
Radical Restoration
Car and Carriage Caravan Museum
Season 2 Episode 10 | 27m 21sVideo has Closed Captions
We take a guided tour of the Car and Carriage Caravan Museum at Luray Caverns.
We return to one of the largest cave systems on the east coast where we take a guided tour of the Car and Carriage Caravan Museum at Luray Caverns. Cars Featured – 1927 Portuguese Nobility Carriage; 1900 Fire Engine; 1905 Riley; 1908 Delaunay-Belleville; 1906 Sears Auto buggy; 1908 Baker Electric; 1913 Stanley Steamer; 1915 Dodge; Rudolph Valetino’s 1925 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost; 1929 Ford Mod
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Radical Restoration
Car and Carriage Caravan Museum
Season 2 Episode 10 | 27m 21sVideo has Closed Captions
We return to one of the largest cave systems on the east coast where we take a guided tour of the Car and Carriage Caravan Museum at Luray Caverns. Cars Featured – 1927 Portuguese Nobility Carriage; 1900 Fire Engine; 1905 Riley; 1908 Delaunay-Belleville; 1906 Sears Auto buggy; 1908 Baker Electric; 1913 Stanley Steamer; 1915 Dodge; Rudolph Valetino’s 1925 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost; 1929 Ford Mod
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch Radical Restoration
Radical Restoration is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Providing Support for PBS.org
Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- This 1899 -Puegeot is one of our first automobiles in the museum.
This car was ordered by Rudolph Valentino.
He died and never received it.
It's 1930.
Cord was the first successful that I know of the first successful front wheel drive automobile in, in the world.
An incredible car company.
Super, super special.
- Every car has a story car, like the best thing ever.
For some they end up here.
These are just some of the stories about those who collectively restore vehicles, giving them a renewed life so that their stories can be told right here.
- Closed captioning is provided by senior discovery tours online@seniordiscoverytours.ca.
Funding for radical restoration is provided by - Rakabot sources sustainable materials to create boot racks that organize footwear while allowing drippings to go in the bowl.
Models designed for home work or recreational settings are available online@rabo.com.
Birds underwater in Crystal - River, Florida supports radical restoration, offering guided excursions with Florida manatees, kayak rentals, scuba diving certifications and boat tours are also available since 1993 and online@birdsunderwater.com.
- In this episode, we take a trip to Virginia where we're given a guided tour of the Car and Carriage Caravan Museum at Luray Caverns.
- When dad built the museum, it was, you know, pretty much a dream to have some very elite vehicles as well as the common man's vehicle.
And as you go through, you can digest his, his kind of feeling for his collecting habits were were really neat.
And the people that surrounded him, including Mr. Huffman, was very, they helped him a lot and gave him advice and sound advice.
And really some fantastic things came along in the fifties, he started collecting right after World War ii.
And like I said, there was just a handful of people in the country and he, they all knew each other.
And as far as I know, dad had, right after the museum was open, he had the first car caravan anywhere in the United States, maybe in the, in the whole world where antique cars followed each other.
We have photographs of it in our archives, and that's a really special thing I'm proud of too.
So, but we start here with the blacksmith shop because blacksmith shop was a very, that's something I added years ago, and it, it's a very important part of the history of transportation.
If people realize how much blacksmithing had to do with today's automobile, they'd be astounded.
But it wasn't about horseshoeing.
That was a farrier's job.
And so a blacksmith was vital to a community.
And they were the first to really get into the automobile business because there was over 500 automobile makers in our history, which people don't realize.
And it really took off after about 1900.
This Portuguese carriage was a, was a gift from Colonial Williamsburg for the Mercy train here.
This is the oldest carriage on display in on the whole continent that we know of.
And I've done a lot of research on that, definitely in America.
And as far as I know, the oldest with Canada and America put together, this is something that has not been in the museum very long that, that my father had collected and had here.
This too is extremely rare.
Most of dad's vehicles are, are really rare, hard to find.
This is an exceptionally rare vehicle.
It's, well, it's not a vehicle much as it is a, a horse drawn fire engine.
And it was, it was bought when he first started and never put it in because of the amount of room and we substituted it for some other things.
But my assistant, Danny Spain did a lot of research on it, and really, he struck pay dirt with this.
We found two photographs of it.
This is the original photograph of this, of this fire engine.
And it, it was a steam engine made by the Manchester locomotive works in New Hampshire.
It was pump number 7 57.
It was for the Watertown Fire Department in New York was ordered for them.
This is an important vehicle in American history.
In my mind, it's a Conestoga wagon.
It had so much to do with American history as far as commerce.
