Rocket City Rewind: Before Toyota — The Car That Almost Put Huntsville on the Map

Long before Toyota and Mazda established manufacturing plants in Huntsville, the state’s first automaker was producing cars at Redstone Arsenal.

The Keller Motors Corporation (1947-1950), named after its president and former Studebaker executive George Keller, had designs on capturing an expanding market for station wagons as people began moving to the suburbs post-World War II with its cheaper compact version – the wood-bodied Super Chief. 

Keller boasted the company would churn out 72,000 vehicles a year and make Keller Motors and Huntsville the car-building capital of the South.

“Everybody was building big cars,’’ the late Hubert Mitchell, a Hartselle businessman/promoter who founded the company and served as executive vice president, told The Huntsville Times in 1976. “One thing Keller drilled into us was that it was impossible for the big companies to keep from doing anything else. One thing he said we had to guard against was letting the Kellers get bigger and longer.’’

He needn’t have worried.

A total of 18 Super Chiefs made it off the line, the company undone by a combination of inexperience, overambition and the death of Keller. Only four of the autos still exist, one of which is owned by Huntsville natives, brothers and Lee High School graduates Lance and Vance George.

Lance, whose day job is as a project manager for IT projects, is webmaster for Huntsville Rewound and administrator of the Huntsville Rewound page on Facebook, and also a certified antique and collectibles appraiser. He and his brother Vance, an engineering and operations manager for a NASA contractor, spent years searching for a Keller before finding one in West Tennessee. 

“We have no plans to sell,” Lance told the Huntsville Business Journal. “We feel it is a cool local heirloom.’’

Other Super Chiefs are owned by Sam and Sally Barnett of Morgan City and Buzz Howell of Cullman. Recently, a fourth one was found in a Pueblo, Colo., salvage yard.

The genesis of the Super Chief was in San Diego, where a woodie called the Bobbi-Kar was invented. Owners eventually moved their operation to Birmingham in 1946, where it went bankrupt, leading Mitchell to buy the assets for $85,000.

Since Keller had automobile experience, Mitchell preferred the company bear the former’s name. But Keller died of a heart attack in a New York hotel at age 56, causing a major financier to back out until another prominent name was found to front the company. No one was found.

“If I had it to do over again,’’ Mitchell told the magazine Special Interest Autos in 1975, “I’d have built the business and the advertising around the car, not around any one person.’’

Mitchell held on to one of the Super Chiefs until 1988, when he sold it to Howell.

“We have no special need for it,’’ Howell told The Times in 1988. “I have been through this. It’s history.’’