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Hibbard & Darrin

organization

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 9, 2024
Entity authorityQ5750612 ↗
Source-derived summary

Carrosserie Hibbard et Darrin was a French coachbuilder located 12 Rue de Berri in Paris, just off the Champs-Élysées. Owned by two Americans, Hibbard and Darrin, it built bodies for various luxury car chassis, including Rolls-Royce, Duesenberg and Minerva.

Hibbard and Dietrich LeBaron

Two American designers, Thomas L. Hibbard (1898-1982) and Raymond H. Dietrich, had met while working for Brewster. Tired of the corporate environment, they started freelance work in their spare time. When William H Brewster discovered this, he fired Dietrich. Hibbard left too. They formed the new company LeBaron after a family friend. LeBaron did not build car bodies, it sold car designs.

Hibbard et Darrin

Fellow designer Howard "Dutch" Darrin (1897-1982) met Tom Hibbard in 1923, who had had left LeBaron, and they founded the company Hibbard & Darrin. The company designed innovative styled bodies for many of Europe's most prestigious car makers but the partnership ended in 1931 when Hibbard returned to the USA to take up a position in General Motors' design department.

Editorial summary

“Hibbard & Darrin” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hibbard, Darrin and organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA strong contextual entry point for chronology, institutions and public events when official records are distinguished from later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1898, 1982, 1897, 1923—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1923. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Hibbard, Darrin and organization.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Hibbard & Darrin” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Hibbard, Darrin and organization provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5750612. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1982, 1897 and 1923.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. 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.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hibbard & Darrin”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hibbard & Darrin primary sources, Hibbard & Darrin archive and Hibbard research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Hibbard & Darrin”?
  2. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Hibbard & Darrin” 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.