Showing posts with label junkyard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label junkyard. Show all posts

Thursday, February 26, 2026

an interesting analysis of why decent seeming cars end up in junkyards

abandoned, results in no title or keys
250k miles, so no useful life left
since it's so high miles, other similar cars are move valuable, 
few people want OEM parts from a junkyard car, most buy the cheapest parts available online

Friday, January 02, 2026

Scrap and salvage depot, Butte, Mont. Oct 1942 Farm Security Administration, Russell Lee




https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4322370771328867&set=a.1541519756080663

1974, Cape Lookout, North Carolina Outer Banks. Just another example of rich people (state banking commission) with insider information scamming the govt for millions, 1.869 Million to be exact (in 1973 dollars)(lifelong friend of the state senator, chairman of the state senate committee of natural resources)


According to the article in the New York Times, locals would buy old, cheap cars, put oversized tires on them, and drive them on the islands because transporting four-wheel-drive vehicles was difficult and expensive.


There were no cops, and so there was no registration needed, so the vehicles were simply left when they died, becoming part of the landscape. 

I can verify from life experience that poor people do not pay to have dead cars taken to junkyards.

Karen Duggan, a park ranger assigned to Cape Lookout National Seashore. “I’ve even seen a picture of a Duesenberg out there. When the cars got stuck or no longer ran, they just left them there.”


the Historic Resource Study prepared in 2010 for the NPS confirms that a sizable tract of land near the lighthouse and the Cape was bought for speculative purposes by Charles Reeves, Jr., a local entrepreneur, who had plans for a marina, hotels and airfield

The Reeves House was used to house the film crew for the 1966 TV commercial for Chevrolet Impala



He laid out plans for a sizable second-home development and eventually sold his land for $6500 an acre, which doesn't sound like too bad a price but was probably pretty good for undeveloped rural property in this area. Before the park was created it probably was worth less than 1% of that price.

This rich landowner collected hundreds of junkyard cars, as a beach stabilizer (rip rap) to build up the dunes near his property. 

A lot of locals thought he was just making a show of wanting to develop his property to jack up the purchase price when the government bought it for the new National Seashore. 

In 1966 the Federal government established the Cape Lookout National Seashore, a fifty- fourmile stretch of the Outer Banks from Portsmouth Island to Cape Lookout.



https://www.flickr.com/photos/leonandloisphotos/6501573777/in/photostream

The 1,500- 3,500junked cars and the squatter shacks were just the latest residue of a long history of human activity on the islands that became the National Seashore.

A passenger ferry from Harker's Island visits Cape Lookout, but beyond that there are only a few small launches such as the one from Davis serving the area. 

All food, ice, tanks of propane gas, gasoline for beach vehicles and the vehicles themselves must come over in those launches, which can handle only one car at a time. For this reason, an incredible series of automobile graveyards exists on the Core Banks.



 Like nearly all national park areas in the eastern United States, CALO was carved out of privately owned lands rather than out of the comparatively trackless public domain on which most early western parks had been mapped. While most of the permanent residents of the islands had already left by the time the National Seashore was created, protracted land-acquisition conflicts with major property owners like the Core Banks Gun Club and with individuals who owned fishing or vacation cabins remind us that creating the national parks, especially in the east, superimposed Park Service-defined landscapes on vernacular ones.

https://www.nps.gov/calo/learn/management/upload/Coast-Guard-Station-Boathouse_hsr_508_reduce.pdf


This May 1971 article states that cars were abandoned here due to the 15 dollar each way fee by the ferry, and the car owners opted to abandon the cars and save 15 bucks

By 2013, the round trip ferry price was 80 dollars


https://boysontheedge.com/documents/






It's conjecture, but based on human nature, nothing out of the ordinary to say that the locally rich, making friends with the famous tourists, encouraged more rich out of towners to visit, and be guests (everyone loves to hang with a celebrity, Babe Ruth, Sam Snead, Bob Timberlake and many politicians were guests.) 




Franklin Roosevelt visited the Lodge (where the Mott family found rest and refuge from their strenuous European travels and social obligationsowned by Jordan Mott, son of the inventor of the anthracite coal stove, (one time Mayor of NYC) friend of the Czar of Russia and the German Kaiser, as well as Roosevelt, a titan of industry. https://cabinculturesobx.com/jordan-l-mott-iii-177/  (image above, FDR getting into an ox cart at Mott's Lodge)

and here's one factual story of how that came to be part of the Outer Banks:
Due East of Shell Point of Harkers Island, Edwin Binney built his camp. Binney, the inventor of crayons, developer of effective black-wall tires, won medals at the World’s Fair and was an avid sportsman. 

His daughter, Dorothy, flew with Amelia Earhart on several record-making flights. Their friendship severed as Earhart came to later marry Dorothy’s spouse.

Charles A. Seifert, owner of the Coca- Cola franchise in New Bern, N. C., bought two lots from the Cape Lookout Development Company in 1927 and is thought to have built the present house the following year. His brother David owned a Coca- Cola franchise in Roanoke, N. C., and he may also have had a role in the building’s development and use over the years. Historically, the house was painted red and white and almost from the beginning was given the moniker, “Coca- Cola House” or “Coca- Cola Building.”




So, that's how I spent my last 2 hours, unintentionally discovering more uber rich cabin culture, starting with a post on Rip Rap, the "Camp/Cabin culture" following recent posts on the Adirondack Cabins, and the Marquette private escape, and the Georgia quail hunting, ending with a 66 Impala commercial, and feeling like I made an episode of Connections with James Burke

https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2019/05/a-small-place-named-big-bay-that-henry.html

Monday, November 03, 2025

1960s photo of Bill's Junk Yard in Rhode Island.


Directly in front is a 1934 Lincoln V12 with the heads off, right is a 1931 Lincoln, in the back is a 1926 Brunn Lincoln turned into a truck with SHARON MOTOR SALES on the door, and back left is a 1936 Lincoln sedan under a 1936 Ford coupe.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

hard to believe that the mansions were so quickly abandoned, and reused by anyone that could figure out something to do with them, but, I never would have guessed that one would become a junkyard






I am not familiar with the the history of the industry of cotton and tobaaco, but I guess it was predicated on slave labor, and no one had a clue how to farm in the south to grow vegetable crops, like everyone everywhere else on the planet, to keep plantations in business with farming instead of bankrupt without slave labor. Or corn, wheat, alfalfa, etc

Then again, this photo is in 1936, after the great depression, and about 50 years after the civil war, this Antebellum mansion/plantation could have failed and been abandoned for other reasons


the same place in 2011:


It was built in 1837 on a 350-acre plantation, with the columns and Italianate tower added just before the Civil War. Dr. Drish died there in 1867, his wife Sarah in 1884. 
It was the Jemison School from 1906 to 1925. After its time as an auto parts warehouse and Walker Evans's visit, it was purchased by Southside Baptist Church, which built a brick sanctuary on one side.

 Threatened with demolition, it was leased to the Heritage Commission of Tuscaloosa County in 1994, and after designation as a "place in peril," acquired by the Tuscaloosa Preservation Society in 2007. It was finally renovated starting in 2012 and opened in 2016 as a venue for weddings and other special events.