History
A 1911 Model T, built around a 1911 story.
Ford built the Model T from 1908 to 1927 and sold more than fifteen million of them — the car that made the automobile ordinary. A 1911 example like this one is an early, brass-era T: brass radiator shell and lamps, wooden artillery wheels, a hand crank where a starter button would later go.
But Ben and Kit didn’t build a 1911 Model T because it was old. They built it because of what one 1911 Model T did, right here, the same year this car was made.
The Hook · 1911
This is why we had to build The General T.
In the spring of 1911, the Tahoe Tavern — a grand lakeside resort at Tahoe City — put up a silver trophy nearly three feet tall for the first person to drive a car from California, over the snowbound Sierra and Donner Summit, all the way to the Tavern. It was a publicity play to pull tourist traffic up the mountain. Nobody had done it.
1911 was a record winter — some forty feet of snow at Tamarack that March — and the route was buried. In June, Arthur B. Foote, an engineer from the North Star Mines in Grass Valley, set out anyway with a small crew in a brass-radiator 1911 Ford Model T.
It took them about nine days. They rigged a block and tackle to haul the car over the washed-out bridge at Cisco Grove, laid wooden boards and runners across the snowpack, and dragged the Ford over rock and snow down toward Donner Lake. Foote reached the Tavern around June 10 and claimed the cup — having pulled his cable off the washed-out bridge behind him so the cars chasing him couldn’t follow.
That’s the run Ben and Kit are obsessed with. A fast, rugged 1911 Model T that could be driven over anything — that’s the whole idea behind The General T. The history and the car are inseparable.
Historical photographs courtesy of the Donner Summit Historical Society and the Searls Historical Library, Nevada County Historical Society .
The Build
How our 1911 got made.
Ben and Kit went to Chris Helling, in Oakland, California, and asked him to build them a 1911 Model T. He told them he could — he had a fast 1911 engine in his own car — but that it wouldn’t be cheap. They said fine: they wanted it as fast as it could be, for off-road rally racing.
That stopped him. You don’t race these antiques off-road, he told them — some people do slow crawler trips, but racing a pre-war car over rough country is almost unheard of. Ben and Kit didn’t blink: if he couldn’t build it, they’d find someone who could. They wanted a Model T that would run like The General Lee.
Then they showed him the Silver Cup photographs — Foote’s Ford, dragged over the snow in 1911 — and asked if he could build that car. He looked at them and said, “Holy shit. This is incredible. I’m in.”
Chris built the car in Oakland and sold them the 1911 engine out of his own car — the same engine he’d tuned for racing — and it lives in The General T today. The name came in that moment: a Model T that runs like The General Lee. The General T.
“Holy shit. This is incredible. I’m in.”
The Car Today
No cheats. A real period runner.
The General T is almost entirely original. The only parts that aren’t are the wooden firewall, the rims, and the tires — everything else is the real thing, right down to the original hickory wheel spokes carrying new rims.
It’s period-correct with no modern shortcuts. The 50 mph on the flat and 62 mph on a 4% grade come from period tuning on Chris Helling’s 1911 engine, not from anything modern hidden under the body. It’s fast because of how it was built in its own era — not in spite of it.
In the Shop
Brought back from the frame up.
These are shots from the build: the bare chassis, the wood body fitted by hand, the brass and the original hickory spokes going back on.
