The Car
The General T is a 1911 Ford Model T, co-owned by Ben Mahoney and Kit Anderson. More than a century later it isn’t a static museum piece behind a rope — Ben runs it hard, out across the high meadows and reservoir roads of the Sierra, hand-cranked and wide open.
It’s a real period runner with no modern cheats, built around a story that happened on these same mountains in 1911. This is the car, in photographs and footage — the way it looks in the light, and the way it moves.
At a glance
The Hook · 1911
In the record winter of 1911, an engineer named Arthur Foote drove a brass-era Ford Model T over the snowbound Sierra to claim a silver cup nobody had won. That run is the whole reason The General T exists.
Read the storyHistorical photographs courtesy of the Donner Summit Historical Society and the Searls Historical Library, Nevada County Historical Society .
The Crew
The General T isn’t a museum piece — it’s built, run, and kept honest by three people. Ben drives it and shoots it, Kit chases the same 1911 obsession, and Chris built the car.
Driver · Co-owner
Ben co-owns The General T and runs it hard — out across the high meadows and reservoir roads of the Sierra, hand-cranked and wide open, a century-old Ford driven the way it was built to be driven. Most of the photography on this site is his.
Sidekick · Co-owner
Kit co-owns the car, shares the same fixation on the 1911 Silver Cup run, and built this site. When the General T is out running, he’s usually somewhere in the dust nearby.
The Builder · Oakland, California
Chris built The General T in Oakland, California, and sold Ben and Kit the fast 1911 engine out of his own car — the same engine he’d tuned for racing, now living in the General T. When they showed him the 1911 Silver Cup photographs and asked him to build that car, he was in. The car runs the way it does because of how he built it.
