Suburban Motor Car Company
The Company that Could Have Changed Our City’s Destiny
The short-lived Suburban Motor Car Company (1911-1913), herein called simply SMCC, is today just a footnote in the long saga of automotive history, yet it became part of a fascinating chapter of that history that would include such disparate elements as the Seven Little Buffaloes, a mayor of Bad Axe, the Ecorse River, a noted landscape architect and a model village, the Lincoln Park Subdivisions, and the Checker Cab Company.
The story of the SMCC begins with William A. DeSchaum (orig. name Schaum), an automotive design engineer, who started the DeSchaum Motor Company in Buffalo, N.Y. (1908-1910).
The company, noted for the DeSchaum’s distinctive high wheel rims, struggled in a market of better and cheaper cars; some would argue that DeSchaum was more a dreamer than a businessman. In early 1910 he whimsically re-dubbed the car the ‘Seven Little Buffaloes’, but the name change didn’t help business, and before long the fledgling company went under.
The same year, DeSchaum moved west to Detroit where he met up with Frank Farnham and William Lankin, a former mayor of Bad Axe. Lankin became president of the new enterprise, with DeSchaum as general manager and vice-president, Farnham as secretary and O. B. Bachman as treasurer; together they formed a new DeSchaum Motor Car Co. to produce DeSchaum’s roadster, the Suburban Limited. [See 1911 ad above] After producing just a handful of the prototype cars in two styles of roadster, the DeSchaum Motor Car Co. was reorganized in September 1911 with the same officers, into the Suburban Motor Car Co., now with ambitious plans for a new industrial community on acreage in nearby Ecorse. According to press announcements in the New York Times as well as many automotive journals at the time [incl. The Automobile; Motor; Motor World; Iron Trade; Iron Age; Automotive Industries; Motor Age; Accessories & Garage Journal], the new Suburban Motor Car Co. was designed to be an impressive complex of factory buildings with direct access, via the Ecorse River, to the Detroit River and to the railroad lines that ran through to the city from the south -- with an adjacent model ‘garden village’ where the employees of the SMCC would live. (note: the factory location in Detroit where the first Suburbans were manufactured is yet a mystery.)
At the same time, the officers separately formed the Suburban City Co. real estate firm, which shared SMCC’s Whitney Building offices downtown. The real estate enterprise was established to promote the planned development of the 240 acres at Ecorse into the model village to be known as Suburban City. The SMCC’s scheme for a ‘garden village’ was described in the trade journal, Parks and Cemeteries and Landscape Gardening, of November, 1912. This article also depicts a unique detailed drawing for the village rendered by noted landscape architect T. Glenn Phillips; the complex is shown straddling the Ecorse River with acreage extending south of St. Cosme Line (now Southfield Road) to the Emmons property and extending west to Fort Street.
Advert. listing for the 1911 Suburban Limited roadster Model A-6
Courtesy of National Automotive Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library
The property needed was subsequently bought up from the local farmers, which included the Goodells, LeBlancs, Bondies, Laffertys, and Cicottes. If you live in the area that was first developed by the Farnhams, you will have an abstract (deed) that shows your property history, and that the property passed through the hands of the Suburban City Co. in 1912; most of these were resold to Farnham Bros Real Estate which remained an active business in the downriver area for several years. It was the Farnham brothers who brought the words Lincoln Park here, and named their first subdivisions: “Lincoln Park No. 1 and No.2”. Both Frank and his brother Hiram actually settled in the area for a time. Farnham Street is named for them.
It was an ambitious development project to be sure, possibly the first of its kind in the nation. The fact that architect T. Glenn Phillips, a high ranking Detroit city official on the Planning commission, was involved in creating the design added significantly to the hoped-for distinction and success of their plans. [Phillips was also known for his landscaping of the Henry Ford home on Edison in Detroit, and later designing the campus of Michigan Agricultural College (MSU) in Lansing.] The SMCC was however, a failed enterprise almost from the start. With a lack of capital and accused of mismanagement, DeSchaum would step away from the Suburban project. Replacing him as president was auto executive, R.A. (Randall) Palmer, who was formerly general manager with the Cartercar Co. in Pontiac. It was Palmer who reorganized the SMCC as the Palmer Motor Car Company in late 1912. Production at the Ecorse plant had been limited (the total output of the SMCC was believed to be 25 cars) and ceased altogether in early 1913, without any further development of DeSchaum’s dream village.
In June of 1913 Palmer joined with the Partin Manufacturing Co. and moved his operations to Chicago, where they began producing the Partin-Palmer auto. The Partin-Palmer in turn became the Commonwealth in 1915 until 1922. Commonwealth had developed a Taxicab called the Mogul; after more reorganization, the Commonwealth evolved into the Checker Cab Co. for its fleet production. Checker moved to Kalamazoo in April of 1923. By 1924, Checker was producing 4,000 units a year.
Beyond the establishment of real estate firms, led by the Farnham brothers, and the subdividing of land here in Lincoln Park, there is little left of the dreams of these men. It’s interesting to imagine what this area might have become had the Suburban Motor Car Co. been a success. It was another few years before auto magnate Henry Ford arrived three miles down the road to begin building his mammoth Rouge plant, when our town would then swell with a population of auto employees of which William A. DeSchaum had only dreamed.
Note: There has been quite a bit of information gathered on this history and more to be discovered. We are keeping a notebook on the Suburban Motor Car Co. history and the research done so far and ongoing. The notebook will be available for public use here at the museum beginning in September. Included will be the only known photographs of the Suburban Limited taken on the streets of Detroit in 1911; the rendering of the Suburban City village plans by T. Glenn Phillips; and an interesting article that appeared in the November 7, 1957 Mellus Newspaper, by writer Al DuHadway, who interviewed some old timers that year who remembered the auto plant in Ecorse.
