#custom vehicles

[krumpkin]

Chevrolet 3200 Custom Pickup ( 1957 ) 😁😁

[stone-cold-groove]

There are custom vans, and then there are custom vans.

[volpestarks]

Lassie.86 on Insta ✨

|A DaVinci masterwork of a custom, in other words

[kollectorsrus]

[hagleyvault]

We *could* use this space to remind you all that National Ice Cream Pie Day is a made-up internet holiday that appears to have started circulating without attribution around 1991, and, like so many of these dates, now exists primarily for its value in allowing social media managers to pop in a hashtag and call it a day. Or we can have some ice cream. It’s hot. Let’s go get some ice cream. This Newton-Mitchell Company was founded in Elkton, Maryland by Morris Newton and Henry H. Mitchell in 1919 and operated out of a building on the corner of Delaware Avenue and Howard Street. This truck was built for them around the year 1925, before the company was purchased by Abbotts Dairy of Philadelphia in June 1930. The truck was custom made by the Wilmington, Delaware company of James Watson & Sons, also called the Riverview Wagon Works.

Riverview Wagon Works was founded by James Watson in 1891. At the time, the company built and restored wagons. After 1920, however, the company began customizing truck bodies, special vehicles (bookmobiles, paddy wagons, etc.), buses, and touring trailers. When Watson died in 1927, the company passed to his sons, William M. and Andrew B. Watson, who operated it until June, 1961.

Many of the hundreds of photographs and negatives in the Hagley Library’s James Watson & Sons Co. photograph collection (Accession 1992.213) show samples of the company’s work on wagons, including noteworthy examples of local Wilmington, Delaware dairy farm wagons and trucks. There are also pictures of delivery vehicles, buses and school buses, ambulances, police and rescue squads, Delaware bookmobiles, moving and hauling trucks, commercial trucks, horse trucks, trailers, and other kinds of vehicles. The collection also includes photographs of the company’s workers and factory, as well as group photographs and family photographs.

To view a selection of images from this collection, click here to visit its page in our Digital Archive.

[krumpkin]

A Customized F150 Ford Pickup ( 1994 ) 😁

[kollectorsrus]