The auto industry's family trees

By Richard A. Wright / Special to The News

April 10, 2001

Of the several thousand auto manufacturers who have operated in the United States, only three remain. But many nameplates that were once well-known are in the family trees of those three surviving auto makers.

Ransom E. Olds, a young automotive wizard from Lansing who began building Oldsmobiles in 1896, was the first to produce cars in Detroit. Among his top aides were Roy D. Chapin, who later left to co-found Hudson Motor Car Co., and Jonathan Maxwell, who would later build the Maxwell, butt of Jack Benny's jokes for many years.

In March, 1901, fire destroyed most of the Olds Motor Works near the Belle Isle Bridge, most recently the site of Uniroyal's tire factory, including 10 of 11 models the plant was building. The only car saved was a small single-cylinder Curved Dash Olds. Olds decided to rebuild immediately and put all the firm's production resources into the little Curved Dash Olds, the "Merry Oldsmobile" of musical fame. It was a momentous decision, because it committed Olds to production of a small, relatively inexpensive car, the first "high-volume" model.

Machine shop owner Henry M. Leland began by making engines for Olds, and would go on to found the Cadillac and Lincoln motor companies.

By late summer, Olds had so many orders that he sought an outside source for engines. So he went to see another man who was a potent factor in making Detroit the Motor City, Henry M. Leland, head of Leland and Faulconer Co. His company was the foremost machine shop in the Midwest, located just north of the Eastern Market at Trombley and Dequindre. Leland agreed to build engines for Olds.

Olds then ordered 2,000 transmissions from a smaller machine shop owned by John and Horace Dodge on Beaubien near East Lafayette. The Dodges later moved to larger quarters at 240 Monroe, then to what became the Dodge Main plant on the site now occupied by Cadillac's Poletown plant. The Dodges also built engines, transmissions and axles for Henry Ford, who was assembling cars at his plant on Piquette and Beaubien and later at his Highland Park plant. Both facilities still exist, at least in part.

So right at the very start of the auto industry in Detroit, relationships were formed between companies that would become part of General Motors (Oldsmobile and Leland, who started Cadillac), Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Corp.

Henry Leland improved the Olds engine by redesigning valve ports and raising its compression. He offered it to Olds, who turned him down. So in 1902, Leland took the engine to a meeting of directors of the Henry Ford Co., who had gathered to close the business,. The company had been formed by four investors to exploit the work of Henry Ford, but there had been a misunderstanding and Ford had quit the company.

The directors were impressed with Leland's engine and decided to build a car using this advanced motor. At Leland's suggestion, the car was named after the French explorer who founded Detroit, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.

William C. Durant was a millionaire in the horse-drawn carriage business before taking over the Buick Motor Co., and then creating General Motors and Chevrolet.

Leland later sold his Cadillac company to General Motors and served as an executive running that division. Henry Leland, along with his son Wilfred, a close associate at Cadillac, left GM in 1917 and organized Lincoln Motor Co. to build airplane engines. In 1920, they switched to building automobiles. The Lincoln became a competitor to Cadillac and Packard in the luxury-car market. Leland later sold Lincoln to Ford Motor Co.

Thus General Motors and Ford were again linked through Henry Leland's companies.

William Durant, unlike most of the early automotive pioneers, was not a tinkerer or a mechanic or an inventor -- he was a salesman. Grandson of a Michigan governor, he was a self-made millionaire, partner in Durant-Dort Carriage Co., largest maker of horse-drawn carriages in the country.

David Buick, shown in 1926, made his fortune in the plumbing business before tinkering with cars.

David Dunbar Buick had made a fortune in the plumbing business, largely because he figured out how to porcelainize cast iron for tubs and sinks. But he was a tinkerer, not a businessman. In 1903, Benjamin and Frank Briscoe took over Buick's business, then sold it to J.H. Whiting, owner of the Flint Wagon Works. Whiting convinced Durant to drive the Buick car, which featured a valve-in-head engine. Durant was impressed.

In 1904, Durant reorganized Buick Motor Co. Among the people that Durant brought into Buick was Charles Nash, a young associate in the carriage business.

After Durant created General Motors in 1908, he made Nash, who had been president of Buick, president of the new GM. In the corporation's first year, Durant acquired Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac and Oakland (later Pontiac), plus some supplier firms and a few lesser automakers. In its first year of existence, GM had put together all of its current car-producing divisions except Chevrolet.

In GM's first two years, Durant had brought 30 firms into GM, including 11 automakers. Not all of Durant's ventures were successful, however, and GM was soon in financial disarray. The banks took over GM and gave Durant the boot.

Durant formed a number of companies, including Chevrolet Motor Co. in partnership with Louis Chevrolet. Chevrolet had built a high-quality car with his name on it. While Chevrolet was visiting Europe in 1913, Durant changed the design to a smaller car in an attempt to achieve high volume. The Royal Mail and the Baby Grand were the first to sport the now-famous Chevrolet "bowtie" insignia. Chevrolet didn't like what Durant had done and quit the company.

