Episode 42: Car and Carriage Caravan Museum

Rod Graves: 0:00

Dad used to complain that the corn carriage care of MM Museum was a failure and I told him. I said, dad, I said it's not a failure. I said you're just, your vision is too far out for most people. And sure enough, in the 80s people stopped seeing crazy tidg graves in his cars. It was really a success after that.

Ayla Sparks: 0:26

H. i I'm Ayla Spark and this is Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers. From ancient relics to modern marvels. Each episode of the show features a new museum and a curator's choice of some amazing artifacts housed there. These guardians of history will share insights, anecdotes and the often untold stories that breathe life into the artifacts they protect. Thanks for tuning in to this Mighty Oak Media production and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of Curator's Choice. Today we embark on a captivating journey through the evolution of roadway travel at the Car and Carriage Caravan Museum in LaRae, virginia. This museum boasts a remarkable collection of over 140 items dedicated to the history of transportation, from simple horse-drawn wagons and coaches to the lavish automobiles of the 1940s. Our journey to the world's most beautiful and most beautiful cities In the 1940s. Our guest, rod Graves, shares how vehicles are an expression of art on wheels. We'll be uncovering the intriguing story behind the 1898 Benz Vise-Ve, a vehicle that traces its roots back to the often considered father of the modern automobile, carle Benz. The Vise-Ve, or face-to-face in French, resembles the prevalent carriage style of the day, in the backseat reflecting the automobile industry's evolution from horse-drawn design to front-facing vehicle design like those we're familiar with today. Also on today's show, we unravel the fascinating history of a mid-18th century gilded coach, the Berlin Coup de Galle. The Berlin carriage design revolutionized travel opulence among the Portuguese nobility with the incorporation of a leather strap suspension system very fancy. This incredible carriage is one of the oldest carriages on permanent display in the United States and it even still has the original gold leaf paint. So without further ado, let's jump right in with Rod Graves.

Rod Graves: 2:35

Dad was always like 30, 40 years ahead of his time and I'd like to say no, no bragging on Dad. I'm very proud of him, but if you just analyze Dad from an outside perspective, dad was always visionary with almost everything he did, and sometimes it was very difficult for him in that regard, because he could see things real far out that most people couldn't begin to see, especially in tourism. It's very interesting because the history of transportation is all linked around. What we do here every day is tourism. So he saw that and Dad embraced that and put it into a collection.

Ayla Sparks: 3:14

I think it's really special too. Like you said earlier, he wasn't an elitist, so he thought that it was all important. And when you look back in history, it's really unfortunate that most people don't think that way, because a lot of what we have today that we can look back on and learn from our history is the pieces or the artifacts that were preserved simply because they were the top tier, the best. Not a lot of those everyday things that all normal people would have had access to are at the forefront of being preserved in the moment, so we don't have those examples as well as we would if people had more of a mindset like your Dad did.

Rod Graves: 3:53

Dad was like myself Dad had a vision of. He felt like it was all important, but especially the everyday man. He felt like it was an important concept there not to delete or delineate the very fancy vehicles he has in the museum. A lot of them are just absolute works of art Dad has. One of my favorite in the museum is 1889 bins and our bins is a very, very feature in the museum. It's got to be one of the oldest in the United States on display, other than the Durier in the Smithsonian. I think it's probably the second oldest, almost car prototype part of that time but in the Horseless Carriage Age it was a very rare thing at that time.

Ayla Sparks: 4:38

So you mentioned a horseless carriage, which seems pretty easy to understand. But for someone who might not be very familiar with that kind of terminology, can you kind of take us through your exhibits of cars through the ages, or how things change over time and throughout history and what those changes were?

