Spotlight on Collections - The James P. Kiely Collection

hank you to Robert Schoen (seen on the ladder) for photographing this collection.

At one time Amesbury’s Walker Body Company made some pretty fancy automobile bodies. James P. Kiely worked for Walker from 1910 to 1935 and amassed a collection of drawings and plans detailing auto body making in Amesbury, which was donated to the Amesbury Carriage Museum by Sandy Dodier.

“Some of these drawings are quite beautiful,” said ACM volunteer Joyann Reynolds, chair of the ACM Collections Committee, “beautiful early hand drawings of automobiles. We also have the actual size blueprints, which are called line drawings, of automobile bodies from the 1930s and 1940s."

This collection has 12 line drawings, some are as large as 15-feet long. The collection also contains drawings of carriage bodies and even letters to potential buyers with costs for custom carriages. All of them have been scanned in and added to our digital archive. The collection consists of over 40 items related to the carriage and auto body building industry.

Born in Scotland, George T. Walker Sr. came to the United States in 1870, and after several years working in the Amesbury carriage industry he founded the Walker Body Company in 1918, with two plants in Amesbury and one in Merrimac.

Walker produced bodies for several automakers, including familiar names such as Buick, Packard, Reo, and Studebaker, but Walker was most closely associated with the H.H. Franklin Mfg. Co. of Syracuse, New York. “These blueprints are from the Franklin Automobile Co. of Syracuse NY,” Reynolds said.

From 1910 through 1932, Franklin was Walker’s largest customer and Walker was Franklin's principal supplier of coachwork including Franklin’s Victoria coupe, sport sedan, and Tandem sedan, all designed by Raymond H. Dietrich (1894–1980) one of the great automobile designers of the classic era.

"Construction used by Walker followed methods practiced by the finest custom builders,” Dietrich wrote. “When designing for Franklin, I was always sure the construction - and workmanship - would meet the same high standards established by the custom coach builders."

You can see a sampling of the Kiely Collection here.

For information about the collection, please contact: collections@amesburycarriagemuseum.org