1915 International Auto Wagon: A blast from the past

When CCJ decided to see if it was possible to test-drive a collection of antique trucks for our CCJ 100 Centennial Celebration this year and next, we contacted the American Historical Truck Society, which, in turn, put us in contact with the Qualls family of Cookeville, Tenn. It was clear right off the bat that we’d hit the jackpot. David Qualls, his brother, Mark, and their respective wives, Sue and Vicki, are all passionately dedicated to finding, restoring, showing and driving antique trucks. A phone conversation with David in early March was amazing: The family had a wide array of restored trucks on hand – spanning a more than a century of trucking – and we’d be able to road-test five decades worth of trucks in one afternoon. Needless to say, we set a date and jumped in the car as soon as possible.

Automotive fans will quickly find themselves in situational overload visiting the Qualls farm. There are so many great trucks sitting around waiting to be cranked up. But the highlight of the collection has to be their 1915 International Auto Wagon and it’s 1917 stable mate. In fact, it was our desire to find and drive a truck from the first decade of the American trucking experience that led us to the Qualls in the first place. The fact that they had two from the Nineteen-teens was just incredible… And never mind the ’31 International flatbed, the ’25 Ford Model TT delivery van and ’41 Mack ED heavy pickup lurking in the back of the barn. We’d get to all of those soon enough. But today, we were in Tennessee to find out what trucking was like for a CCJ reader 100 years ago.

When the Qualls pull back the heavy barn doors and you first glimpse the 1915 Auto Wagon, your first thought is that it’s so old! It doesn’t look old, mind you… In fact, the Qualls have restored and painted it so that it looks like it just rolled off a showroom floor. The bright red paint and brilliant brass fixtures gleam in the afternoon sunlight.

But if it doesn’t look 95 years old, the Auto Wagon does look primitive. It has wagon wheels topped with hard rubber “tires.” The suspension looks like something that might have crossed the American prairie pulled behind a plodding mule. There’s no electric system to speak of: The headlamps burn acetylene in a chemical reaction to emit light. The plush black seat is leather and hand-stitched. But there’s no cab – not even a rudimentary roof – to protect the driver from the elements. The “cab” is made of wood and very cramped. You sort of wedge your feet behind the curved, wood firewall and suck in your gut to slide behind the tall, upright walnut and brass steering wheel, which is mounted on the right side of the driver’s platform. Behind you, the bed is about the same size as a modern pickup truck and features an adjustable tailgate to allow long cargo (say, fence posts) to hang out the back end. Even better, a couple of inserts can be fitted into the bed to allow seating for the family when heading to town or to church.

video management, video solution, video streaming Qualls says it’s important to view the Auto Wagon in the context of its time: International got into the truck business because they figured it complimented their core business at the time – which was farm equipment. If they could help their farmers get their crops to market, they reasoned, they’d be able to sell more plows, reapers and tractors as a result. But, nobody really had defined what a truck was in those days. As a result, most ended up being a sort of half work vehicle, half family transportation.

But a few features on the ’15 Auto Wagon highlight its agricultural roots: Forget that email you got a few years ago about railroads and highways being based on old Roman roads. In fact, there were major differences in Northern and Southern roadways at the time. The Qualls’ Auto Wagon was spec’d with the optional, “Southern Road” wide-track wheelbase. On the 1917 model, the radiator is mounted behind the four-cylinder, 19 horsepower gas engine – that way a farmer could drive the truck through his pasture or field and not worry about chaff, cotton or grass clogging up the cooling fins and overheating the engine.

Starting the engine is as complicated as anything you’ve seen on an old silent movie. The engine has to be primed first. Then, you take a cast-iron hand crank (which David found one day at a garage sale) and manually spin the crankshaft until the engine catches. Naturally, it’s a good idea to have the brake set and the transmission in neutral before doing so. And – if you’re like me, and you’ve always wondered how hard was to actually spin that crank and get the engine turning over – rest assured it’s not easy. And I can’t imagine it would be a lot of fun on a cold winter day or in a driving rain storm.

