Current Article

Old Car Factory coming back to life as museum

TIMES-REPUBLICAN Marshalltown, IA • July 16, 2005

An abandoned factory that once produced 10,000 carriages a year and later turned out automobiles is coming back to life. Workers are fixing up the 120-year-old buildings of the Spaulding Carriage and Automotive Works to house the Iowa Transportation Museum, a $21 million project that aims to tell the story of cars, trains, airplanes and highways – anything to do with transportation in Iowa.

    “We really see this as being a combination of a history museum and a science and technology museum, to pick up on the best features of both,” said John Swanson, the project’s executive director.

    “It will look not only at the past, but also the future of transportation. We want to involve young people in what transportation is and what it can be and how it can affect them.” There’s plenty of history in the site itself – three brick buildings on a lot the size of a city block, just west of downtown Grinnell. At the height of its operation, the Spaulding company was Poweshiek County’s largest employer with nearly 400 workers. Founded in 1876, the company made horse carriages and wagons, then turned to “horseless carriages.” From 1910 to 1916, the factory rolled 1,481 Spaulding automobiles off its assembly line. While most were sold in Iowa, the company did have dealerships as far away as Texas and California.

    Bill Jepsen, an automobile historian from Boone, said the Spaulding was a medium-priced car selling for $1,500 to $1,600. It would have been in the class of a Buick or Pontiac today, Jepsen said.

    “By all descriptions, it was a very viable automobile,” he said. “Apparently it was fast enough to suit the people of the day and, of course, durability was a very big issue in those days because the roads were extremely rough. “They did a lot of driving across country. You wouldn’t want a car that would shake to pieces if you were heading out in Iowa.”

    Museum organizers bought the Spaulding site in 2001 and have been working in partnership with the city of Grinnell to restore the buildings, which have been standing since the 1880s and are on the National Register of Historic Places. Adding to the site’s historic ambiance, the tracks of the former Rock Island Lines, now operated by the Iowa Interstate Railroad, run just south of the buildings. Plus, there’s an Interstate 80 exit only three miles south of town, and about 20,000 cars pass that exit daily. “But we’re not all thinking if you build it, they will come,” Swanson said. “That’s a false concept. It’s going to take marketing and planning and promotion, but it doesn’t hurt when you’ve got that easy access.”

    About $2.5 million has been raised and invested so far. The roof on one of the factory buildings has been fixed and a wall stabilized with steel beams, structures that local residents like to call flying buttresses.

    Workers also are renovating what had been Spaulding’s
administration building, which will become the museum’s welcome center. Part of that building’s roof collapsed on May 11, but it did not cause any major problems because it was being fixed anyway.

    The restoration will extend to the brown brick smokestack on the southwest corner of the complex. The top half of the stack collapsed in the 1950s, leaving only “AULDING” showing on the side.

    Funding for the project is a mix of private and government money. The museum already has received $978,000 in federal transportation enhancement grants, most it distributed by the Iowa Department of Transportation, said Craig Markley, a DOT planner.

    Swanson said planners want to give the museum a little sizzle with some high-tech displays but won’t go overboard. Swanson said the museum also will feature a restoration lab, where visitors can watch old vehicles being restored. The first such project is what’s believed to be the only Spaulding car still in existence, or 60 percent of it, anyway.

    The museum bought the parts from a Missouri collector, but the work of putting it back together, estimated to cost at least $75,000, is on hold. It’s unlikely all the parts can be found, so some will have to be fabricated, Swanson said. Like many cars built in the early 1900s, Spauldings were “assembled” vehicles, meaning the various parts – engines, lights, axles, starters – were manufactured elsewhere. The parts were shipped to the factory, where the car was put together.

    “But they had to do it well enough to make it a viable car,” Jepsen said. Spaulding was among more than 100 companies that were formed in Iowa to manufacture cars, though not all of them produced a vehicle, Jepsen said. Among the cars that did come out of those shops were the Adams Farwell in Dubuque, the Colby in Mason City, the Littlemac in Muscatine, the Meteor in Bettendorf, the Mason in Des Moines and the Maytag – yes, the very same family that made appliances – in Waterloo. Most operated only a short time because they didn’t have the resources to market their cars nationally.

    That’s just one of the stories the Iowa Transportation Museum wants to tell – if they can raise the money. The welcome center will be the first portion to open, hopefully in 2006, Swanson said, followed a year later by the main museum.

    “We’re very optimistic,” he said. “I think what we’re trying to tell and the way we want to involve the public will appeal to people who have ties to transportation either vocationally or avocationally, whether they’re model railroaders, experimental aircraft pilots or vintage car owners.”