Circle the Wagons
Love wagons? Us too. Here from the wayback, semi-wayback, and not-so-wayback history of car-based haulers is a smattering of our personal favorites. We’d love to see photos and read recollections of your own: mmcnessor@hemmings.com.
We figured we’d kick off our roundup of collectible station wagons with the rarest truckster of them all: the 1957 Mercury Villager. What? Never heard of it? Neither had our eagle-eyed Senior Editor Tom DeMauro when we asked him to write up a description to accompany this photo, obtained from Ford. As Tom pointed out, Mercury didn’t make a Villager wagon in ’57. The car pictured, we learned, is a clay model (which explains the full-length black package shelf standing in for seats, a dashboard, etc.) A production Villager wagon did roll out in ’58, but it was an Edsel. After Edsel’s demise, the Villager joined Mercury and remained there for years on wagons and later minivans.
1949-’50 PLYMOUTH SUBURBAN
Price new: $1,840 (1950 Deluxe)
Average value today: $32,100
Collectibility:
Willys pioneered the all-steel station wagon in the postwar era, but the public saw it as more of a truck. At Chrysler, however, the steel wagon concept was finally produced in a form that was recognizably a passenger car first and a utility vehicle second.
The styling of the Plymouth Suburban was clearly derived from its wood-bodied siblings (Plymouth also offered a traditional four-door woodie) but the substitution of metal greatly simplified maintenance. It also knocked
