back in Model T days, if you wore out your low band, you couldn’t pull hills. Drivers would turn the Model T around and back up the hill (assuming of course that the reverse band was good).

Widespread paved roads were a long time in coming. It was in 1950 that paved roads came to the Pea Ridge area. It is easy for some of us to remember when going to Bentonville from Pea Ridge meant traveling on a gravel road, with many sharp right-angled turns. The old Pea Ridge to Bentonville road went west to Dove Road. And It’ll Do Road, turned south on what is now Dove Road, then west on what is now Blue Jay Road, south again, west again and south again,then continued south to the S curve at today’s Jac’s Ranch. The west corner at Jac’s Ranch used to be a sharp left turn. Today it is a smooth graded curve, but amazingly, cars frequently run off the road there and knock down the fence at Jac’s Ranch. Going down the hill to Little Sugar Creek, the road used to take a sharp right turn at the bottom of the hill, and ran along the edge of the hill westward, then turned south to cross Sugar Creek bridge. The south hill, coming out of the Little Sugar Creek valley, was very steep in those days, and the old Chevys labored up the hill in second gear.

So many of the great old cars are not around anymore, casualties of the fickle market, unpopular style changes and so on.

One of the old cars that has always fascinated me was the Stanley Steamer. It was a good car, and I have often wondered how different things might be today if the steam engine had become the common power plant for automobiles rather than internal combustion gasoline motors. Early on, before electric starters were added to car engines, when Model Ts had to be cranked to start, the Stanley Steamer could compete. But the steam-powered car had to have a little time to heat up the boiler, and electric start gasoline motors were instant start (except when they were not in the moodto start at all).

Dad used to talk about the Hupmobile, the LaSalle, the Pierce Arrow, the Star and the Maxwell cars.

Those were quite popular in their day, but eventually faded away. I remember the Henry J, the Hudson, the Crosley, the Packard (a really great and fine car for many years), the DeSoto, Nash cars, Kaisers and Frasiers, Studebaker cars and trucks, Ramblers, Reo trucks, Diamond T trucks.

And I remember, of course, the Edsel - the poor Edsel!

Just recently we have lost more of the great old car names - Plymouth, Oldsmobile and Pontiac.

Anyway, Chevrolet, Dodge, Buick, Cadillac, Chrysler, Jeep, Ford, Mercury and Lincoln makes seem to be hanging in there, at least for now. There was a time when only rarely did we hear of a car made overseas. Now we have Toyota, Honda, Lexus, Infiniti, Hyundai, Kia, Isuzu, Mazda, Land Rover, Acura and so on. Times sure have changed!

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@ centurytel.net, or call 621-1621. The opinions of the writer are his own, and are not necessarily those of The Times.

Community, Pages 5 on 01/19/2011