Yahoo Autos Forgotten Carmakers: Tulsa Automobile Corporation
In the late 19th century, western Pennsylvania and northern Ohio were the centers of U.S. petroleum production. But all of that changed in the early 1900s, when massive oil deposits were discovered in Oklahoma. The city of Tulsa became a center of this emerging industry, and began promoting itself as the Oil Capital of the World. Since the drilling and refinement of the juice that fueled the growing American automobile industry was being produced locally, a group of wealthy Tulsa businessmen, an oil producer among them, decided to capitalize a local car company designed to serve local needs.
The resultant prototypical launch vehicles-a three-passenger roadster, a five-passenger touring sedan, and an oilfield special trucklet-were featured in regional publications, touting their roots in the extractive industry that gave the area its roughneck cachet and black gold prosperity. The vehicles were thus positioned with the combination of mythological Western ruggedness, everyman accessibility, and casual insider/outsider dichotomies familiar to anyone who has viewed an American truck commercial (or American truck.)
"Unusual conditions forced a group of wealthy oilmen to build for their own use a car that would withstand the punishment of the world’s worst roads-the oilfield roads of the mid-continent fields," read a period advertisement. "They called it the TULSA, after the city that is the hub of their activities. For more than two years, the TULSA has been put through the most grueling road tests. It has gone down into the very depths of mud, mire, sand, gumbo, and ruts-over roads nearly impossible to describe."
The Tulsa Automobile Corporation was officially founded in 1917, with its first cars unveiled in a bizarre ceremony in the lobby of the grand brick Tulsa Hotel downtown. Potential customers, investors, and other interested parties were invited to the festivities, where, according to reports in the local Tulsa Daily World, the vehicles would be christened "by a young woman, Miss Tulsa, with a bottle of Tulsa-made gasoline." What a beautiful bouquet that must have emitted. We hope that cigar smoking was discouraged.
Like many automobile manufacturers of the time, Tulsa was more of an assembler than an originator. Cars were put together mainly from off-the-shelf parts-the 35-hp four-cylinder engines came from Herschell-Spillman, the clutch from Borg & Beck, the gearbox from Muncie. But the cars were given some special design or engineering elements to separate them from their peers.
Tulsa's magic bean wasn't its engineering, though, but a somewhat jingoistic reliance on local pride, and the kind of anti-"Eastern Establishment" positioning that's still found in the region. A 1918 ad in the nearby Muskogee Times-Democrat reminded readers that the "Tulsa Four is manufactured in the West, it is a home product. Like the Eastern factories will care for the Eastern people, the Tulsa Four will care for us Western folks." Driving the wedge even further the ad asked, "Are you going to buy a car that you will have to tie up for indefinite periods, while you send to some disinterested eastern factory for some little part?"
Despite the company's early marketing outreach to "the man of moderate means," its cheapest model started at $985, or nearly double the $500 cost of a 1917 Ford Model T. Within its first years of production the Tulsa’s price jumped to $1085, then to $1550. Despite Tulsa's advertising and optimistic projections, it seems the cars never took strong hold in the wider market, though it was reported at one time that a few Tulsa cars had reached European showrooms. This claim was a common tactic used by small manufacturers at the time-touting famed international customers, like the Sub-Emperor of the Congo, or the Finance Minister of Lichtenstein-so it may be necessary to take it with a grain of salt.
Whatever heyday Tulsa may have enjoyed, it was relatively short-lived. A factory fire in 1919 caused a major setback from which the company seemingly never fully recovered, even with the introduction of a more upscale six-cylinder model in 1921. Perhaps its decline was helped along by the construction of a Ford plant in downtown Oklahoma City, which employed 350 workers producing Model Ts for the regional market, and undoubtedly undercut much of the demand for a far more expensive local product among first-time buyers.
Eventually, Tulsa went the way of its Oklahoma-based vehicle-manufacturing contemporaries, the Ozark, Geronimo, and OK Trucks motor companies. The last Tulsa models were produced in 1922, with totals at around 1000 vehicles. At that point, the company shifted its focus to manufacturing and distributing auto parts, but went out of business a few years later.
Very few Tulsa vehicles seem to remain. The Tulsa Historical Society has one of the best, a well-restored 1918 Tulsa Four Runabout. This is a small open-bed pickup specially equipped with mounts for oilfield drill bits in the back. According to a Tulsa World article from the late 1980s, the truck was found locally, buried in mud in a farmer’s field with trees growing through it. After it had been shipped to England for a restoration that took years to complete, some prominent Tulsa citizens and organizations pooled funds to purchase the vehicle from the local Leake auction house, as an emblem of local history.
Intriguingly, this same 30-year-old Tulsa World article also mentions rumors of the existence of another Tulsa Four. In Australia. Just this past year, Tulsa Historical Society curator Ian Swart received a letter from a car collector in Victoria, Australia, who detailed just such a finding, an oilfield roadster from the late 1910s. Some of the earliest petroleum wells on that continent were in the southeastern portion of the country, in the early part of the 20th century, so the importation of such a rugged vehicle for the purposes of oilfield exploration does not seem entirely impossible.
The current owner of the vehicle, Leonie Perkins, did not respond to requests for an interview for this story, but he did email Swart with assurance that he planned to restore the vehicle. "That is not a problem, as I can make a lot of parts myself," Perkins wrote. "I have restored a 1925 Dodge buck board [another proto ute] and have a 1933 Dodge sedan." As with all owners of vehicles from orphan brands, we wish him the best of luck with his oddball find.
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