Classic Car’s Conversation with Dayton Duncan

Author of Horatio’s Drive: American’s First Road Trip

Classic Car: How long did it take you to make the documentary once you got going?

Duncan: I started researching this off and on back in 1990 when I first came across a brief reference to the trip and became intrigued by it. I then began to convince my friend Ken Burns that this would be the makings of a great documentary film if we could find the critical mass of information needed.

Over the years, in between other projects, I found the hundred or so photographs Jackson had donated to the University of Vermont library, which is very important to our film making. I went to the Smithsonian and looked through all the newspaper clippings that Jackson had donated there. I searched and found other newspaper accounts in towns along Jackson’s route. I went to historical societies along the way and found more clippings and some photographs of Jackson. And finally, through my wife Dianne’s work, we located the granddaughter’s of Jackson, who had his letters. At that point we knew we had the makings of a film.

The real full-time effort on the project was about two and a half years, but preparatory work goes back to when I first discovered the seeds of the story thirteen years ago. Once we got into full gear we retraced Jackson’s route over six weeks. We would film the landscape that he went through and try to find roads in a similar state of disrepair to what he encountered in 1903. Using the pictures that he took we tried to find places and roads that looked like what he encountered. We put a camera man on the hood of our Chevy Suburban, strapped him in a harness, and tied him to the luggage mount. We drive down dusty roads, forded through a stream, and tried to get up a mountainside on a rocky road.

What we are trying to do with the film is put you in the front seat with Horatio Nelson Jackson. We want people to learn what it was like to be in this contraption going across the nation like Paul Revere saying, ‘the automobile is coming’, with people coming out in small towns to see a horseless carriage for the first time.

We also want them to see what American looked like in 1903. Here was the epitome of the 20th century traveling through what is essentially a 19th century American. When you look at all the photographs of the small towns, they are essentially unchanged from the middle of the 1800s even though it is 1903. His car is really representing the transformation that will come principally due to the automobile.

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