Rod Graves: 4:57

Yeah, there were probably about four stages of history with that and of course everything would have been in the book that I wrote, booklet that I wrote you start out with, obviously, man, one foot and then you get into the first true wheel and that was developed primarily in Egypt probably. We think there's a lot of debate about that because the word car itself comes from the people of Scotland and that area that were the cells, that's a Celtic word, is car cart, so they were developing things to there and all of them very advanced. Now you get into Egypt, you get into some seriously advanced cultures at that time and Ben's, for instance, I think, is the father of the modern day automobile and his is kind of by accident and includes the lady and his wife and he marries into a family that makes foreign engines to do anything from milling to conducting as a power source for doing just about anything grounding, feed, this sort of thing and he's a tinker and kind of an out there inventor and he puts it on a carriage and has this little tinker toy that he takes around and puts his rounds with. With it runs on a thing called benzene, which is a very dirty form of gasoline. He has relative success with it. Well, he leaves one day and she gets the idea to go out with her, with her children, and take them for a ride in this automobile. Well, he comes back, finds out about it. He's a little upset and she said look. She said I'm your wife and I don't know anything much about this other than the engine that my father basically came up with. But if I can do this, anybody can do this, and she's the one that convinced him to start an automobile company called the Ben's company. He's what I consider the father of the automobile and we're so proud to have that in there. You notice that that one is called a V-A-V and that's. It has like a little seat in front and then a seat with the driver sets. Well, the answer to your question is as the time there was a transition and people ask well, why did they have a V-A-V, or face to face in French carriage? Because you really couldn't see around to drive. And the reason why is because at the time that was the style of carriages. People were selling to a carriage clientele, not a car clientele, because they weren't there yet. So it was all very new and so that was why those were the first style. We also have a Pujo that also is a VIV and that is probably the oldest Pujo in America at least, probably one of the oldest in the world. But as you go around that you get into the Henry Ford period. He was also an incredible person. You couldn't overblow him enough, but he was a late comer to some degree. What he did is and he did not invent the assembly line what he did is he improved it. The assembly line started in about 1810 in England, in Ironbridge, England. But what he did is he got it to a real science and applied it to transportation. He started with tractors and then moved into working with Cadillac and then came up with his first model A. We actually had two model A's, strangely enough, but he kind of had an alphabet soup with his different cars that he'd come up with.

Ayla Sparks: 8:38

I am very proud and very lucky to say that the very first vehicle I ever drove was a 1914 model T Ford in Tonopah, nevada. So I just so happened to be traveling with my dad to go get groceries and they had a huge caravan of these model T Ford cars and there was a man who we walked up and we were just blown away by just randomly seeing all of these amazing vehicles and he offered to let me ride in the car and of course I was super stoked, I was probably like 11. And he took me on a ride around the parking lot and then he kind of looked over at me and was like, do you want to try to drive it? And I was so excited he let me pull the little horn because it wasn't the horn in the middle of the steering wheel, but it was that lever that you had to pull and I got to drive around and I just thought that I was the coolest thing and it was a really awesome experience. But with your museum I mean you guys have a lot of different people like Henry Ford and a lot of examples of people who had that kind of a visionary mindset.

Rod Graves: 9:47

Yeah, we have a lot of visionaries that are like Henry Ford. Whitten Whitten was just another incredible person that changed the history of automobile steering. Ford borrowed that from him, and there's just so much I can talk about. But anyway, we have a lot of great automobiles. I think my favorite in the museum has got to be the Mercedes S. It is a very valuable car, one of the most valuable cars in the world. It's a 1928 S and there's a few of those around. That's an absolutely elegant automobile. My other favorite in the museum and I'm fickle about that too, but Ford is probably the D'Lennie Belleville that has original mahogany on it and that Mahogany had been painted seven times over and scraped down to expose the original what would have originally been there. But that's an exceptionally rare car as well. But then I got loads of other things in the museums that are non-car related.

Ayla Sparks: 10:46

One of the things that really struck me when I was walking through the museum that I personally really enjoyed were all of the blankets. There are blankets all over and they are horsehair blankets and some of them dog hair I believe that the tour guide told me. But these are kind of like the heating sources of the carriages back in the day. So when you're looking at it it reminds me almost of the Pirates of the Caribbean, the very first one when they have that iron box full of coals that they put underneath of the bed. These are really similar, but you put it at the feet. So you have those coal boxes that you put at the feet and then these really heavy hair blankets that would put on top and that is what kept you warm while you were driving around. That was your heater for your car.

