The Franklin Automobile Company

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

A 1922 Franklin, air-cooled, kept at a specialty garage in Missoula, Montana, photographed in 2022. Carol M. Highsmith Archive. Library of Congress.

For thirty-two years, a factory on Syracuse's west side built cars with no radiator. Franklin's engines were air-cooled — no water, no pump, nothing to freeze or boil — at a time when every serious rival had settled on water cooling. The cars were framed in wood and skinned in aluminium, and for a while the company was the largest user of aluminium in the world. In 1906 a Franklin driven by L. L. Whitman crossed the continent from New York to San Francisco in fifteen days, two hours and fifteen minutes, a record. What killed Franklin was not bad engineering. It was good engineering. The company ran what it called a craft shop, making its own components rather than buying them in, and the margins were thin enough that shareholders saw a dividend exactly once, in 1925. It overbuilt in 1929, discounted hard to clear the stock, and left its dealers weak just as the Depression arrived. In 1932 it launched a hundred-and-fifty horsepower twelve-cylinder car. In April 1934 it went bankrupt. Franklin employed thousands of people in Syracuse. Someone in your family may have been one of them. If you know a Franklin story — a car, a job, a name — add it below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.