Dating from 1910 to 1932, the advertising materials and travel ephemera in the Early Automobile Companies Ephemera Collection, held in the collections of the Transportation Library, provide insight into the early years of the burgeoning automobile industry in the United States. Mass automobile manufacturing was in its early decades in this era, and a wide-open field of established and upstart automakers in Detroit, Cleveland, and across the United States competed for the business of the American consumer through advertising and printed materials that promoted advances in automobile technology and the promise of adventure and the open road.
The collection of 260 items includes dealers’ catalogs, marketing brochures, maps, and travel guides that provide insights into business history, advertising history, and the technology behind the auto industry in this early era. It has now been digitized, and is available to view online in its entirety in our Digital Collections repository. Users who are interested in viewing more information can also visit the collection’s finding aid online. Be sure to click through the digitized covers in this post to connect with the full text of each.
Some of the automakers in this collection – including Cadillac and Buick 
– are instantly recognizable and still in operation today. Catalogs and brochures provide insights into the early years of the corporate history of those companies. Other familiar names in the collection include Studebaker and Packard, represented by 1912 and 1913 catalogs, respectively.
The bulk of the collection, however, represents companies that were perhaps influential or innovative in their day, but which have been long out of operation, merging with other companies or going out of business altogether – and are today largely forgotten by the public: names like Marmon, Stevens-Duryea, and Paige.
Chalmers is among these now-defunct manufacturers. Based in Detroit, at the time of publication of the brochure shown here, the company employed 4,000 workers in a 1,000,000 square foot factory – facts which feature prominently in this brochure alongside the full lineup of Chalmers cars for 1913. A decade later, Chalmers, together with Maxwell, was acquired by Walter Chrysler, forming the origins of what became the Chrysler Corporation.
Haynes was the legacy of industrialist and auto industry innovator Elwood Haynes. The 1913 brochure shown here promoted the company’s legacy of 20 years of experience in automobile manufacturing. Twenty years earlier, Haynes’ first auto was tested on the streets of his hometown of Kokomo, Indiana, achieving a speed of 6-7 miles per hour and becoming among the first automobiles built in the United States. Haynes operated until the 1920s, declaring bankruptcy in 1924 and going out of business in 1925.
Electric cars enjoyed popularity throughout the 1910s thanks to being quiet, clean, and easy to operate–but eventually lost out to gasoline-powered vehicles, which were lighter, less expensive, and powered by what was at the time a more readily-accessible source of energy. This collection includes several items related to electric vehicles, among them a Lincoln Electric advertising card that promoted in-home charging stations for electric vehicles, and a 1910 map of Chicago published by Commonwealth Edison that listed electric charging stations around the city.
Manufacturers of parts and components are also represented: Sulzberger & Sons upholstery, as well as Rushmore Electric Lighting, with its electric headlights and side lamps, Rutenber Motor, Auto-Liter, and Grinnell Gloves, designed especially for motorists.
A traffic safety brochure produced by the Miller Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio provides insights into the chaotic state of traffic safety and traffic laws before they were codified on a large scale. Speed limits, legal driving ages, and rules of the road varied between the several midwestern states and various municipalities listed in Safety Always. The brochure concludes with a section on sharing the road, with insights into the experience of rural driving in the 1910s: “Don’t wait for a frightened horse to climb a fence before you stop. His driver probably is as badly frightened as the animal, so you must be calm and do the thinking for both.”
Long-distance auto journeys were popular demonstrations of auto performance by manufacturers, and descriptions of these trips also highlighted the primitive nature of roads in this era. Voiturette is an excellent example: as described in this brochure, a team of company executives set out to “concentrate as much punishment as possible in as short a time as possible” on the Keeton as a test of its safety, durability, comfort, and speed. The brochure includes a colorful description of the journey from Detroit through Virginia, where it “rained pitch forks;” meanwhile the motorists described cutting down trees and rolling boulders to fill ruts in the road, which were “a sea of mud.” In addition to the Keeton, the Voiturette Company produced the wonderfully-named Car-Nation, or Carnation, billed as “More than a Cycle Car.”
Cyclecars filled the space between the automobile and the motorcycle. Mercury Cyclecars, American Cyclecar Company, and others sold small, lightweight, and relatively inexpensive vehicles, whose selling points included economy, simplicity, and reliability. As full-sized cars became more affordable in the 1920s, however, the market for cyclecars died out.
An early Chicago Auto Show program provides a glimpse into the range and number of manufacturers in operation in 1911, the show’s tenth year.
While this collection primarily focuses on automobiles, other modes of transportation are also represented. This includes motorcycles, as in the case of a 1914 Harley-Davidson brochure, bicycles, as shown in a 1911 Columbia Bicycles catalog, and trucks, such as Peerless Motor Trucks.
A Rand-McNally pocket map from 1911 wouldn’t have focused on roads and highways, as we expect today. Instead, it showed railroads, cities, towns, and post offices. By the end of the era represented by the collection shown here, the S.R. Highway Atlas of the United States and Canada, published in 1931, included highway maps for every state in the U.S. as well as southern Canada.
This post represents only a small portion of this collection related to early 20th century automobility. Please visit our Digital Collections repository to browse the collection in its entirety, or the collection’s finding aid for more detail. For more information on this collection, or on the Transportation Library’s services or collections, please visit our website or contact us at transportationlibrary@northwestern.edu. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter.