2024 Hagerty Bull Market Car: 1946–50 Chrysler Town & Country
The war was over and the troops were flooding back desperate to buy cars. Chrysler Corporation, which had been cranking out tanks, trucks, engines, and munitions, turned to face the future, and the future was wood. Or, at least, Chrysler president David Wallace thought so. It helped that Wallace was also president of Pekin Wood Products, a Chrysler subsidiary in West Helena, Arkansas, that had spent the war making shipping crates for aircraft engines. Pekin had supplied the ash and Honduran mahogany for the very first Chrysler Town & Country, a spectacular 1941 woody wagon so named because its chrome-rococo face said “Hello” while its cavernous barrel-back rear said “Howdy.”
1948 Chrysler Town & Country Woodie | $99,900.00 | St. Louis Car Museum & Sales
However, when Chrysler belatedly went back to building cars late in 1945, delayed because of strikes and raw materials shortages, the Town & Country wagon was gone. In its place, the company offered a few gussied-up versions of the 1942 New Yorker, including a Town & Country sedan, a T&C convertible, and one of the industry’s first two-door pillarless hardtops, which was basically a T&C convertible with a roof bolted on.
At nearly $3000, the pricey Town & Country was an odd mashup of 1940s streamlining and rectilinear right angles. And though it was never built in huge numbers—fewer than 15,000 between ’46 and ’50—it was immediately embraced by East Coast patricians and West Coast Hollywood types as a rolling status symbol. Who else but the rich could afford a car that evoked the Stickley-style and art deco furniture of the finest houses while, according to the owner’s manual, needing to be revarnished every six months to preserve its exterior?
Initially the T&C’s ash framing was structural, comprising the doors and trunklid and held together via complex joinery that no doubt taxed Chrysler’s Jefferson Avenue body assembly shop as much as it has restorers in the years since. However, the weight of the car’s cost and build complexity (at a time when anyone would buy anything new at any price) bore down, and by 1949, the ash was merely decorative, bonded to a conventional steel body shell and accented by fake vinyl mahogany.
David Kraus didn’t set out to buy a Town & Country, exactly—he set out to buy a convertible. Any convertible would do, and this ’47 T&C was priced right at $200. Did we mention that this was back in 1965? Kraus, now a retired aviation lawyer from northern New Jersey, spent a few years and another $800 painting the car, redoing the top, and restoring the interior, and he has been happily motoring in it ever since. Still original are the 324-cubic-inch flathead straight-eight and Fluid Drive four-speed, a kind of semi-automatic that takes much longer to explain than it does to learn how to use it. You sit up high in the T&C and roll in velvety if not speedy comfort, the engine seeming to operate only between a low idle and a high idle. For years, the winners of the Miss Arkansas pageant rode in the back of T&Cs in parades, and that is perhaps the best use of any Town & Country
Highs: Everyone loves a woody; A piece of art deco furniture you can drive; America’s favorite parade car or fun for six on a night out at the drive-in.
Lows: Built before Eisenhower’s interstates and geared like it; the wood is difficult to restore and maintain; restorations are financial sinkholes.
Price Range: #1 – $144,000 #2 – $81,400 #3 – $52,500 #4 – $28,400
HAGERTY AUTO INTELLIGENCE SAYS:
There’s a theory that young enthusiasts only want newer cars. Our data show that’s dead wrong. The best older classics, like the T&C, will endure. But find a good one, as restoring a 70-year-old wood-bodied car can be costly.
If you are interested in exploring advertising with us, I encourage you to get in touch. Please feel free to contact me directly, and I will be more than happy to provide you with further information, answer any questions you may have, and guide you through the process.
Nick Aylieff | Classic Motors For Sale |
+44(0) 2392 160 809 | www.classicmotorsforsale.com
