1907 Jewel Model E Stanhope. Oldest car at the Concorso, 2015. And a weird one. One cylinder, two stroke, producing 8 hp. Of course it only weighs 900 pounds. Colin Chapman would have approved.

Story and photos by Charley Seavey

For this gallery, which I named Age of Brass, I decided to present cars earlier than World War I, which was a fascinating time as at the beginning of the era, no one really knew what a car was supposed to look like. Of course, the older ones bear a close resemblance to horse drawn buggies as that was the experience. But by the end of WWI you could see the modern automobile starting to emerge. Ten more years, with the development of all-metal enclosed bodies we were pretty much there. While my real interest in cars doesn’t kick in until the 1930s it turned out I had a lot of pics of old timers floating around.