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Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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King Arthur's Truck

Posted May 31, 2011 9:50 AM by dstrohl

Through Hemmings Forums, we heard from the folks at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont, regarding the calliope truck that was used to promote their flour in New York City and Boston in the late 1920s.

Featuring a wooden carving of King Arthur atop his horse and carrying a banner (a later version of the truck has him carrying a banner with the King Arthur Flour lettering on it), this calliope truck is a mystery on several levels.

First, though it carries a sign noting that it was built by Spillman Engineering of North Tonawanda, New York - the company best known for building carousels and for building four-cylinder, six-cylinder and even V-8s for use in cars of the 1910s and 1920s - we haven't yet come across any reference of Spillman building trucks. (The company did build about four cars in the 1900s, back when it was formally known as Herschell-Spillman.) So which company provided the cab and chassis for this truck?

Second, the folks at King Arthur Flour would like to restore this truck, but they don't know where it is. We imagine solving the first mystery will go a long way toward solving that second one.

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Re: King Arthur's Truck

06/01/2011 11:03 AM

I knew King Arthur. But I'm not sure how much flour a European sparrow could carry in its coconuts.

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