People didn't ride in these, these wagons.
They would've been spelled with two Gs to discern it when they wrote it down between a, a freighting wagon and a regular wagon that people would ride in or a smaller wagon.
These Conestoga wagons really weren't called Conestoga until later on.
That was kind of a 20th century nomenclature.
But at the time, they would've been called road wagons.
And road wagons were used to haul freight.
They were the tractor and trailer truck of the 18th and 19th century.
They went the way of the dodo about 1880.
They were replaced by canals that were put all over the country and railroads.
This is was one of my father's prizes in the collection.
Extremely rare automobile.
This is one of the earliest, not the earliest.
The Smithsonian Institute, as far as I know, has the earliest carriage horseless carriage on display.
We call these horseless carriages because they mimic a lot of the, the elements, architectural elements of carriages at the time that were popular in buggies and coaches and so on.
This is an 1898 Benz vis-a-vis.
Now, why did they call it vis-A-vis, you see the front seat and the back seat.
Well, the carriages of the day would have the, the people facing each other vis-a-vis in French to emulate the, the style of, of carriage that was, that were popular at the time.
Now, they had no car buyers at the time, so they had to appeal to carriage people that owned carriages.
So they designed it in a way, this is just aesthetics.
It's not really practical at all.
This 1899 EO as one of our first automobiles in the museum.
This too is a vis-a-vis very special early peo, a very early PEO period anywhere in the world, certainly the oldest peo in the United States.
And this type 26 was, had a hot tube ignition design, very similar to a glow plug in a diesel vehicle.
This rally is, is very important.
I actually met Mr. Rally.
He was one of the last survivors of his family.
They were in business until the sixties and sold out their car company.
But this is what the advertisement would've looked like for this 1905 rally.
Kind of a glorified motorcycle in some regards, but this is called the Mother-in-law seat in front.
It's really, really a great original track car.
This was probably my, my father's favorite and my father was Ted Graves.
Of course, he was the founder of this.
And this is all his collection.
I've just embellished it and tried to take care of it and bring it up to speed.
But it's all his genius.
The Delaney Belleville is from 1908 and it's super elegant car.
All he did is repaint it and get it running again.
It's actually in good operational shape when he, he bought it and the whole vehicle had been painted over.
But one of the, the neat features is this, these are leather wheel covers and fenders.
So it would've been quite an elegant thing in modern times to have something like that.
Now all the, all the leather and the interiors in the back are, are original.
This would've been a very elite car at the time.
You would've spoken to your driver with this telephone like speaker, and then the speaker would come out here into his ear and you tell him where to go.
This is a very, very important vehicle from Cadillac.
Henry Ford designed this car.
He was working for Cadillac at the time.
He had his fordson tractor company.
He started with tractors first, but at the time he, he was working also for Cadillac and designed this beautiful tulip, tulip design touring car.
What's interesting is his first car was a model A, he would have two different model a's now why he went back to the original later on, which I was, you'll see a model a later.
His first car looked a lot like this, just not as fancy.
Now, I don't know if you all know it or not, but Sears and Roebuck, the, the order company, one of their things in our catalog, he would buy a car.
It wasn't, was not made by Sears and Roebuck, but made for Sears and Roebuck.
So it was called an auto buggy and was made in Illinois.
This is a, a very special vehicle in context to today.
This was one of the first electric vehicles.
They were really the most sought after cars originally.
So this was a favorite among women.
And like I said, women were one of the first drivers in the world, so that's pretty neat.
And but this is all original except for the paint original interiors.
But this could go 25 miles per hour and go about 25 miles on a charge with the, with the batter, the lithium batters that they had at the time.
So with a new technology and Tesla, this is, this is, this was their forefather was the Baker Electric and they were in business all a right, good while.
But Bakker was a pioneer with electric vehicles.
It just didn't take for some reason.
And I, I think that early on, the reason why was because the horsepower amount of horsepower and the amount of distance you could get with, with, you know, a early fueled vehicle with, with petrol fuels was, was better.
Here's a Stanley Steamer.
This is one of those vehicles in the museum that does not run because it's missing a few parts.
And when dad bought it from a, from a man, it was missing parts and he didn't tell him.
So we left it as is, but it's a great piece of technology from that period.
These were game changers.
The only trouble is they couldn't use these in colder climates because a lot of times they blow and they made 'em with, with very, see you gotta fire the, the water to, to build up steam.
Once that steam was done, you had no gears.
You just had 1 1 1 gear, basically one gear that would run the whole thing to make it go forward and get it under steam and you power up the steam from there.