Behind the wheel, it’s quickly obvious that we’re at least three decades away from concepts such as “driver comfort” and “ergonomics.” You sit bolt upright on the leather couch – and rub shoulders with a passenger, if you have one. You’ve got a single pedal on the floor: That’s your brake. I had hiking shoes on, but it was all I could do to move my size 10 foot around and get it on the pedal quickly. The space in the floor is so tight, I was worried that my foot would get hung up in the event I needed to perform an emergency stop.

The steering wheel is almost – but not quite – flat in front of you and jammed firmly into your gut. The seat does not adjust. Just beneath the steering wheel itself are the levers for the accelerator and spark advance. That’s right: The gas pedal is on the steering wheel. And there’s no distributor. So you have to manually control how much fuel and spark you’re giving the engine. It’s insanely complicated – so much so that David set the spark for me in advance. All I had to worry with was the throttle. Which was a good thing: Because attempting to manipulate the combination clutch/gearshift lever jutting out from the rear, right-hand corner of the couch was clearly going to take most of my concentration during the drive.

Again, you have to remember that nobody had worked out what a truck really was – much less how they ought to be controlled when rolling down the road. Every manufacturer had their own control system and it was some time (about 20 years, actually) before an industry-wide adoption of the control system we know and use today came into being.

For the 1915 Auto Wagon, International engineers decided – for convenience, I suppose — to roll as many functions as possible into the truck’s gearshift lever. Move it forward, and you put the two-speed transmission in neutral. Move it forward and up, and the little truck/buggy lurches forward. There’s no easing the clutch in or out gracefully and smoothly: One minute the truck is not in gear, and the next it is. It jumps forward and you’d better be ready when it does.

To shift into second (or high) gear, move the shifter down again and then sort of force the entire stick assembly rearward. Here, the shift is a little smoother since the truck is already moving. But it is surprising how quickly the little truck picks up speed. To shift into reverse, you have to pull a heavy cotter pin (sort of like – no kidding – a hand grenade pin) out of the shifter’s hinge point, move it downward into neutral once more, then pull the shifter backward and up this time. Once again, the results aren’t smooth: The little truck lurches right into gear.

On the road, the Auto Wagon handles remarkably well – at least at road speeds. It’ll do about 25 mph flat out. Insanely slow by today’s standards. But, as David Qualls noted, much faster than looking at the rear end of a mule as it plodded toward town. You’re out in the open. So bugs, rain, dust and anything else Mother Nature has going on are simply a fact of life. I quickly understood that the goggles we see early drivers wearing in old photos were an essential piece of driving gear. A heavy, weather-proof coat and a scarf to put over your nose and mouth wouldn’t be bad ideas, either.

At slow speeds, the Auto Wagon is an absolute beast to handle. If you have to make a tight turn, you’d better start planning it out well in advance. The huge wagon wheels steer just fine – until you’re stopped or creeping along. Then you’d better have some serious muscle power at your disposal when you start cranking on the steering wheel. Couple all of these with the truck’s jumpy transmission and you get one highly nervous magazine editor behind the wheel who has only one thought racing through his jangled, over-loaded mind: You DO NOT want to be the person who wrecks this irreplaceable, 95-year old truck! But no fear: David was by my side the whole time and coached me through the drive with infinite patience.

For me, that was the most surprising aspect of driving the 1915 Auto Wagon: Even though motoring technology was new-born, there was a surprising level of sophistication present on the truck. And far from being easier or simpler to drive, the Auto Wagon was actually very difficult to drive and anyone who mastered it would have to be part mechanic, part driver and part teamster to do so.

But things were changing quickly: The Qualls have a 1917 International Model F as well. And to drive it is to experience the quantum leap in technology that took place in just two year’s time: It has a cab, for example. Primitive. Made of wood and glass. But it’ll keep you dry in a rainstorm. And the controls are suddenly very similar to those found on cars and trucks today. The evolution and definition of the American truck had begun.

Next month: Join us for a truly mind-blowing test-drive behind the wheel of a 1925 Ford Delivery Van.