By David Fleet
Editor
Hadley-It’s been 102 years since the 1917 Ford Model T truck rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. The historic vehicle, one of just a few drivable

today, has been a fixture in the Hartwig family and a regular on Hadley Road for the Fourth of July parade.
This year local resident Robert Hartwig had some help with the old truck from grandson and third generation Hartwig 4-year-old Grant.
The truck was purchased by Roberts’ father, the late Gene Hartwig, in 1968 from the Copeman family, who lived near Oakwood and Herd roads in Brandon Township and were the original owners.
According to Ford Motor Company, in 1917 Henry Ford decided to get into the truck business after his customers were converting the popular Model T cars into vehicles for work. It paid off for Ford as about 40,000 Model Ts were built and shipped as a chassis only by 1918 at a cost of about $600.
The buyers supplied their own body and box for the truck—most of the time it was just constructed out of wood. The Copeman family purchased the Model T in 1917 brand new and used it to haul produce to the Eastern Market in Detroit from their Brandon Township farm.
The truck cab was actually purchased from a company that specialized in creating seats and floors of the vehicles. The simple wood cab has no door on the driver’s side and passengers slide over to go for a ride. The seat is a wood box with the transmission and exhaust exposed through the wooden floor. The roof is metal and there’s no glass for a windshield or side windows in the cab. There’s no muffler, the truck is powered by a 20 hp—flathead four-cylinder engine with an estimated top speed of about 40 mph.