Michigan's First Car Wasn’t a Ford

Memphis, Mich. — There isn’t much happening in the small town of Memphis, these days. There’s a gas station, police and fire stations, and a weed dispensary. The winery on the edge of the downtown looks really nice and has great reviews to prove it.

In the 1880s, however, Memphis was briefly known for something even more famous—the first self-propelled vehicle in Michigan, at one point thought to be the first in the country.

Thomas Clegg and his father, an Englishman named John, reportedly built Michigan’s first motor vehicle in their Memphis machine shop in 1884. Powered by a single-cylinder steam engine, with canned coal for fuel, “the Thing” sat four people and cruised along huffing and puffing.

The real lineage, of course, dates back to old England. John was trained as a machinist there, at the height of England’s burgeoning steam train industry. In essence, the Thing was just a miniature steam train on four wheels, with no tracks to guide it.

It was never planned as a product. It was the hobby project of two curious machinists, tinkering with steam engines in their shop and wondering, what if we just put four wheels on this thing and drove it down the road?

As the story goes, the two men assembled their vehicle and drove it along the 14-mile dirt road over to Emmett and back dozens of times over the course of the summer. They put about 500 miles on the Thing, and after they had their fun, dismantled it and sold the engine to a local creamery.

The irony is, despite being Michigan’s first motor vehicle, the Thing wasn’t even considered notable enough for a proper name. It became known as the Thing, presumably, because the Clegg’s didn’t even name it. It was simply the thing they were working on.

No photographs were taken of it, and outside their local rural crowd in Memphis, few people ever heard of it. It wasn’t until automotive historians in the 1930s discovered Clegg, and sourced a few anecdotes from him, that the Thing became more widely known.

Even in Memphis today, there isn’t much to commemorate the Thing. Just a roadside historical marker and a folk mural painted down the street from it, depicting the old Clegg Foundry and the curious-looking horseless carriage.

This isn’t like Ford or Oldsmobile, historic Michigan companies which developed and sold the first commercially available automobiles, and now maintain museums with vehicular legacies over a century old.

This was just two guys, a father and son, in a garage, tinkering. A common sight in Michigan to this day, long known as a state for crazy builders and hobbyists pushing the boundaries of their equipment.

If anything, the Thing deserves recognition for that. Not for being the first vehicle in Michigan, and certainly not for being the best. But for representing the fundamental spirit of a state that encourages similar ingenuity today.

For all we know, a few guys in a garage somewhere in Michigan are tinkering with the next big thing right now, and no one even knows it.