International’s country car

There’s something intriguing about a vehicle that can provide a look into a time that vanished so long ago as to seem almost another world, one where “a car for country road use” made perfect sense.

The way it was in 1907

More than a century after International used that description in its catalog, a “country road” strikes most drivers as one that has two lanes, pleasant scenery and a speed limit lower than about 60 mph. No car in production today would be out of its element on such a road, but in 1907, some were better suited than others for the conditions — some might call them hazards — encountered upon leaving the boulevards of the city.

Horse-drawn vehicles had mostly worked well on such roads, and although probably wrote in 1904 that some who favored horses as personal transportation did so out of sentiment while others denied the self-propelled vehicles’ utility. The former, he believed, were likely to be dismissed.