America’s Camping Vehicles

The earliest traveling Americans covered hundreds of miles across country with wagons pulled by horses or oxen. The laying of rails changed much of this travel, especially in Western America where distances were great and roads were few. However, the coming of the automobile was the beginning of major changes in American life, for work and business and for leisure.     Cross country roads like the Lincoln Highway and Yellowstone Trail encouraged the population to use their cars to travel long distances looking for better jobs, and to enjoy leisure time exploring America’s outdoors. The Ford Model T was a major early means of conveyance that carried its passengers and could be converted for roadside camping.     Vehicle adaptations like the one shown led to the creation of city parks and waysides devoted to the vagabond travelers of the 1920’s. It was not long before camping or travel trailers were being manufactured by companies like Covered Wagon, Silver Dome, Saginaw, Trotwood, Safari, Roycraft, Palace Master, and Aladdin. These small trailers varied in price from cheap $300 models to the expensive $2500 luxurious models. The more common well-equipped trailer was in the range of $700 and many were used for housing during the depression years of the 1930’s, especially while their owners stayed on a perpetual vacation as they searched for better jobs.   The photo on the right is of a 1936 Ford pulling a Silver Dome trailer that had left South Dakota as new equipment the previous summer. It had been to the east coast, traveled to California and was photographed on Palm Sunday in 1937 on Snowqualami pass in Washington. My uncle returned to South Dakota and operating his gas and service station on the Meridian Highway, one of the named highways, now US – 81, that runs from Texas to Winnipeg. Did he get the travel fever from his customers? possibly, but he continued to travel far and wide all his life, a characteristic of many Americans     Starting in 1936 Pierce-Arrow produced a line of camper-trailers, the Pierce-Arrow Travelodge, including some that came equipped with a toilet and shower. If my memory is correct there is (or was) one in the old prison museum in Deer Lodge. It was inevitable that “motor-homes” would be on the horizon, a few had built as early as 1910 and were often called “house-cars”. They were few and far between prior to the 1950’s, but in 1937 apparently the Ford plant in St Paul Minnesota built a very few on pickup truck chassis. One of these was found in Minnesota in 2001 and restored by a collector named Graeme Thickins, and is pictured below. It has a standard pickup chassis, a Ford V8 engine, a body frame of oak, a metal skin, and a canvas roof with a silver rain proof coating. Note the raised part which allows very limited area to fully stand.     The windows all open, it has a bed, a table, and a sink, but there is no evidence of a toilet, cooler, or stove. The cabin was built onto the cowl with it all open to the driver area, but it was well before the seat-belt era. Overall, it was clearly a mobile “sleeping room” with the need for a campground location to have cooking and toilet facilities.     This returns us to the roadside camping facilities, remnants of which still can be found in many communities although they were augmented in many places by cabin camps. The cabin camps were composed of individual small sleeping cabins usually with an outdoor picnic area and bathroom facilities either indoors or elsewhere on the grounds. Almost all were pre-war (WWII) and were often converted into early motels by adding additional rooms between adjacent cabins. The last of the individual cabins were removed from Bozeman’s East Main in about 2005. There still remains a motel that was at one time just separate cabins. Careful watching will pick out similar structures in most Montana communities on major highways.