The Corbitt trucks are rolling in to town this weekend for the annual car show – not as many as rolled out of town during the vehicle maker’s heyday, but that’s ok with Ken Stegall.
He is one of the locals who helps keep the memory of the Corbitt truck alive and well, and he said if the weather’s nice, there could be a dozen or more vehicles on display during the Show, Shine, Shag and Dine event in downtown Henderson Saturday.
Take the 1926 fire truck, for example. It’s one of only six that the Corbitt Preservation Society knows about that rolled off the line here in Henderson. It originally was sold to a Washington, D.C. area hospital for the insane, Stegall said on Tuesday’s TownTalk.
“When we found it, it was in really bad shape,” he said. Untold hours of loving restoration went into giving it new life. “We’re going to have it there Saturday,” Stegall said.
He said he hopes the oldest running Corbitt vehicle will be on display, too. It’s locally owned, he said. There should be some farm tractors on display as well.
Not sure whether the big 6 by 6 military truck will make it, but Stegall said that’s the one that put Corbitt on the map.
The one that John Richard Hedgepeth has restored “is probably as good or better today than when it came out of the factory,” Stegall said. “That military truck is immaculate.” Corbitt in Henderson spit out 3,400 during 1939 and 1945. There were others that manufactured the vehicle, he noted, but they all used the Corbitt design.
Stegall welcomes any and all interested in volunteering with the museum or in other ways to join the preservation effort. Membership fees have been discontinued in favor of donations, he said, to encourage more people to join the likes of founders Charles Powell and the late Mac Renn to celebrate the Corbitt Trucking Co.
Before it was producing vehicles with gas-powered engines, Corbitt was producing horse-drawn buggies.
“They were making as many as 250 buggies a month” in Henderson, Stegall said. But finding one of those buggies has proven to be a challenge.
“Something we are desperately looking for is a Corbitt buggy,” he said. “That’s the thing we made the most of in this county,” he said.
Surely there’s a buggy out there somewhere with that iconic Corbitt tag under the chassis.