So it's an incredible force of power, much like electric.
It's, it's, it's pretty basic, but it worked really, really well.
But it would take a while to fire up that and it was fired with a gasoline benzene type of fuel at the time, and they made those parts of it very cheaply.
There were some accidents early on that made them explode and so they got a really bad rat.
People would die, get burned, you know, be scalded by the steam.
So the technology with that part of it was with the steam car companies.
It was their not making that.
Well think they'd still be with us today if they had better gasoline fired engines for the boiler.
This is one of the oldest dodges on display in the, in the world.
We confirmed that with a Dodge owners club.
This is a 1915.
This car right here, to the best of my knowledge, is the first all steel bodied car in the world.
And they made it all steel before they were there.
Were tin, I don't know if you any of y'all have ever heard a thing called Tin Lizzies.
Well, this was made of a heavy tin, so they were very flimsy and you know, they could propel on speed, but the engine couldn't carry the kind of weight that he had here.
So they had an advanced engine in this, this car is a hundred percent original paint and everything.
And original interiors belong to a doctor and we really love this.
It's a, but it's a very important vehicle.
It did have an aftermarket fender put on it and an aftermarket radiator cap.
But other than that it was all original and an extremely rare dodge.
One of the oldest anywhere.
This car was ordered by Rudolph Valentino.
He died and never received it.
It was made by American Rolls Royce Company in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The the interiors are, are all original.
Some people say that this is not the original finish, but I have pretty much proof that this was original paint because the crackling was supposed to look like that, to emulate a leather look.
And this car was another game changer for Americans and the, and later people in Europe too.
And people love these cars because they could drive about 50 miles per hour.
It's unheard of.
And on really rough roads, they could travel rough roads at higher speeds.
Another thing that changed these was the rumble seat in the back.
Now I can remember my grandmother saying that rumble seats really changed things and that, you know, people would, would stay out late at night unescorted today that nobody can dream of that practically.
But socially, this car changed America for two reasons and that's they could drive from point A to point B very quickly and get there.
And that changed people's lives completely.
It really was a game changer socially.
And other car companies copied it because it became so popular among younger people.
This is a super special car to me, if you'll see over there.
This is a museum in Portugal, the museum at Carmel, which is a fantastic museum.
If you ever get to go to Portugal, don't miss this museum.
It's in the mountains of Portugal and they have a lot of bugattis.
Now the Bugatti is very famous for the race cars.
And that's a, that's an image of the race car.
This is not a race car here.
This is a, this is a sports vehicle and it's a lot heavier than it looks.
It's small, but it has an aluminum head is all original and even the underbelly of the car is painted orange.
So the French had a a really, they have a really great eye for design.
This particular car company, Bugatti made a thing called the Bugatti Royale.
And at one time in the eighties, that was the most expensive car ever purchased, was a Bugatti Royale.
Well, they, Bugatti royals were made just for the royal families around the world and very sought after and very elaborate.
Now, the cord, this 1930 cord was the first successful that I know of the first successful front wheel drive automobile in, in the world cord.
Alban Dusenberg was the car family.
This came from much like Ford and Mercury.
Now you all have heard of the expression doozy, which means something really great.
What comes from Dusenberg, a great, a great automobile trivia and same car family as this right here.
And this particular L 29 Fain has a, a front a, a front shifter right on the dash of the car.
It's really neat.
The tooling has Tiffany's style handled door openers.
That's a doors.
And the lawyers, they call 'em suicide doors because they open this way instead of that way and very ingenious way because you could get in the front and the back at the same time without the, the doors hitting each other.
The original green interiors, even the engine is green in this, this particular car, this, the Pierce arrow from 1931 is a model 43.
And this convertible sedan is, is one of possibly two in the world, if not the only one.
And it was manufactured in Canada and for two years they were in business and very quickly went out of business.
Pierce pulled out of their works for a very brief period.
And this is one of the, the only ones known this is 100% original tires, paint, interiors, everything.
So it does have a little bit of damage here on it, but it's all original.
It's fantastic.
You know, even, even the radiator cap is original.
We had no idea this, this car was from Canada until we got a Pierce arrow expert that researched it.
And he was just, he was going wild over this car because of the history of it.
So it's a very special thing.
I'm glad to know that it was, was researched because we, we wouldn't have known that if it wasn't for that gentleman.
But one of my favorite features on this car is, is these pierce arrow lights that is evolve outta here.
So aesthetic trends really set the stage for what we're driving nowadays, but just total elegance, you're not gonna get that today.
All cars look alike.
This is a very special and viable car.
