Friday evening, 15 Hay family members — granddaughters through great-great grandchildren from around the Lower 48 — gathered at the museum, located at the Wedgewood Resort, for a private reception, to admire the 1898 Hay Motor Car their forebear designed 112 years ago and to honor his memory on his 140th birthday.
The Hay Motor Car is a rarity — the oldest known surviving 4-cylinder gasoline-powered automobile made in America. It was discovered in a barn in the 1940s and went through several owners before it was purchased and restored for exhibition by the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum in 2007.
According to Hay family lore, only three Hay Motor Cars were built in New Haven, Conn. One for Hay, one for his partner, Emerson Hotchkiss, and a third as a sample car.
The deep maroon vehicle accented with spoked white rubber tires and two old-fashioned side lamps was gleaming and ready to roll for a short memorial outing Friday.
With a 5-horsepower engine, 6 miles per hour is its top speed, said auto restorer Sean Brayton of South Kingstown, R.I., who was on hand to start it.
Brayton is familiar with the auto. He first restored for Admiral J. William Middendorf as a touring car. After it was sold to the Fountainhead Museum, Brayton restored it to jewel-like quality for exhibition.
The inside of the rear engine compartment glows with copper and brass plating and parts.
“Every single worn, broken or missing part was hand cast,” Brayton said, pointing to two shiny, brass wing nuts.
Hay claimed the car’s 8-cycle engine could run without oil, but the design although innovative was flawed, said Brayton, who added a sump and external oil pump.
“The engine and drive system are very unique,” Brayton added, noting the eight-cycle, horizontally opposed four-cylinder engine.
Hay’s granddaughters, Martha Hay Deegan and Diane Hay Burley, never knew their grandfather. He died in 1936, years before they were born. But family legends about the man, whose father, a swindler and con man, deserted the family when Hay was just 3 years old, piqued their interest.
Deegan, who has a childhood memory of the family’s Hay Motor cars being auctioned at her grandmother’s estate sale in the mid-1950s, began a determined search a few years ago via the Internet and elsewhere to learn more about her grandfather’s motor car and eventually locate one.
Today, Deegan has a three-ring notebook filled with photos and newspaper articles relating to her inventive grandfather’s life.
A small prospectus booklet Hay wrote about his motor car goes into detail about how “The Hay Motor Vehicle thoroughly satisfies all practical requirements, and as a saver of time, it is as greatly superior to the horse, as mechanical power is superior to animal power.”
But Hay’s marketing doesn’t stop there. He breaks down the average cost per year to keep a horse ($175) including shoeing, harness, shelter, food and liability and compares it to $85 per year to drive and maintain a Hay Motor Vehicle, which “Unlike the horse, the motor vehicle necessitates no care or expense when not in use.”
Hay goes on to praise the convenience of motor vehicles over horses, how they eliminate anxiety or danger of operation, and finally that the displacement of horses will improve sanitary condition on roadways and in stables and do away with the “nerve wrecking clatter of horses’ steel shoes and rumble of wheels.”
Hay, who designed his motor car in Seville, Ohio, did find a backer (Hotchkiss) in New Haven, Conn., where the three Hay Motor Cars were manufactured.
Both Deegan and Burley point out that grandfather Hay owned his own business at age 21, and after his motor car failed, he didn’t give up.
“He continued on,” Deegan said. “He had to backtrack.”
That meant returning to Ohio, where he lived with his mother for a while before he founded Union Chain Works, a successful chain making business in Sandusky, Ohio.
Hay’s other inventions included an electric doorbell and a multi-level parking garage.
Both granddaughters admire and appreciate Hay’s inventiveness and go for it attitude, family traits they say have been carried down over the generations.
“We’re strivers. We take chances, go out on a limb. We’re very decisive people,” said Deegan, a retired trial lawyer.
Both Deegan and Burley eagerly took the initiative to honor their grandfather and also to involve their children and grandchildren.
“It’s been a long, long journey, but wonderful to see my great-grandfather’s car,” said Emily Deegan. “He was on the very cutting edge of technology in 1898 ... and now it’s at the Last Frontier.”
Contact staff writer Mary Beth Smetzer at 459-7546.
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