The story of the first man to drive cross America presented during Annual A Classic Car Show on Saturday, July 26, 2025
The National Packard Museum will present “The Adventures of Tom Fetch” on Saturday, July 26, 2025. This entertaining history program is open to the public and free with paid admission to the museum. The program begins promptly at 10:00 AM.
E. T. “Tom” Fetch, the first person to drive across America in an automobile, was born in Jefferson, Ohio in 1872. His father S.R. Fetch owned a machine shop in which he helped build a steam wagon. Tom’s father was also a competitive high-wheel bicycle racer. Taking up that sport at a young age, Tom possessed the competitive nature and discipline of a professional athlete. Coupled with his natural mechanical aptitude and the knowledge and experience gained by working in his father’s machine shop, Tom was destined for fame in the earliest days of motor sports, when endurance, rather than speed, was often the goal.
Automotive pioneer James Ward Packard and his brother William Doud Packard first hired Tom Fetch to work at their incandescent lamp factory in Warren, Ohio in 1892. A year later they sent Tom home to start up and run their Jefferson Electric Light Co. plant. He remained there until 1900, when the Packard brothers recalled him to Warren to work at their new automobile company. After learning to drive on the first Packard built, “Old No. 1,” Tom became one of the company’s test drivers.
In 1901, Tom Fetch was part of the Packard team that competed in a highly publicized endurance run from New York to Buffalo that was halted in Rochester on account of President McKinley’s death. Two years later, Packard Motor Car Co. officials assigned Tom with an audacious task that no man had ever accomplished: driving an automobile across the entire width of the North American continent.
Up to the challenge, Tom Fetch, with automotive journalist Marius “Chris” Krarup as his passenger, departed San Franscisco on June 7, 1903, in a single cylinder Packard Model F, christened “Old Pacific.” After a grueling 63-day journey across mountains, deserts, and water-logged prairies, Fetch arrived triumphantly in New York City to a hero’s welcome, and his place in automotive history, on August 21, 1903.
Apart from a brief stint with the Stearns Auto Company in Cleveland, Fetch worked for the Packard Motor Car Co. until 1922, when he moved home to Jefferson, where he sold automobiles and managed the water works.
In 1943, the Packard Motor Car Company honored Fetch at a reception commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Old Pacific’s Transcontinental Run. Packard Vice-President Jesse G. Vincent lauded Fetch, stating “your trail-blazing trip not only helped prove the motor car as a vehicle of real utility, but set the stage for later engineering progress in the automotive industry. You can rightfully be proud of these contributions which we in the Packard Engineering Department gratefully acknowledge.” Tom Fetch died of a heart attack a few months later in March 1944.
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