Already known for the firearms manufactured at the Springfield Armory and Smith & Wesson, Springfield rapidly became an industrial powerhouse in the decades following the Civil War, when more than 100 factories opened in or near the city. The output wasn’t all stovepipes and machine tools; Springfield companies created iconic consumer goods, from Milton Bradley’s board games to a legion of cool automobiles to the beloved Indian motorcycles. The museum is an ideal place to take any child (or former child) who ever wanted a truck for Christmas.
The museum’s piece de resistance is undoubtedly a 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom built in Springfield and acquired by M. Allen Swift of West Hartford, Conn., on his 26th birthday. He owned the two-tone green car for the next 77 years, racking up 172,000 miles and performing most of the maintenance himself, before presenting it to the museum shortly before his death in 2005 at 102. Swift also donated $1 million to purchase the former Verizon building that the Springfield Museums transformed into the new history museum with a dramatic, three-story, barrel-vaulted addition.
The 1921-31 saga of Rolls-Royce manufacturing in Springfield (where 1,702 cars were built) was hardly the city’s first foray into automotive manufacturing. While few have quite the provenance of Swift’s massive Rolls, the museum displays stunningly restored examples of the city’s entries into the heady early days of car production.
The first successful American gasoline auto, the Duryea, was launched here when bicycle mechanics Frank and Charles Duryea took their horseless carriage for a spin on Sept. 21, 1893. Starting in 1901, Stevens-Duryea would manufacture motorcars here until 1927, and the museum has some of their most impressive touring cars.
Inventor-entrepreneur Henry Knox developed his three-wheel runabout in 1899 (an example is on display) and founded the Knox Automobile Co., which produced cars, trucks, and farm tractors until 1924. Knox left his company to found Atlas Motor Car in 1907, manufacturing technologically advanced autos until price competition with Ford put him out of business in 1913.
