The Birney Vanishes

Thanks to Olin Anderson and Wesley Paulson for bringing to my attention an online post stating that two streetcars were auctioned off in 2019 by Daniel Boone Village in Hillsborough, NC, and may have been sold to a mystery buyer in South Dakota. "What now," you ask?

One of the two streetcars I knew about: it's the body of a Birney, shown here in a James Hinman photo from about a decade ago, and for some time it was displayed under this roof on the grounds of Daniel Boone Village, a kind of touristy shopping area (Google Street View). My best guess is that it may have been a Raleigh car, simply because the closest cities to run Birneys were Raleigh and Greensborough and the latter's cars weren't of this design. But that's just a guess - the car is a very standard, run-of-the-mill Birney without much in the way of distinguishing features, so I never added it to the PNAERC list because I couldn't reliably identify it. It's been sitting on my "mystery cars" list along with an assortment of other oddities, rumors, and unidentifiable wrecks. And now, apparently, it has vanished into the ether. If anyone has any information on the car - where it went, and especially where it may have come from originally - I'd certainly be interested.

There was apparently also a second car in Hillsborough, noted as having been the car from "Meet Me in St. Louis" and stored inside. I haven't been able to find any photos of it, but I'm curious whether it's an actual streetcar or just a movie prop. It was auctioned off in 2019, too, so its whereabouts are equally mysterious.