Spinning Tar Heel wheels; North Carolina's pioneer automakers cranked up early but they didn't get very far.

• Author: Ireland, Robert

SPINNING TAR HEEL WHEELS

The man who built the first horseless carriage in North Carolina had traveling in his name and on his mind. Peregrine Cook was so determined to answer the call of the open road that in 1880 he mortgaged his cotton crop for $200, sent away for an 8-horse-power steam engine and boiler from Hamlin and Sons Co. of Greenville, Pa., and went to work.

Even 20 years later, when it was estimated that one in every 9,500 Americans owned a car, only about 50 existed in North Carolina. Most had been purchased elsewhere, in cities such as Baltimore and Washington. But a few owned their existence to the initiative and inventiveness of a handful of inspired Tar Heel tinkerers. Many of these brash young men were bicycle repairmen, buggy makers or mechanics.

Peregrine Cook, who lived in the Sampson county town of Turkey, had been a wheelwright, carpenter and blacksmith, and he was noted for designing an improved plow. When he turned his attention to building his automobile, he had begun working on a sawmill, which was also to be powered by a steam engine.

There are no photographs of Cook's car, and the only physical evidence left is its boiler and a crude crankshaft he fashioned from a wagon axle, both in the private museum of Sampson County historian Claude Moore. But there are plenty of stories about it. According to one late, Cook lost control of his steamer, plowing into a row of beehives. Disgusted, he supposedly abandoned the car on the spot.

It had run for at least a decade, though. The inventor's grandson, L.V. Cook, who was born in 1989, remembered seeing the old vehicle chugging along -- in a cloud of steam. Years later, after its ignominious encounter with the bees, it was dismantled and the boiler put to work as a tank for a solar-heated shower.

Perhaps the state's best-known auto-building effort came nearly two decades later. New Bern buggy maker Gilbert S. Waters, 30, took a trip to Baltimore in 1899 and was so captivated by the steamers he had seen chugging along the streets that he decided to build his own. Completed in 1900, the result was a high-wheeled, chain-driven carriage. Waters called it the "buggymobile."

It had a 5-horsepower gasoline engine and reached 12 mph on its maiden voyage down Main Street.

Encouraged by the buggymobile's performance, Waters tried to persuade his father, who owned the G.H. Waters Buggy and Carriage factory, to invest in its production. But the elder Waters was unmoved. So too was a...