Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum: The Empire That Burned Bright
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
The building you're passing in Auburn, Indiana tells one of the great stories in American automotive history, the story of an empire that rose from a struggling carriage company to produce some of the most celebrated automobiles ever built in the United States, and then collapsed in a single year, leaving behind nothing but the cars themselves and this Art Deco showroom.
It began in nineteen oh three when the Eckhart Carriage Company of Auburn began making horseless carriages. For two decades the Auburn Automobile Company struggled, producing decent but unremarkable cars. The transformation came in nineteen twenty-four when a twenty-nine-year-old salesman named Errett Lobban Cord arrived, took over the company within a year, and remade it entirely. Cord was a showman and a risk-taker. He redesigned Auburn's cars for visual drama and performance, cut prices, and turned a money-losing operation into a profitable one. He bought Duesenberg in nineteen twenty-six, employing brothers August and Frederick Duesenberg to build the most expensive and technically advanced cars in America, cars that sold for prices equivalent to several years of a working person's wages, cars purchased by movie stars and millionaires. Then Cord put his own name on a third marque: the Cord automobile, one of the first American front-wheel-drive cars, with a coffin-nose hood and hidden headlights that became design icons.
For a few years in the early nineteen thirties, the Auburn Cord Duesenberg company made cars that stood at the absolute summit of American automotive ambition. Then the Depression, compounded by stock manipulations that drew attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission, brought everything down. On August seventh, nineteen thirty-seven, production of all three marques ended simultaneously.
The showroom building they left behind, this Art Deco headquarters with its sleek lines and limestone facade, became a museum in nineteen seventy-four. The National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark in two thousand five. Inside are the cars themselves: Auburns with their boat-tail speedster bodies, Duesenbergs built to the specifications of celebrity clients, and Cords with their futuristic profiles. The empire lasted thirty-three years. The cars last forever.
