Brewster & Co., Long Island City, New York, USA 1916 - 1925

Springfield Manufacturing Co., Springfield, Massachusetts, USA 1934 - 1936

Brewster & Co. were carriage makers long before the of the turn of the last century, but inevitably turned to custom-built bodies for the new automobiles. Their customers were wealthy, but conservative, Americans who wanted a discreet form of transport around town.

In order to satisfy this demanding but limited market they put a car of their own design into small scale production. They chose to build their own design of 4-cylinder Knight double sleeve valves engine, presumably because this design is very quiet in operation. The whole car was designed and built to a very exacting standard and was equally expensive and exclusive.

The chassis could be supplied with either left or right hand drive and the bodies were tall with obvious links to the carriage and reminiscent of the London taxicab. Leather was employed extensively and some cars were fitted with leather mudguards and bumpers. The radiator design was similar to the Delaunay-Belleville for which Brewster had the American franchise up to the First World War.

The Brewster company also built bodies on the Rolls-Royce chassis and by 1925 they were taken over by the Springfield Manufacturing Company who were the main coachbuilders for the American Rolls-Royce.

The Brewster name reappeared briefly in 1934 on a series of mass produced chassis with very odd styling which featured a tall "heart shaped" radiator grille falling to a point ahead of the front axle with three bar split bumper bar on either side. There were steeply fared front wings but from there back the bodies were old fashioned. The overall effect was decidedly odd.

Bibliography:

"Brewster: when modesty was the best policy", by Beverly Rae Kimes.

Automobile Quarterly, Vol. 7 No. 3