Supposedly were 13 of these made and it's been known that the Ford, Ford, Ford, Henry Ford was very superstitious and his son was less superstitious and more, more modern.
And in his thinking, Henry Ford's son, Edsel Ford wanted to buy the Lincoln Car Company.
Well, they, the two of them got along well, but they thought differently and Sel wanted to have another car family very similar to the, the cord Auburn and Deusenberg.
He wanted to have the mercury and, and and so on that, that our president with us today, well he also bought Lincoln, the Lincoln Car Company, which is a terrific car company.
Bought them out lock so and barrel and he wanted to have a car for more, more of the elite man or the man that was accomplished or the woman that was accomplished and let them have their automobile that they could drive around in.
That would be a status symbol.
Well, this is no exception here.
This this particular model of the 1941 Lincoln.
There were 13 of these made just for him.
So there was a special design just for the Ford car family.
We had a gentleman that came in here that had one of the two left that we know of.
It's the only automobile in here with a radio.
So in 1941, that's a big deal.
I mean that's like, I can remember driving around a car when I was Volkswagen bus and it had an AM station and we thought that was really cool.
So it's, it's got a lot of special features in it.
It it's much like a, a cab and it's got separation here.
You would've had a driver more than likely for this and you would've sat in the back.
Very elegant suicide doors.
You'll see this beautiful kind of, kind of arc design here.
Two-tone removable front top here.
And there's the radio right there.
Really, really powerful automobile, all original condition, just a fabulous car.
And finally our Hispanic suza is, it's just a really incredible automobile.
All original, there again, the tires were replaced, but past that, it's all original.
It has German silver on the radiator area and radiator cap and also suicide doors, pneumatic turning signals.
In other words, you pressed a a button and the air would make these pop out when you were turning a certain direction.
Very advanced.
This was supposedly in the 1935 Paris Auto Show.
And we have, when I first came here, we were able to gently break into the, the, the glove box.
And I'll say this, why they call it the glove box today, it's still called a glove box.
That's where they kept their driving gloves early on.
This car belonged to a woman and she kind of wrote a diary about her everyday things when she changed the oil, how far she went, where she went.
And so it's a fascinating thing.
This was it right here and we found it inside the glove box.
And that's the original manual for this as well.
Incredible fun.
And we've discovered a lot of history about this car that we wouldn't have had otherwise and where it drove to and when the oil was changed, when things were changed to new tires and so on and maintenance things.
So that's a very special thing that we have for this.
An incredible car company.
Super, super special automobile.
We have plans to restore the car and carriage these last 10 years and that's come out really well and always something in progress we're gonna add on to the museum, hopefully this coming year or the following year.
It'll probably take about a year to two years to complete.
But we're gonna, we're gonna add on this way and a little to the right in that space we have there and remodel our gift shop and probably our bathrooms a little bit.
And that will include automobiles and memorabilia from the 1950s, sixties and seventies that, you know, include automobilia, you know, gas pumps and that sort of stuff that will, will enhance the tour and bring it up to speed to where people of this generation can understand it a little bit better.
So we have great excitement about that.
And we've have several very special cars, including a mark two that's gonna go in.
Mark two was was owned by Elvis Presley and they're very few of those around and it's a terrific automobile.
And we've got an original one that we have already that we bought.
So, but this will pretty much up to the grass be there.
We wanna build it in the spirit of what my father would've done.
It's very eclectic in many ways.
And so what we're gonna have there is from very high end to the every, every man car and or every woman carriage or that sort of thing, right?
Right in front here.
And we'll circulate those and we'll be able to make the museum a little bit more malleable than it is now, than it is in back.
But anyway, we're very excited about that for the future.
And we will include also some hands-on activities for children that, that they can understand how an engine works and how, you know, of course all that's changing now, the electric.
So we'll be showing that too as well.
The electric technology will include that and the future's important too.
So we're gonna mention a little bit about the future and not only the past and how that has context with each other.
- Closed captioning is provided by senior discovery tours online@seniordiscoverytours.ca.
Funding for radical restoration is provided by - Rakabot sources sustainable materials to create boot racks that organize footwear while allowing drippings to go in the bowl.
Models designed for home work or recreational settings are available online@rabo.com.
Birds underwater - In Crystal River, Florida supports radical restoration, offering guided excursions with Florida manatees, kayak rentals, scuba diving certifications, and boat tours are also available since 1993 and online@birdsunderwater.com.
- Thank you for joining us.
My name's Gary Nichols.
Until next time, may all your rides be radical.
- Home and How To
Hit the road in a classic car for a tour through Great Britain with two antiques experts.
Support for PBS provided by: