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Gray–Dort Motors

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 25, 2026
Entity authorityQ5598131 ↗
Source-derived summary

Gray-Dort Motors was a Canadian automobile manufacturing company in Chatham, Ontario, which operated from 1915 to 1925.

Formation

Gray-Dort Motors started as the carriage works of William Gray & Sons Company Ltd., founded in 1855 by William Gray. In the mid-1900s, William's son and president of the company, Robert Gray, began to build car bodies for the Ford factory in Walkerville, Ontario, until 1912.

In 1915, Robert Gray obtained the Canadian rights to manufacture the Dort automobile from manufacturer Josiah Dallas Dort, in Flint, Michigan. Later that year, Gray-Dort Motors Ltd. was formed. Gray-Dort produced two models in its first year of operation: the Model 4 roadster and the Model 5 touring car.

Throughout its lifetime, Gray-Dort manufactured around 26,000 automobiles. During this period, they also produced bodies for the locally built Chatham automobiles. Three body styles were offered: the tourer, coupe and the sedan.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gray–Dort Motors” is open-knowledge reference entry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gray, Dort and Motors, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1915, 1925, 1855, 1912—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1885-01-01. For this dossier, Gray, Dort and Motors is the immediate research focus.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5598131. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1925, 1855 and 1912.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Gray–Dort Motors” 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.