Rod Graves: 11:37

You come to a great point that that's something we take for granted now, that we can turn a car instantly and if you are cold or hot you can just change it at the touch of a button. In those days, I mean, you had to fire up your car. If you had a steam car, you'd have to wait until the steam came up. You had a full boil to get going. Everything was instant. It's just amazing where we've come. One of the things that surprises me is when people walk in the museum and they don't know what to expect. Kind of a sub-degree, but one of the things that shocked a lot of people and this is pretty neat years ago I gave the first lady, michelle Obama, a tour through the museum and she was shocked that there was a car that we have in the museum, the Baker Electric that was from 1908.

Ayla Sparks: 12:29

Yeah, the electric cars are actually much older than people realize.

Rod Graves: 12:34

People are just shocked that Elon Musk didn't invent that. So these people were taking raw material and doing amazing things with it that most people couldn't begin to think of today. Their mind was very open. They were dreaming of all kinds of things, and anything that could possibly make this get to point B is what they were experimenting with, and I think it's such a shame because I think steam power, in my mind, is one of the most overlooked things for today's world that we could be looking at. It's more effective than electric cars if it could be reapplied with computer technology Absolutely amazing. Someone's going to get very rich off that one day. One of them right now that we have on display that I'm real proud of that dad never did get in the museum is a 1901 fire engine and it's a steam pumper. It's just a fabulous fire history display and it's an incredible. It'll be a rare thing because most of those are restored that are out there. There's not a lot of them out there anyway, but this steam pumper is just fabulous.

Ayla Sparks: 13:43

Yeah, I think Danny Spain, he was the tour guide who was with us. He's your assistant manager. He was really excited about the research you all had been doing on the steam firefighting engine and you had found out. You know it came from New York, from Watertown, and you were even able to get some spare parts from a company called Firefly up in New England. I am curious how does the steam work? I mean, I'm assuming the steam, it's drawn by the horses. The steam gets built up and the pressure from that is what shoots the water out to put the fires, something like that.

Rod Graves: 14:21

Well, what they would do. It's a really interesting thing and something I've found out more as of. It was fascinating. If you had a fire company, what you would do is in the morning you would build a fire inside the fire box, you would build up the steam in the pumper. Once you got to full steam you would keep it kind of on a mid-level fire to keep the you know, kind of a light boil. And if a fire didn't happen that day, that was great. Then you would drain the water and you'd start all over again the next day. Well, if you had a fire, what you'd do is you would fire it up, you would hitch up your horses at a moment's notice and you would go to the fire. You would find the closest water source you could, with a creek or well stream of some sort, and you would pull out your fire hose and you would put it into the creek and you'd have a filter on the very end of it so stones and stuff wouldn't get in and that water would go in to the pipe. And the reason why you would want to have steam is because you know when they have you see firemen with hoses that's a lot of energy to take to push water out that far. And that's what this engine did. That steam boil would provide the energy to pull it from point A from the river to point B through the engine and then spew it out, get the fire out. It's an amazing yet very simple thing to some degree as far as the engine goes. And then later on some of the engines were developed pretty close to that, to where they were self-propelled by the steam and the steam would do both, which propel the fire engine and put out the fire. That was made by a company called Amoski and the Manchester Fire Company and originally they made during the Civil War they made sabers, and prior to the Civil War they made sabers and hats, some military. After the Civil War they really didn't have a whole lot else to get in. Prior to the Civil War they made firemen's uniforms and firemen's buttons and all kind of neat things and they kind of hit kind of a brick wall with their sails because the war was over. So they got completely into the fire engine business and that technology really evolved incredibly because steam was the power of the day when, right after the Civil War, most bigger farms had a steam engine or a gasoline engine in their farm yard to conduct farm business, then grind feed and to cut lumber and this sort of thing. So they were getting pretty common. But the development of this fire engine was incredible. Hydro technology, I mean the more I know about, the more fascinating I get.

Ayla Sparks: 17:14

It really is amazing. So similar to the new development of this amazing hydro technology, our next artifact has some amazing revolutionary technology as well, but in the form of a wooden carriage. So it's a stunning artifact. It's painted a beautiful gold, with red embellishments and scenes painted everywhere. What is the importance of this grand carriage?

