Twenty-Millionth Ford Wows Port City

Digging into the life of the founder of Fuller Gardens for a history feature (“On the Road with Alvan Fuller,” Portsmouth Herald) required considerable research on vintage automobiles. Fuller lived in Boston and summered in North Hampton. His successful Packard and Cadillac showroom on Commonwealth Ave. in Boston earned Fuller the title “most successful auto dealership in the world.”

So let’s continue the early automobile theme with this May 12, 1931 image from the Portsmouth Athenaeum archive. As I hoped, the Internet is rich with shots of the Twenty-Millionth Ford. The Model A sedan toured the nation as a publicity stunt and it was filmed and photographed often.
After crossing Memorial Bridge, this shiny motorcar parked in front of City Hall. That’s the old City Hall entrance at the corner of Chapel and Daniel streets. Frank E. Brooks, the local Ford dealer escorted the car to the center of town. And that is probably Mayor Fernando W. Hartford, greeting the Ford driver. Mayor Hartford, as we know from previous articles, was also owner of the Portsmouth Herald and the Music Hall at the time.

The stunt earned free publicity coast to coast. Henry Ford himself, accompanied by his son Edsel, drove the Twenty-Millionth car off the Detroit factory floor on April 14, 1931. The milestone car idea was not fresh. Ford had previously grabbed headlines with a Ten Millionth car in 1924, and a Fifteen Millionth car three years later. The words were emblazoned on both sides of the “slant windshield town sedan,” and also on the roof, so it could be spotted from the air.

The car appeared at fairs, Ford dealerships, state capitals, historic sites, and–as here–city halls. Initially another 20 new 1931 Ford model cars followed along in a publicity parade. Kids were released from school, bands played, and police escorted the hyped car through town after town. Dignitaries and celebrities like actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. signed a logbook at each stop, as the car became the most photographed Model A in history.

For years it was rumored that, long after completing its tour,  the Twenty Millionth car had been destroyed in a fire along with the logbook. Long story short, the famous car was actually sold in Detroit in 1940 to Mr. Carl Liimatainen . Carl drove the car to Upper Michigan and gave it to his father Charles, who drove it until 1956. Charles gave it back to his son Carl, who bequeathed it to his son Rod, who stored it in his mother’s shed.

The Twenty Millionth Ford was “rediscovered” in the year 2000. Rod leased the car back to Ford Motor Company, where it was fully restored for the Model A Centennial in 2003. The vintage auto was returned to the owners after Ford’s 10-year lease elapsed. For more info read a short history of the Twenty Millionth Ford by Jim Spawn, editor of The Restorer (May/June 2001), a publication of the Model A Ford Club of America. The historic logbook, it appears, has never resurfaced.  

Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.