Woodie Cars

Most of us just love cars. Shiny new cars and old vintage cars are just some of the cars that tug at our hearts and keep people looking at the Kars for Kids garage page in hopes of seeing some rare find. Perhaps one of the most pleasurable and exotic cars we can still occasionally see on the road is the woodie, a beloved American car with wood incorporated into its body.

The very earliest cars were made of wood. So it was not exactly a surprise when a car incorporating wood into its design became a runaway hit. That would be the Ford Mercury woodie station wagon.

Bragging Rights

Produced during the 1930’s and 1940’s, the woodie came with prestige and bragging rights. It was one of the most, if not the most expensive model in the Ford line from year to year. The funny thing was, the car was high maintenance and had all sorts of foibles but everyone still wanted one, still coveted that woodie above all other cars.

Ford was the industry leader for sales of cars with wooden bodies. But the manufacturer kept production of these beauties to a very limited number, owing to the smaller demand for this gorgeous but impractical vehicle. The demand was mostly among the higher echelons of society: movie studio moguls, resorts, country squires. Of course, in those days, no one called these cars “woodies.”

Woodies being made of wood swell and shrink with the weather. As a result, the cars make a lot of noise as the glue and screws holding the body together shift during contraction and expansion of the wood. Also, think of the wooden hull of a boat and how much maintenance it needs and you begin to get an idea of how much effort a woodie owner must put into cosseting his moving acquisition. The owner’s manuals always included a recommendation for annual stripping and refinishing.

The Woodie Narrative

Of course, that makes no difference to a country squire or a movie mogul. They can afford to hire people to do that sort of thing for them. The annual refinishing was all a part of what made the woodie and the narrative that went with it, something special.

Henry Ford had a thing about making his enterprises totally self-sufficient. To that end he purchased rubber plantations and ore mines to produce materials for his cars. In deciding to create the woodie, he bought huge tracts of forest reserves in 1920, on Iron Mountain in the Upper Michigan Peninsula, located around 500 miles northwest of Detroit. There he grew stands of maple, gum, birch, and basswood, all for the purpose of building Model T floorboards and body frames. In addition to growing the trees, he had his own people cutting timber, ran his own sawmill, and cut and created wooden body parts on location.

Ford didn’t like waste and could always find a purpose for everything. The leftover wood pieces and even the sawdust from the mill were not disposed of but were used to create Ford Charcoal Briquettes. There’s a lot you could say about Ford, who was a known anti-Semite, for instance, but one thing for sure: he had the green ethos down pat, way before anyone else was concerned with recycling and making good use of all resources. He might not have cared much about the environment, but he appreciated that everything had a purpose.