On a recent trip to Cape Cod, I revisited Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich. Among the surprising finds here are a 1908 Looff carousel, a museum building with changing exhibits relating to Cape Cod, and a display of some three dozen vintage vehicles in a building designed after a traditional stone and wood Shaker round barn.
This year’s temporary exhibition in the museum building was Creating Cape Cod, which told the story of how Cape Cod developed from a “Yankee backwater” (as Henry David Thoreau once described it) into the major tourist destination it is today. This transformation was driven first by the railroad, which enabled easy access to the Cape, and later by the automobile, which brought a ceaseless seasonal tsunami of visitors to Cape Cod.
Creating Cape Cod extended to the Automobile Gallery, where a selection of vintage vehicles complimenting that exhibition was on display on the lower level. As you may have deduced from previous posts of mine, vintage automobiles draw my roving eye. I didn’t take any pictures in the main museum gallery, but I did take plenty of the three cars and the camper displayed in the Automobile Gallery, so that’s what I’ll focus on here. So buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Packard Runabout and Curtiss Aerocar Camper
The oldest car is a 1929 Packard 633 Runabout. An intrepid Packard collector tracked down the car in 2013 and found it in a shed in the Adirondacks, where it had sat unused for half a century. He purchased it from the original owner’s descendants and restored it to running condition.
Packard produced high-quality luxury automobiles. The exhibit panel notes that the price of the Runabout when new was $3,175, just over twice the average annual (American) income in 1929. That translates to $52,678 in 2022.
The Packard is displayed hauling a 1930 Curtiss Aerocar Camper. The forerunners of today’s RVs, auto campers were first manufactured in 1910 as car camping was gaining popularity.
If you know anything about aviation history, the name Curtiss should ring a bell. Glen H. Curtiss was an early aviation pioneer and aircraft designer and manufacturer. Later in life, his frequent hunting trips in Florida’s Everglades also led him to design and manufacture the Aerocar Camper.
Like the Packard, the Aerocar was acquired by a collector from its original owner after it had languished in a barn for decades. It is the only Aerocar known to exist that has a wooden frame wrapped in oil cloth, a structural design adopted from early airplanes.
Mercury Station Wagon
Popularly known as a Woodie, this unrestored 1946 Mercury Station Wagon sports maple panels with mahogany veneer trim on the outside, mahogany paneling inside, its original Dynamic Maroon color and a matching leather interior. It cost $1,729 when new, just over two-thirds the average annual income in 1946. That translates to $24,928 in 2022.
Woodies were great beach cars, their powerful engines enabling driving on sand. Their roomy interiors had plenty of room for people and their beach or fishing gear or a surfboard or two.
The exhibit panel states that the Woodie evolved from early horse-drawn or motorized vehicles often used on Cape Cod to haul people and luggage between hotels and train stations—the origin of the term “station wagon.”
Ford Country Squire
Ford Country Squires were probably a familiar sight on Cape Cod in the 1960s and 1970s. This 1965 model sports a rooftop carrier for extra luggage. There was plenty of room for kids too. Spotting out of state license plates and arguing over who had to sit astride the hump in the middle of the floor (for the rear-wheel drive transmission) were popular family road trip pastimes.
The car still has its original Tropical Turquoise paint and matching colors inside. The exhibit panel notes that it is a top of the line model, with a V-8 engine, factory-installed air conditioning, a Cruise-O-Matic automatic transmission, and high-end interior finishes. The simulated (according to Wikipedia) wood-grain body trim is a nod to the original Woodie wagons.
This Country Squire cost $3,147 when new, slightly more than half the average annual income. That translates to $28,345 in 2022.
While Creating Cape Cod will probably be replaced by another exhibition next year, the Mercury Station Wagon and the Ford Country Squire are part of the museum’s collection and might still be on display.
David Romanowski, 2022
Bike Walk Drive 
Had I known you had a fascination with old cars, we could have taken you to the car museum at Spa Park very close to where we were tooling around. And, with a bit more timing, attended the “Way We Were” auto show in Ballston Spa this past weekend where there were some 500 old and not so old cars on display. It is dubbed that name because that movie was in part filmed there and at Union College in Schenectady.
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I don’t really know much about vintage cars, but I do think they’re cool to look at. Car shows pop up all the time around here, and it’s not uncommon to see vintage cars driving around our area. I saw two lovingly restored Stingray convertibles in different places just a couple of days ago.
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