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Earliest Ancestor of Escalade?(General Motors Corp. Cadillac Motor Car Div.'s first commercial vehicles)
Byline: JOHN F. KATZ
Cadillac built its first commercial vehicles-two different delivery vans-in 1904, having produced only a runabout (with optional tonneau) in the marque's debut year of 1903. So what about the 1903 delivery van pictured here? Its body is a reproduction, yes, but based on evidence that at least a few 1903 runabouts could have been converted for commercial duty before the Detroit factory caught on.
At least four such delivery bodies were built by I.W. Dill Carriage Works, located at the East End Mulberry Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Irving Dill also owned the Central Pennsylvania Automo-bile Co., which sold, serviced and stored the vans. A probably not unbiased letter from Central Penn Auto manager C.C. Crispen, published in the Feb. 25, 1905, issue of The Automobile, extolled the rugged reliability of the little trucks:
"During the holidays... the two department store wagons pull[ed] out many times a day loaded to the very roof,'' often "plow[ing] through the snow'' from 8:30 a.m. until 9 or 11 at night. The remaining two vans, operated by the Harrisburg Morning Telegraph and the still-extant Harrisburg Patriot, "hustle the papers to the trains as fast as they come from the press, then pick up as many as seven boys and their bundles of papers...'' The letter further notes the largest van had a capacity of 72 cubic feet, and that "The automobile company is well satisfied with the record of never having to bring any one of the wagons home by outside power.''
From this testimony it seems certain the Harrisburg vans were in use for Christmas 1904; an accompanying photo clearly shows the sloping radiator and gooseneck spring hangers of a 1903-04 Cadillac Model A, so they could have been built earlier. Still, when Harrisburg-area Cadillac restoration specialist Greg Tocket (of The Cadillac Shop in Lewisberry) bought a solid 1903 chassis with only part of a runabout body, he decided to restore it as a delivery van.
Dill built his vans with unique side windows resembling billowing teardrops or fat ...
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