Charles W. Nash became president of the new General Motors in 1908. In later years, he would take over an auto company which became Nash. It eventually would merge with Hudson to form American Motors.

Durant's Chevrolets were a great sales success. The company grew rapidly and Durant used profits to buy up GM stock. GM, meanwhile, was coming back out of trouble under the guidance of Durant's protege Nash, president of GM, and the new head of Buick, Walter P. Chrysler, a former railroad machinist.

Durant fired Nash, who took over the ailing Jeffery Motors, which became Nash, then Nash-Kelvinator and in 1954 merged with Hudson to form American Motors. Roy D. Chapin Jr., son of the founder of Hudson, would later serve as chairman of American Motors. In 1987, Chrysler Corp. bought American Motors, uniting the legacies of those two Buick pioneers, Charles Nash and Walter P. Chrysler.

Irked by Durant's management style, Walter P. Chrysler resigned from GM in 1920 shortly before Durant was forced to resign again. Chrysler agreed to manage financially troubled Willys-Overland. While there, he put together an engineering team under Fred Zeder, who had been with Studebaker, where he had developed an advanced, high-compression engine.

As Willys-Overland returned to financial health under Chrysler's guidance, the bankers who had drafted Chrysler for the job asked him to do the same for Maxwell, which was in serious difficulty. Chrysler bought the Willys engine plant and Zeder's engine for Maxwell and began building a new car at the old Chalmers plant in Detroit.

Horace Dodge, shown shortly before his death in 1920, started in the auto business with his brother John by building engines, transmissions and axles for Ford and Oldsmobile.

Maxwell had been started in 1904 by Jonathan Maxwell, a former associate of Ransom Olds, and Benjamin Briscoe, who had been involved with Buick before Durant took over that make and used it as the base upon which to build General Motors.

Hugh Chalmers in 1908 bought Thomas-Detroit, part of a company which had been launched in 1906 by Roy D. Chapin and Howard Earle Coffin, both of whom had been associates of Ransom Olds.

Several models of the Maxwell with the Zeder engine built in the Chalmers plant were shipped to New York for the 1924 auto show with the name "Chrysler" on them. Later that year, Maxwell-Chalmers was reorganized into Chrysler Corp. Detroit had its Big Three.

John and Horace Dodge both died in 1920. Their widows asked Frederick Haynes, manager of the Dodge plant in Hamtramck, to run the company. Under Haynes, the company continued to grow and acquired Graham Truck in 1925, which became Dodge Truck. Joseph, Robert and Ray Graham worked for Dodge for a while, then left to build the Graham-Paige car.

In 1925, Dodge Brothers Motor Car Co. was sold to the New York banking syndicate of Dillon, Read and Co. for $146 million, the biggest cash deal up to that time in the auto industry. Less than three years later, the bankers sold it to Chrysler Corp. for $170 million.

Most of the heroes of World War II were military men and political leaders, but one industrialist who became a hero was Henry J. Kaiser, who built Liberty Ships faster than German U-boats could sink them. After the war, he decided to take on Detroit.

His new partner, Joseph Frazer, had worked for General Motors, Chrysler Corp. and Willys-Overland before picking up the failing Graham-Paige just before the United States entered the war.

Partners Henry Kaiser and Joseph Frazer introduce the new Kaiser in 1946. They formed the most successful post-war independent car company, but by 1955, Kaiser-Fraser had folded.

Kaiser-Frazer surprised everyone by leading all the independent makers in production in 1947, building 144,500 cars. Henry J. had done the impossible again. He had taken a seat in Detroit's high-stakes game.

Or so it seemed, for a brief time. But by 1955, Kaiser-Frazer was gone, after an abortive attempt to sell a small car called the Henry J through Kaiser dealers and the Allstate through Sears, Roebuck.

Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson Motor Car Co. merged in 1954, with George W. Mason as chairman and president. Before the year was out, Mason died and George Romney, who had been executive vice president, became president and chairman. Romney left AMC in 1962 and embarked on a political career, becoming the governor of Michigan. Roy D. Chapin Jr., son of one of the founders of Hudson Motor Car Co., served as chairman of AMC from 1967-78.

When Chrysler Corp. acquired American Motors in 1987, the Chrysler branch of the automotive family tree took on the numerous ancestors of AMC in combination with its own complex heritage. GM's branch already contains hundreds of companies through acquisition.

And the three surviving American auto makers -- out of literally thousands -- can all trace common ancestry back to the turn-of-the-century machine shops of Leland & Faulconer and John and Horace Dodge.

(This story was compiled using clip and photo files of the Detroit News. To view images available for sale from our photo collection please visit our Photostore of historic galleries. )