Originally Posted by jcyuhn

Very cool - looks nicely restored too.

There used to be hundreds of automobile manufacturers in the US. A few years ago I was aimlessly riding my bicycle across Wisconsin and stumbled across a museum dedicated (mostly) to the Kissel motorcar company. Never heard of it before, and I grew up in Detroit around people the live, eat, and sleep cars. Kissel was a high end, high quality product. The museum had an unrestored Kissel flatbed truck that had been used to run deliveries by a local business - for something like 60 years before retiring it. The most interesting thing is they were completely vertically integrated. Every single part of the car was made by Kissel, including every nut and bolt. That lack of efficiency probably also explains why they went out of business.

http://wisconsinautomuseum.com/