The Family Car: The "Nash"

It's a what?

If its Monday, it's Family Car day here on Your Genealogy Matters.

Today's car picture comes from the Malcolm and Turner families of Crawford County, Ohio.   In the driver's seat is young Kathryn Malcolm, "off to pick up Earl" according to the back of the image.

The bigger question is what is Kathryn driving?

Katheryn is the behind the wheel of a 1926 Nash Advanced Six sedan.  Instead of steel disc wheels, it sports the optional wooden "Artillery" wheels that many owners preferred over the early steel disc wheels, which gave a "harsh" ride.

So our second question is - for those of you too young to remember - what is a "Nash" and isn't that an odd name for a car?

The Nash was a product built by the Nash Motors Company, or Kenosha, Wisconsin.  Originally the Jeffery Motors Company - incidentally the company that built the first "Rambler" automobiles in the early 1900's, Nash was named for Charles Nash, one of the best men in the automobile business.  Nash had previously been hired by Alfred Sloan, the Chairman of General Motors, to fix the mess created by William Crapo Durant, the man who conceived General Motors and built it up in it's early years.  Durant, who was a visionary, lacked discipline and twice almost destroyed GM in his role as President.

Charlie Nash was very disciplined, and he could have had the permanent office of President of GM, but he longed to build a car that he knew GM would never commit to.  So he approached Jeffery Motors and bought the company.

Nash was smart and hired a young Finnish engineer by the name of Nels Erik Wahberg to head of development of the forth coming Nash automobile line in the nineteen-teens.  The car that Nash and Wahlberg produced was a marvel.  It was durable, comfortable and trouble free.

And in the 1920's, Nash developed a reputation for building outstanding autombiles, a reputation that it maintained the mid 1950s.  In fact, Nash introduced the "Ajax" brand car, a priced competitively in the "affordable" market that was the first low priced automobile with breaks on all four wheels.  In its second year, the Ajax was renamed the Nash Light Six.

This particular car was large, powered by Nash's Advanced Six engine, which in the 1920s was one of the more powerful sixes on the market - and this is long before 8 cylinder cars became the rage.  The Nash was good for a rip roaring 70mph sustained speed, and this at a time when a model was good to do 40.

These were not inexpensive cars - but they were everything and more that the company promised.

Of note, in the 1930's, Wahlberg developed the "Weather Eye" system for Nash, making it the first car brand to eliminate dust, excess humidity and drafts in its closed models.  And by the early 1950s, Weather Eye would be the first automobile air conditioning system designed to fit under the hood instead of the trunk.

But also in 1950, Nash reintroduced the Rambler, as a compact.  And as the decade wore on, Rambler sales eclipsed that of the larger Nash automobiles.  Nash merged with Hudson to form American Motors Corporation (AMC) in 1954, and in 1957, the final Nash automobile was built as the company put all of it's capital into the Rambler brand.

In the late 1960s, AMC bought the Jeep brand from Kaiser Manufacturing.  And Kaiser had acquired Jeep when it bought out Willys Corporation, formerly Willys Overland - the company where Charles Nash got started in the car business.

AMC ceased business in the mid 1980's when it was acquired by Chrysler for its lucrative Jeep. division, itself.

In the case of Nash, its family tree is as twisted as many of our own family trees.

Funny how that works, isn't it?