The Nova snowmobile and the Metro-Sled were no mere flukes. Decades before, Model T owners in the Snow Belt of North America, convinced their Ts could do anything, including milking the cows and animal husbandry, converted their rides into sleds. Fortunately, they had assistance from a kit developed by Virgil D. White, of West Ossipee, New Hampshire, a Ford garage owner who is thought to have coined the term snowmobile in 1913 when he patented his conversion kit, consisting of a pair of wooden skis in the front and a track at the rear driven by two of the Model T’s wheels (the front wheels moved to the back, where they served, essentially, as idler gears).
According to an article in a local newspaper, White eventually sold about 25,000 of the snowmobile conversion kits during the 1920s, enough of which survive today to warrant the Model T Snowmobile Club of America, a chapter of the Model T Ford Club of America. The kits proved popular among rural doctors and mailmen, but the end of the 1920s saw the demise of the Model T snowmobile and of White’s Snowmobile Company, Inc., as municipalities started to first pave their roads and then plow them.
I shot the T snowmobile above at Hershey this year, shortly before the Model T Snowmobile Club’s annual meet. This year’s Model T snowmobile show, by the way, will take place February 2-4 at Lake George, New York.
UPDATE: It looks like Coop wants one of these bad. He provides a link to one that was used as a postal delivery vehicle in Central Square, New York.
