The Winton Motor Carriage Company

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Alexander Winton at the tiller of the Winton Bullet, 1903. Cleveland Plain Dealer, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1903 a doctor bought a used car on a fifty-dollar bet and drove it from San Francisco to New York, because nobody had done it yet. Horatio Nelson Jackson had no route, since there were no roads worth the name. With a mechanic named Sewall Crocker he followed rivers, railroad tracks, sheep trails and dirt back roads, hoisting the car over rock where it would not drive. It took sixty-three days and twelve and a half hours, and it was the first time anyone crossed the United States in an automobile. That car is in the Smithsonian now. It was a Winton, built in Cleveland by a Scottish immigrant who had started out making bicycles. Alexander Winton sold more than a hundred cars in 1899, which made him the largest builder of gasoline automobiles in America. He also talked himself out of a fortune. When a customer named James Ward Packard complained about his Winton, Winton is said to have told him to go and build a better one himself. Packard did exactly that. Winton stopped making cars in February 1924, though the engine business outlived it and ended up inside General Motors, powering diesel locomotives and Navy submarines. If you know a Winton — or a Packard, or a story from either works — add it below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.