Brush Motor Car Company
company
Brush Motor Car Company (1907-1909), later the Brush Runabout Company (1909-1913), was based in Highland Park, Michigan.
History
The company was founded by Alanson Partridge Brush (February 10, 1878, Michigan – March 6, 1952, Michigan). He was a self-taught prolific designer, working with Henry Leland at Oldsmobile, and went on to help design the original one-cylinder Cadillac engine. Although there were many makes of small runabouts of similar size and one to four cylinders at this time (before the Model T Ford dominated the low-price market), the Brush has many unusual design details showing the inventiveness of its creator. The Brush Runabout Company, along with Maxwell-Briscoe, Stoddard-Dayton, and others formed Benjamin Briscoe's United States Motor Company(USMC) from 1910, ending when that company failed in 1913. Runabouts, in general, fell out of vogue quickly, partly due to the lack of protection from the weather.
After Brush and the other companies of the USMC folded into Maxwell Motor Company, President Walter Flanders wrote in 1913 document "Why We Did Not Use All Our Plants", the Brush factory in Detroit (along with the Flanders and Sampson Plants) were to remain open and running as factories. The modern successor is Stellantis North America/Chrysler.
Design
Brush
Touted as the "Everyman's Car", Brush designed a light car with a wooden chassis (wooden rails and iron cross-members), friction drive transmission and "underslung" coil springs in tension instead of compression on both sides of each axle. Two gas-powered headlamps provided light, along with a gas-powered light in the rear.
The public source identifies “Brush Motor Car Company” as company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Brush, Motor and Company.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Brush Motor Car Company”, the useful work is to connect “company” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q994313. VIAF identifies the subject as 148160250. The Library of Congress control number is no2010029428. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1907, 1909, 1913 and 1878.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Brush Motor Car Company”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Brush Motor Car Company primary sources, Brush Motor Car Company archive and Brush research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Brush Motor Car Company”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Brush Motor Car Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.