Marysville and the Wills Sainte Claire

Marysville owes its shape to a car most people have never heard of. The man who built it was once Henry Ford’s right hand: C. Harold Wills, the metallurgist who developed the tough, light steel that made the Model T strong. When Wills left Ford in 1919, he walked away with a fortune, and he spent it on a dream.

He bought up a sleepy riverside hamlet of about two hundred people, re-laid the streets, and built solid homes for the workers he was about to hire, many of which are still lived in today. Then he started building his car: the Wills Sainte Claire, named partly for himself and partly for the river out front. It rolled out in 1921 and it was a marvel for its day, with an overhead-cam V-8 engine, the first back-up light on any car, and a body of strong, lightweight molybdenum steel. On the radiator perched a flying gray goose, because Wills admired the Canada goose as the world’s great traveler.

The trouble was that Wills was a perfectionist, and perfection is expensive. The company lasted only a handful of years before it closed in the mid-1920s, and surviving Wills Sainte Claires are now rare and prized by collectors. You can see a roomful of them, the largest collection anywhere, at the Wills Sainte Claire Auto Museum in town. You’ll find visiting hours at willsautomuseum.com.