For Sale at Auction: 1914 Stutz Bearcat in Newport, Rhode Island

Chassis No. 2250
Engine No. AI-779

The 1911 Indianapolis 500 drew forty starters, most of them built by established firms with reputations to defend. Among them was a car assembled in roughly six weeks by a 34-year-old Ohio machinist who had never before sold a complete automobile, which he called the Bear Cat. It finished eleventh at an average of 62.375 mph, running the distance without a single mechanical adjustment and stopping thirteen times, eleven of those for tires, with Gil Anderson at the wheel. Harry Clayton Stutz had his slogan by the following morning: "The Car That Made Good in a Day."

The path to that triumphant Memorial Day had begun with Stutz's arrival in Indianapolis in 1903, followed by the better part of a decade spent moving through the city's young motor trade. He designed an engine for the American Motor Car Company's Underslung and later served as chief engineer at Marion, all the while pursuing a private invention that combined transmission and differential at the rear axle in a single unit. In 1910 he founded the Stutz Auto Parts Company to build the transaxle he had designed, and the Ideal Motor Car Company followed shortly after, formed expressly to build a complete car around it. Once the Speedway had proven the design, the two concerns merged into the Stutz Motor Car Company, and the transaxle remained a defining feature of the marque for its first decade, a layout that would not become common practice for another fifty years.

The road-going version reached buyers as the Model A later in 1911, and by 1912 it carried the name Bearcat. It was, in effect, the stripped back Indianapolis car offered to the public, differing chiefly in that the name was by then styled as a single word. Two bucket seats, a bolster fuel tank, and a monocle windscreen clamped to the steering column made up the whole of the bodywork, with no doors, no running boards, and no weather equipment of any kind. Stutz factory literature made little attempt at subtlety, holding that "racing a car is concentrating the wear and tear it ordinarily experiences in every-day use," and that the buyer therefore enjoyed "the proven mechanical perfection of the Stutz."

Beneath that minimal coachwork sat the proven Wisconsin Motor Manufacturing T-head four of 389 cu-in, refined by Stutz to near 60 horsepower. Bosch ignition, a Warner speedometer, and the trademark three-speed transaxle completed the specification, and the price was $2,000, with buyers choosing from Vermilion, Monitor Grey, Mercedes Red, or Yellow finishes.

Chassis number 2250 is among the small number of pre-1915 Bearcats whose history can be followed continuously from the day it left Indianapolis, and the list of names attached to it is without compare among surviving examples. Its first owner was Thomas Ives Hare Powel of Middletown, Rhode Island, a Harvard graduate, banker, descendant of Brown University founder Nicholas Brown, and once a candidate for mayor of Newport. He bought the car new in April 1914 and registered it in Rhode Island under license plate no. 51. When he married Hope Knight Hodgman in 1923, the couple took the Stutz on their honeymoon.

In 1936 Powel sold the Bearcat to Smith Hempstone Oliver, a figure central to the founding of both the AACA and the VMCCA, and later curator of the Smithsonian's transportation department. Oliver drove the car home to New York and used it daily. That October, when the Vanderbilt Cup was revived at the new Roosevelt Raceway, George Robertson organized a one-lap exhibition for veteran drivers ahead of the main event. Ralph Mulford, winner of the 1911 Vanderbilt Cup, took the wheel of Oliver's Bearcat and won. In 1940 the car appeared twice at the New York World's Fair, first on a VMCCA tour and then at the World's Fair Grand Prix, the last race organized by the Automobile Racing Club of America, where Ralph DePalma drove it as pace car.

Oliver enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and sold the Stutz to Jack Fetterolf, who sold it within a year to Thomas McKean of Philadelphia, an SCCA regional executive and the first curator of the Free Library of Philadelphia, whose automotive reference collection now resides at the Simeone Foundation and the AACA Library. McKean kept it until 1949, selling to Charles Dearnley Jr. of Abington, Pennsylvania.

Dearnley sold the Bearcat in 1965 to Winthrop Rockefeller, son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and governor of Arkansas from 1967 to 1971. Rockefeller restored it in the traditional yellow and black and displayed it at his Museum of Automobiles on Petit Jean Mountain. Following his death in 1973, the collection passed to collector and casino magnate William "Bill" F. Harrah, whose museum already held two early Bearcats. Chassis 2250 was then purchased in April 1976 by James A. and Dorothy S. Conant of Rocky River, Ohio.

The Conants kept the Stutz for three decades, and it became the centerpiece of a collection that included early Mercedes, Napier, and Locomobile. Under their ownership, it won an AACA National First Place at Hershey, appeared at the first Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance, and took part in the Henry Ford Museum's Sports Cars in Review. Sold from the Conant estate in 2006, it then passed to the noted private collection of Richard Losee, making infrequent public appearances including a December 2011 Road & Track feature comparing it with the contemporary Corvette.

Acquired by the current collector in 2021, chassis 2250 continues to present in phenomenal condition. Among the most recognizable American cars of any era, the Bearcat remains the definitive Brass Era performance machine, and more than a century after production ceased, with genuine examples scarce and documented ones scarcer still, chassis 2250's unbroken chain of ownership places it in a category of its own.