Before the Truck Had Words
Autocar of Ardmore
“They built twenty-seven Type J vehicles there before the year was out.”
About the Book
A radiator does not radiate. A dashboard has nothing to dash mud onto. A fifth wheel on a tractor is neither fifth nor a wheel.
In 1900 the Clarke brothers moved The Autocar Company to Ardmore, Pennsylvania, onto Lancaster Avenue at Greenfield Avenue, ten miles west of Philadelphia. They built twenty-seven Type J vehicles there before the year was out. The first went to Dr. George S. Gerhard of Bryn Mawr.
Nobody had agreed yet on what to call it. Catalogues from three firms in the same year gave the same part four names. So the trade took words from wherever they were lying (the carriage shop, the engine room, the ship, the sawpit) and bolted them on. Chauffeur means stoker. Cab contains a Latin goat. Chassis is the same word as the sash in a window. The Teamsters still carry two horses’ heads on their emblem.
Louis Semple Clarke named his company after the English word proposed to beat the French automobile. The word lost within fifteen years. The brand outlived it by a century and a quarter.
The men are harder to find than the words. The 1916 and 1919 state directories kept a headcount and an address, and not one name among the men who built the trucks. The fullest account of Clarke himself survives because of a fishing club, and the only likeness under his name is a small boy in a sailor suit. He lived to see White buy the firm in 1953.
Nobody wrote down a word he said about it.
Other Books in A Field Guide to Vanished Trades
- Book XVII Fitler's Cordage
- Book XXV The Stetson Hat Company
- Book XXVI Dobson Mills