This is perhaps
one of the best available descriptions of the tools, materials, technology,
and process of wagon-making in the US during the late pre-automotive
period. The featured centerpiece of this book is a masters thesis
completed in 1968 by Kube. This thesis describes the content, structure,
and functioning of the Gruber Wagon Works as that business existed
in the middle part of the 20th century – a rare late-surviving representative
of an industry that had, at one time, been essential to the transportation
needs of the agrarian and early industrial national economy.
Contributions
by Ray and Wegener provide an introduction to the significance of
the Kube thesis, a brief history of wagon-making in the United States,
a review of the relocation and management of the Gruber Wagon Works
as an interpretive center during and after the mid-1970s, a compilation
of surviving production records of the Gruber Works, and a biographical
sketch of Paul Kube.
