Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine Issue 215 | Page 63

steel on the back of the body and to the
thin steel in the fenders. This took a very
good welder who know what he was doing in order to avoid burning through the
thin sheet metal in the fenders and body.
The inner parts of the front fenders have
been cut and extended with sheet metal
triangles in order to raise them up to clear
the large front tires. The backs of the rear
fenders have been modified in a similar
way by opening them up to a larger diameter. The insides of the rear fenders were
torch welded directly to the body quarter
panels above the rear wheel wells.
This car was originally painted dark
blue and was repainted a medium blue
probably sometime after this car was converted for rural mail delivery. The top is
not the original top and and was replaced
sometime before 1940. The second and
third photos of this listing show Milton Hill
with this car. A notation on the back of one
of the photos indicate that this conversion
was done in 1936. If you look closely, you
can see that the top in the third photo
matches the top in the current photos.
How many Model A’s have you seen that
still have a 75 year old or older convertible
top still intact?
Who ever installed the custom replacement top did not tailor it properly to let
the top fold down. The top should have
had a split in it about 3 inches long directly
behind the bottom of the back of the side
window. I suspect that whoever had the
original top replaced was more concerned
with keeping typical eastern Montana
winter weather out than enjoying fresh air
on the nicer winter days. One needs to
remember that this car was only used to
deliver mail during bad weather conditions.
Whoever used it back in the 30’s, 40’s and
early 50’s no doubt had a more modern
and easier to use vehicle to deliver mail
with most of the time.
The front seat upholstery is the original
tan whip cord and is in tough shape. The
rumble seat back rest is the original black
artificial leather material and is in amazingly
nice original condition. Milton Hill probably
removed the rumble seat cushions so he
could haul more packages and groceries

for his customers in that rear deck area.
It is an absolute miracle that the original
rumble seat back rest is still with this car.
The rumble seat bottom cushion is smaller
than the original and is from another car of
this era but it fits fairly well and lets people
enjoy riding high in the rumble seat of this
gem.
Some Early History
Since I first listed this car here on eBay, I
spent many hours over a several day period
a few months ago calling people around
Lindsay and Bloomfield in north eastern
Montana. I have learned a lot of very important history relating to this car and I
want to share that history with you here.
I eventually learned that Milton J. Hill
of Bloomfield Montana used it to deliver
rural mail before Leonard Quammen even
owned it. The old Montana title for this car
has the number 254564 and was issued
on 10/22/41 to Leonard J Quammen of
Lindsay Montana. This title listed a $200 lien
if favor of Lester H. Hill who was the administrator of the estate of his father Milton J.
Hill. The lien was paid off a bit over a year
later on 11/30/42 so Lester H. Hilled signed
the lien release at about that time. The fact
that this title had a $200 lien on it in 1941
sparked my interest to dig deeper into the
history of this very special mail car. Why
would anyone have a $200 lien on a 11

year old Model A Ford unless it was worth
a lot more than a normal Model A for some
special reason?
After making some more calls to the
area around Bloomfield Montana and talking with several residents there, I located
Lester H. Hill’s daughter Ardice who would
be Milton J. Hill’s granddaughter. She was
born in 1934 and barely remembered her
father and grandfather using this car to deliver rural mail there. She would only have
been 6 years old when her father Lester
Hill sold this car to Leonard Quammen of
Lindsay Montana. She informed me that
there was an early photo of this car in the
book “Our Times, Our Lives” A History Of
Dawson County. I had already found a copy
of that book here on eBay so I opened it up
to the history of Milton J. Hill’s family and
found that priceless bit of this car’s history.
That photo was taken some time between
1936 and 1940 and is shown as the second
photo of this listing.
That photo is not of great quality so I
had my friend enhance it as much as possible using her Photoshop program. That
photo shows Milton J. Hill leaning of the
left front fender of this very car that happens to have the driver’s door open for
some reason. The caption under the photo

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