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Murray Motor Car Company

American automobile manufactureer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 14, 2025
Entity authorityQ58158922 ↗
Source-derived summary

Murray Motor Car Company was an American automobile manufacturer based in Pennsylvania.

Company history

William N. Murray, who worked for a Packard distributor, founded the company in Pittsburgh in 1916. His goal was to create powerful, distinctive "prestige" cars. Murray was an automotive enthusiast and was said to have driven the first motorized vehicle, a De Dion-Bouton tricycle, on the streets of Pittsburgh. The company was located at 3727 Webster Avenue in Pittsburgh with the manufacturing facility at 3700 Grand Boulevard. The same year, automobile production began. In December 1916, the first vehicles were on display at the New York Show. Production ended in 1920. In 1917 James Radcliffe Murray, president of the company's other office in Baltimore was killed in an automobile accident while test driving a new car. The company made 269 vehicles in total: 121 vehicles in 1917; 87 in 1918; and 61 in 1919.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Murray Motor Car Company” is american automobile manufactureer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Murray, Motor and Company, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1916, 1920, 1917, 1918—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1916. For this dossier, Murray, Motor and Company is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american automobile manufactureer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q58158922. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1920, 1917 and 1918.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. 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

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Murray Motor Car Company”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Murray Motor Car Company primary sources, Murray Motor Car Company archive and Murray 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 “Murray Motor Car Company”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Murray 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.