America's Packard Museum: The Cars of the Gilded Age

Inside a restored nineteen seventeen Art Deco dealership in downtown Dayton is the world's largest collection of Packard automobiles, more than fifty cars spanning from nineteen oh three to the final year of production in nineteen fifty-six. Packard was once what Rolls-Royce is today: the car you bought when money was not the object. The company built one point six million vehicles over that span, and collectors estimate only about ten thousand still exist.

This building sold them in Dayton starting in nineteen oh eight. Robert Signom acquired it in nineteen ninety-one, restored it to its original grandeur, and opened it as a museum the following year. The collection tells the story of American luxury manufacturing at its peak: the long hoods, the straight-eight engines, the coachwork that competing companies could not match. Packard died because it tried to survive by building cheaper cars under the same name, and buyers who wanted a Packard stopped believing in it. The dealership here outlasted the brand by decades.