Rod Graves: 17:42

Well, my father was given that by the Clooney Williamsburg Foundation because it was too early to their mission and it was part of the Mercy train the Mercy train, rather, by the French as a gift to the United States for thanking them for the sacrifices we gave in material and especially our American lives for their freedoms after World War II. And Colonial Williamsburg was really in high gear before the war and then got put on hold. So Colonial Williamsburg, you know, being a very strong national symbol of what we're all about here. They gave that as a token of friendship. The Portuguese carriage date is a little sketchy. We think it's. We've studied it very, very heavily. It could be somewhere in between 1725 and 1745, probably going to hit somewhere in between. It's very special. It was made in Paris, france, by one of the leading carriage makers. We don't know the exact carriage maker. We hope to study that a little bit more. I've not been to Paris yet but I hope to get there. Studied that with my wife but we have studied it in Portugal a lot. It was found in France. It was made for the Portuguese nobility and also the King too, also a Royal Carriage Factory in Paris. They made it for most of the nobility of Europe. And what's most amazing about it is the fact that it's all original. It has nothing that's been done to it. There are some things that are missing, but not a lot. The original glass has gone. It even has a built-in toilet in the seat and then the side. It has all the original gold leaf paint guilting on the outside. It's just outstanding. We traced that back to the original carriage house in northern Portugal, which was just an incredible experience. But they're very rare. We went to the Portuguese nobility carriage museum in Lisbon to study that and they were thrilled to know that was still out there. But at every car we drive today has a suspension in it, correct? The suspension is this is leather and it's very thick pieces of sewn leather on both sides and acts as a shock absorber. Well, you can tighten that up to whatever shock you want on the sides.

Ayla Sparks: 20:04

That's interesting, that you could make it less shocky or more shocky. I mean, wouldn't you want it to be the most shock absorbing as possible, so you're not bouncing around really hard?

Rod Graves: 20:17

Absolutely. I mean you can actually adjust it with kind of like a clock mechanism where you can wind it up or get it tighter depending on how the road is. And when they get on a certain road they'd realize kind of what was going on pretty quickly and they'd adjust it. And the footmen in the back would adjust that as they went, because you're on early 18th century roads, you know it's going to change very quickly, anything from cobblestone to just dirt, mud. It's all kind of circumstances you were going to be in. But most areas where they were were going to be pretty sophisticated, so they would have had good cobblestone roads where they were, or brick.

Ayla Sparks: 20:52

I guess you really wouldn't be going on back dirt roads.

Rod Graves: 20:56

That carriage was the Maserati of its time. I mean, there's no equal to that at the time Only, other than maybe in Russia, where the Russian carriages were just out of this world Deligent.

Ayla Sparks: 21:11

What was it originally used for? I know it was gifted to us, but what was the original purpose of this carriage? Was it just carrying around royalty?

Rod Graves: 21:21

Well, no, they were the. His name was August Sunimor and he was very close to the king. He was what they call a royal minor in nobility to some degree and he was very, very important at that time to the king of Portugal and very powerful men. But my wife and I went to where that carriage lived. We went to the very carriage house where it came from. It's just an incredible journey. I mean, each vehicle in there you could actually take a journey with and just explore, and I've done that with a lot of them and it's just. What they bring up is just the stories of people and how they lived and worshipped and played and everything else in their lives.

Ayla Sparks: 22:04

Well, thank you so much for sharing the story of this museum and giving us a glimpse of all the amazing artifacts you have to offer, of course, each one with his own amazing story. So, thank you.

Rod Graves: 22:16

It's been a real pleasure. We just man.

Ayla Sparks: 22:21

Thank you so much for tuning in and supporting Curator's Choice, a mighty oak media production. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing and rating the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you love a museum and would like to hear it featured in an episode, shoot me a message at curatorschoicepodcastcom. I'll do my best to reach out and see if I can get them to be on the show. You can also view articles, artifacts and more by following us on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for listening to Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers.