Classic Woodies: When Fine Carpentry Hit the Road

Naturalists tell us that Earth has lost about 1/3 of its forests* in the last 10 millennia, but that most of this loss occurred in the last 3 centuries.  Shipbuilding was a major cause.  As the empires of Europe depleted the forests at home, they sent their navies across the oceans to find and seize more forests so they could build more ships, and the cycle continued.  Back on land, carriage builders used wood, fabric and leather to frame and finish their coaches.  By the time the French apertif mogul Andre Dubonnet dreamed up this wooden torpedo-style body for Nieuport Astra to build on a Hispano Suiza* H6C in 1924, more advanced construction techniques were available...

Nieuport Astra, which had produced a streamlined racing monoplane before making its famous WWI fighter planes, constructed the bodywork of thin wood strips adhered to an aluminum framework with thousands of brass rivets.  The finished body weighed only 160 lb. Instead of using this 8-liter, 6-cylinder car as the land yacht it resembled, Dubonnet competed in Italy's Targa Florio with his Tulipwood Torpedo after removing those teardrop fenders, which must've appeared positively futuristic in 1924.  He finished in 6th place. 

Five years later, the wood-bodied Armstrong Siddeley* "shooting brake" below was ordered by the Duke of York, later King George VI.  Apparently he had been a fan of the sturdy but obscure (at least Stateside) marque since early on.  This car, intended for hunting excursions (thus the name) was based on the Armstrong Siddeley 30 hp. model (named for its taxable hp.) and featured a 5-liter engine with two inline 3-cylinder blocks with overhead valves.

During the same period, what the British called shooting brakes or estate cars were called station wagons in the USA, perhaps because they had enough space to hold passengers and their luggage when you picked them up at the train station.  The steam locomotive in the background of the Ford rendering below is a clue.  That the illustration shows a sunny, warm day is convenient, as this 1929 Ford Model A wagon offered only flexible side curtains to deal with inclement weather...

By the late Thirties, American wagons had moved on from side curtains, if not from wood-framed bodies. This Packard 110 wagon shows how a pricier wagon presented itself in 1940. The passenger cabin and doors are actually wood-framed. The 110 was the entry-level Packard, and featured an inline flathead six-cylinder engine.  The popular, eight-cylinder 120, the car which many credited with getting Packard through the Great Depression, was just above it in the lineup.

The spear molding was typical on Packards of the era, and the chromed vents are a deft touch...

Power for the 110 came from a 245 cubic inch (4 liter) inline, flathead six.  Transmission was a 3-speed manual.

The next year, Chrysler took a more streamlined approach with their Town and Country, which featured a steel roof over wood doors and window trim, and a center-opening trunk.  The 241.5 cubic inch inline 6 made 112 hp; this increased to 250 inches and 120 hp the next year. Note that the Town & Country is picking up passengers at an airport; the Douglas DC-3 is a cue that Chrysler was selling modernity...

But unlike the Packard 110 woody, the Town & Country wasn't a true station wagon.  The wood-framed trunk opened along the centerline, but there was no hatch above it. The modern, curved rear window was fixed in the fastback metal roofline.

After World War 2, Nash offered the wood-paneled Suburban below in fastback sedan form.  The name seemed a savvy choice, as it coincided with the postwar suburban housing boom.  Even as early as 1946, the year this car was introduced, this was a major trend.  A 234 cu. in. L-head inline 6 matched the Town & Country's horsepower, at 112.  Only 272 Suburbans were sold in 1946.

Ford offered wood-paneled wagons as well as Sportsman convertibles in 1946, and these came with their famous, 239 cubic inch flathead V8, making 100 hp.  Over 1,300 examples of the Sportsman were sold that first year.

The Mercury version of the Sportsman shown below offered a longer wheelbase (118 vs. 114 inches) than the Ford, but the same engine.  Priced at $2,209, it was a couple hundred dollars more than Ford's version.  Even in the deluxe category of convertible woodies, price apparently mattered.  Only 205 specimens of the Mercury Sportsman were sold in the only year it was offered, 1946...

Mercury sold more of its wagons, though: 2,797 in 1946. This example owned by Keith Carlson shows off wood-framed doors, passenger cabin (including roof) and tailgate.  Note that this '46 model has a different grille than the '46 convertible above, with a chrome frame and horizontal bars instead of the ragtop's vertical chrome slats in a painted frame. That's because it's a Canadian Mercury Monarch.  Production figures for the Monarch wagon are unavailable, but as total production for the whole Canadian Monarch line is estimated at less than 12,500 from '46 through '48, a period when Ford sold over 213,000 American Mercs, this must be a rare car...

The L-head Ford V8 remained at 239.4 cu. in. through the '48 model year in the Mercury, and was upped to 255.4 in the '49 model year.  It remained at 239.4 in the Ford...

While the dash and V-shaped windshield are the same as the Mercury sedans of the era, the wood ceiling has a nautical feel, and tells you that you're riding in something special...

Ford and Mercury continued to offer wood-trimmed wagons from 1949 through 1951, though with steel roof panels, and only in 2-door form.  GM continued its 4-door woodies for 1949, but only until mid-year on the Chevy, Pontiac and Oldsmobile. Then they switched to all-steel bodies, except at Buick, which continued to offer wood-trimmed Super and Roadmaster wagons, as we shall see.

Chrysler launched its new line of wood-paneled Town & Country convertibles and sedans in 1946, and built only 7 copies of the Custom Club Coupe version shown above, which had it gone into production, would've beat GM's pillarless hardtops to market by 3 years.  The sedan version like the '48 below abandoned the fastback form of the prewar T & C for a notched profile, while standard Chrysler sedans kept the fastback...

All Town & Country models shared the wide grille with high, somewhat inset headlights at the front edge of upward-slanting fenders; heavier and more complex-looking than the '41 model, and underlined by bulky-looking bumpers.  Inline 6 and 8 cylinder engines were offered in '46 on the sedan, while the convertible kept the inline 8 exclusively through the end of this style 1948, when the ragtop outsold the sedan. 3,309 to 1,175.

Chrysler introduced new body styles for all lines in 1949, and went to all-steel bodies on the 2-door Plymouth and Dodge wagons, reserving the fine carpentry for 4-door wagons, including the Chrysler.  The top Chrysler wagon was called a Royal, while the Town & Country name was reserved for this convertible, which was built on the Imperial's 131.5 inch wheelbase.  This example is a garage mate to Keith Carlson's Monarch woody.

The new Town & Country offered more coherent, modern lines, with steel door panels outlined by real wood trim, and Di-Noc wood-grained infill panels.  The 5.2 liter, inline 8 engine made 135 hp, and had to move 4,630 pounds of car.   At a list price of $4,665, the T & C cost just over a dollar a pound...

As they had in '46, Chrysler also planned a T & C pillarless hardtop, but this didn't appear until 1950, when for some reason the convertible disappeared from their lineup.  The 1950 T & C hardtop kept the inline 8, missing the 331 Hemi V8 intro by a year, but did feature 4-wheel disc brakes, which it shared shared with the Imperial, a first on a big car.  Chrysler built only 993 of the '49 convertible woody, and 700 of the hardtop '50 version. The T & C woodies disappeared for 1951, the year when all Chrysler wagons went to steel bodies...

During the same period, but at a completely different scale, Fiat built their 500 Topolino ("little mouse') with 569cc inline four and 4-speed gearbox. This postwar Model C Giardiniera ("gardener") wagon was offered from '49 with wood door, tailgate and side panels, along a with fabric top, until the last front-engined 500 (until the 21st century front-driver) gave way to the rear-engined 600 in 1956.  Comparing it with the Chrysler woody from this era says something about fuel costs in Europe, as well as the available space for parking and the available money for new cars during Italy's postwar recovery.  The Topolino's wheelbase was 78.7", compared to the Chrysler's 131.5", and weight averaged 1,433 lb., compared with the Chrysler's 4,630.   Fiat built 520,000 Topolinos over the model's life span, from 1936 to 1955.

When GM abandoned wood wagons in the Chevy, Pontiac and Olds lines in mid-1949, it had the effect of moving the fine carpentry up the price ladder and keeping it there, but only for a few more years.  Buick continued to offer its Super and Roadmaster wood-trimmed wagons until 1953, when it built this Roadmaster Estate Wagon.  And while '53 was the last year for woody wagons from Buick (and thus GM), it was the first year for Buick's new V8 engine.  So this '53 Roadmaster is a landmark car for a couple of reasons...

Doors featured steel lower panels with wood trim around the windows.  The Roadmaster version, distinguished by 4 portholes ("Ventiports" in Buick-speak) per fender to the Super's 3, sat at the top of the line, along with the limited-production Skylark convertible.  The new V8 displaced 322 cubic inches and made 188 hp. 

The wood-framed 2-piece tailgate opened clamshell-style.  In this last year of production, Buick sold 1,830 Super woodies and 670 Roadmasters.

Over in the Mother Country, Morris Motors threw their hat into the woody wagon sweepstakes with their Morris Minor (1948-'71) but only starting with their Series 2 Minor Traveller in 1952, the year before GM built its last woody. By the time the curved windshield appeared on Series  3 in 1956, the Minor was being produced by British Motor Corporation, the amalgam of Austin and Morris that also offered MGs, Austin-Healeys, Rileys and Wolseleys.  The car was still called the Minor 1000 when the Series V was introduced with 1,100 cc engine in 1962.  

That model still had the original-style dash with the big circular speedo in the middle, and more painted metal than you'd see in a modern car.  Simple but effective...

The Traveller estate stayed in production until April 1971, outliving the Minor sedan by 5 months.  By then under British Leyland management, the Traveller offered updated paint colors, but still had the same wood framing supporting a steel roof, and with the center-opening wood-framed tailgates. The Traveller model accounted for 280,000 of the 1.6 million Morris Minors produced. That's a pile of timber, by anybody's standards...

For historians out there, this means the Traveller outlived (by a bit) its smaller stablemate, the wood-trimmed Mini Countryman.The original front-drive, transverse-engined Mini Countryman wagon was offered by BMC badged as an Austin or Morris, and had authentic wood on the exterior, along with 4.2" more wheelbase and 9" more overall length that the Mini sedan, which was famously only 10 feet long.  The wood-trimmed Mini Countryman, called a 2-door estate by BMC, was continued through production of the Mk. II series (1967-'70); it was survived by the sedan and pickup (no wood trim on that) when the Mk. III took over.  Were these British wagons the last production cars you could call woodies?  It would appear so.

*Footnote:  For a revealing survey of the world's forests and the ways in which their fate is linked to the human one, see "Root and Branch" by Jill Lepore, in the May 29, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.  We took our first look at Dubonnet's tulipwood Hispano in "One of One: A Brief History of Singular Cars", on Sept. 7, 2015, and presented an overview of Hispano Suiza in "Swiss Precision, Spanish Drama, French Style", posted Sept. 25, 2017. The only Armstrong Siddeleys we've encountered were modern ones (well, sort of) and are pictured in "Hillsborough Concours Part 2:  Escape Road to the Past", posted July 29, 2018.  Finally, for a look at Dennis Varni's one-off, fastback '51 Studebaker bullet-nose woody, see "Green Streamline Dream", posted here on June 12, 2017

Photo Credits:
Top:  en.escuderia.com

2nd & 3rd:  the author

4th:  Keith Carlson

5th:  Ford Motor Company & Crawford Auto Museum

6th thru 9th:  the author

10th:  Chrysler Corp. on Flickr.com

11th:  eBay Motors

12th:  Wikimedia Commons

13th:  Ford Motor Company

14th:  Drew Shipley

15th thru 19th:  Keith Carlson

20th: Chrysler Corporation

21st:  Wikimedia Commons

22nd:  the author

23rd thru 27th:  Keith Carlson

28th thru 30th:  the author

31st thru 34th:  Keith Carlson

Bottom:  the author