OMAHA

Omaha Motor Car Co. (1912-1913)
Omaha, Nebraska

This is an Omaha radiator script (1912-1913)   mjs
Size: 302mm wide

David W. Henry was the designer of the Omaha motor car. He had wide experience in the automobile industry having worked with the Columbia Automobile Company for more than ten years and more recently with the Colby Motor Car Company. He had also designed his own Henry automobile in Muskegon in Michigan two years earlier.

Henry managed to secure the financial support of Omaha businessmen and established the Omaha Motor Car Company in February 1912. Production of the Omaha began in April 1912 in the Stroud Machine Company workshop, where a space was rented until the Omaha Motor Car Company factory was ready in 1913.

The Omaha 30 was a 30 hp four-cylinder five-passenger touring car with shaft drive and an underslung frame and was offered for sale at $1250. Henry had planned to build 1,000 cars in the first year but the reality was much lower and only a very few Omaha cars were actually built. 

By July 1912, there was trouble between Henry and members of the Board of Directors. Then in March 1913, a tornado swept through Omaha causing much devastation, which resulted in damage to the economies of Nebraska and Iowa, which is likely to have impacted badly on sales of the Omaha 30. The Omaha Motor Car Company declared bankruptcy in October 1913. The assets of the company included six finished Omaha cars and several unfinished cars.

Emblem

The only photos of the Omaha 30 that I have seen are from Omaha Motor Car Company advertisements. These advertising photos do not show a frontal view of the radiator but it appears that the Omaha 30 did not carry an emblem on the top of the radiator, see example shown below:

Omaha 30 advertisement (1913)   ma

Omaha 30 close up showing no radiator emblem (1913)

However, the Omaha 30 apparently displayed the "Omaha" name on a metal script attached to the radiator core, see example shown above at the top of this post. Original Omaha radiator scripts are very rare.

If you have more details of Omaha motor car emblems, please let me know in order to update this post.