Dashing through the snow: the return of Mr. Kinsey and his Franklin

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Remember the Franklin of Darius Kinsey, which we recently showed you inside a tree? We found another gem of a picture of the same car making its way through deep snow. Kinsey was a keen photographer who was hired by the Seattle and Lake Shore Railroad Company and spent no fewer than five years taking pictures of the grand views along its lines in the early 1920s. At the same time, he photographed every aspect of the logging industry and visited a great number of logging camps on his travels around America's north-west.

He must have loved his Franklin car, too, as it turns up in his pictures on a number of occasions. This picturesque forest scene was taken on one of his adventures, probably to the Coal Creek Lumber Company at Chehalis, Lewis County, which cut fir and cedar lumber to sell to the railroads, which in turn used the wood for bridges.

The Franklin Automobile Company built its cars, for a change, not in 'Motown' Detroit but in Syracuse, New York. An advertisement of the time proclaimed: 'The Franklin owner is a successful man who thinks for himself and who owes his place in the world to his habit of getting the facts and using his own judgment.' Some 150,000 Franklins were built between 1902 and 1934 and it is estimated that about 3,700 have survived, or so says the marque’s car club, which seems to be a very active and enthusiastic association for owners of these cars in the USA. It was established in the early 1950s and now has some 900 members as well as an impressive collection of its own (in the Gilmore Car Museum in Michigan), and a website brimming with activity.

The late Darius Kinsey would surely have been a member, if he'd lived long enough.

Words: Jeroen Booij; picture: Darius Kinsey / University of Washington
 

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