2013 A-C-D Museum Fall Festival

AUBURN, IN — August 31, 2013 — “It’s more than just a car … It’s a Time Machine,” read the legend on the road sign heading into Auburn, Indiana this morning. The cars … the Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs … have come home this weekend. Hundreds of them. When you see them parade from the judging fields in the morning back through downtown Auburn you wonder how so many of them have survived. Click here to view the video.

When we arrived on Friday you saw classic Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs literally parked in the parking Auburn Museum Fall Festival 2013lots of the local hotels. You couldn’t get a hotel room for miles around. They were all sold out for the show.

Each year it is a wonderful experience to spend time in Indiana, the birthplace of so many American car companies. We were able to visit the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum here today. It is an experience I highly recommend. I’ve been to a good number of auto museums over the years. This is the best I’ve ever seen.

The A-C-D Museum is in the very building that E.L. Cord built to house his Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg car company. It still has the orignal art deco style

architecture. You can see from the photos of the company showroom that the structure has been maintained beautifully. The offices of E.L. Cord are all intact and even the sales meeting room and board room are maintained as they were. The most interesting rooms upstairs are the design studios of Gordon Buerhig and Alan Leamy. All of this history unfolds for you as you walk through the same hallways that Cord and his staff did back in the day.

Just in back of the museam is the home of NATMUS, the organization that is dedicated to the preservation of trucks, tractors, toy replicas and peddle cars. Their successful restoration of the GM Futuliner is legendary. On Saturday, much of the floor space in the NATMUS building was being taken up with displays of cars that are being offered at the Worldwide Auctioneers auction sale to be held on Saturday evening.

Meanwhile, just down the freeway at the Auburn Auction Park, RM’s Auctions America was holding their three-day auction sale of collector cars. The Auctions America sale is highlighted below.

On the grounds at the Auction Park there is a car corral and even a swap meet area. If you are a car guy, there is something for everybody here in Auburn, Indiana on Labor Day Weekend.