1949 Plymouth special deluxe wagon
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Serial Number: 12196292
Engine No.: P-18 120424 (6-cylinder)
Exterior Color: Malibu Brown with Mahogany side panels
Interior Color: Tan Leathercloth, with Mahogany Finish panels
Assembly Plant: U.S. Body & Forging, Frankfort, Indiana
Assembly Date: April 27, 1949
Ship Date: May 6, 1949
Dealership: Harding Motor Co., Inc., Woodstock, Illinois
Original Purchase Date: Unknown
Backstory
Visitors to Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts may have toured The Old Sculpin Gallery, across from the Chappaquiddick Ferry ticket office and Memorial Wharf. The Gallery opened in 1954, as a showcase for The Martha’s Vineyard Art Association, which was founded by a group of local artists in 1934. One founder of the Association, and a driving force behind creation of the Gallery, was Ruth Appeldoorn Mead, owner of this 1949 Special DeLuxe Woody Wagon.
Ruth Mead was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and earned a master’s degree in Art from the University of Chicago. She moved to Chicago, and later became one of the first residents of Barrington Hills, Illinois, when her husband, Sumner, transferred to the Chicago office of his family’s business, the Dwinell-Wright Coffee Company of Boston. Sumner Mead later became President of the firm and commuted by train to Boston from Chicago’s western suburbs. Starting in 1927, the Mead family spent
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summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where Ruth painted and taught art in Edgartown. For over 30 years, she also taught art in McHenry County public schools in Illinois, starting in a one-room schoolhouse and eventually supervising art in 103 schools.
At the end of the 1949 school year, Mrs. Mead, then age 55, purchased this new station wagon from George Harding Motor Co., the Dodge and Plymouth dealership in Woodstock, Illinois, McHenry County’s county seat. She drove the car to Martha’s Vineyard, most likely along a combination of U.S. Routes 20, 30, and 6 to the Woods Hole Ferry. In 1982, she transferred ownership of the car to her youngest son, John, a Chicago lawyer, who retired with the vehicle to the Vineyard in 1982. Mrs. Mead died in 1994, in Barrington, Illinois, at age 100. John and his children offered the car for sale in Massachusetts in 2014, a few years before he died.
The Plymouth Special DeLuxe Station Wagon was Plymouth’s highest-priced series for 1949, newly redesigned for the first time after World War II and introduced to the public shortly before Mrs. Mead’s purchase. Wood trimmed bodies for these cars were manufactured by the U.S. Body & Forging Co. in Frankfort, Indiana (a trade name for USHCO Mfg. Co. of Buffalo, NY), and shipped fully assembled. My wagon is body number 1112 of only 3,443 versions of this model produced in 1949, the last full year of U.S. Body & Forging Company’s association with Chrysler; in 1950, Plymouth transitioned to steel-bodied station wagons.
Harding Motor Co. was owned and operated by George A. Harding, a World War I veteran who operated the auto dealership for several years, and later established a real estate business bearing his name. In 1958, he donated land for the building of a new co-educational Catholic high school, Marion Central Catholic, northeast of Woodstock. The land had previously been used as an airport and for farming. The school’s football stadium is named in his honor. Mr. Harding died in 1967, at age 71.
