Old Car City U.S.A. Is Part Graveyard, Part Playground for Fans of Abandoned Classic Cars
This story originally ran in 2014 on Hot Rod. For more barn find and classic car content, check out Hot Rod Network.
You’ve probably seen images from this place before. Big finned Cadillacs sinking slowly in the loam, a 1967 GTO peering out from waist-high weeds, vines curling around the mirrors and in and out of hood scoops, pre-safety glass windshields starred and fogged from decades of quiet resting in the woods. There are more than six miles of trails in and around the Georgia forest land that houses these picturesque scenes of abandonment, and the owner of it all, Dean Lewis, knows exactly how striking it is.
There is a sign on the fence that reads “CARS, ART, NATURE, HISTORY.” That sums up Dean’s approach to his 34-acre vintage car scrapyard pretty well. Actually, calling it a scrapyard might lead to the wrong impression; maybe “adventureland” would be better. Dean calls it “Photographers Paradise,” and that works too, although you don’t have to be behind the lens to enjoy walking the wooded trails of Old Car City, USA. For a car junkie, it’s a bit like walking the Louvre, if that famous museum had left the Mona Lisa outside for 25 years.
The business started back in 1931, when Dean’s parents opened a small general store in White, Georgia, a tiny town only formed a few years earlier. The Lewis’ added a scrapyard business to the store, and Dean says his childhood was spent playing with cars in that junkyard. His folks had moved out of the junk business by the time Dean got interested in taking over the property in the 1970s, but there were still some ‘40s cars sitting around in the woods. Dean started buying cars from auctions and private parties and recycling yards. He expanded so much he had to buy more land to keep everything on. The area became a playground for Dean, his friends, his children, and his grandchildren. A creative group, they’d use scrap metal to build towers and airplanes and other oddities in and around the rusting frames of muscle cars and ‘50s classics. Eventually, the place became more of an art project than a working salvage yard, and that’s when Dean realized he could make more money charging admission like a theme park than parting out the displays.
Like all good art, Old Car City is not without controversy. Collectors hoping to score a bargain leave the place grumbling and dissatisfied. “Everything is for sale,” Dean told us, “But only at a price that makes it worth it for me. If I sell this, it’s gone. I don’t have it anymore. I can’t replace it.” The Internet seems split between people who think Dean owes something to the hobby to get these cars in the hands of people who will restore them, and those who think it’s cool just to be able to see a photogenic spot with so many incredible automobiles in one place. Patina hounds and Ruin Porn aficionados will have no complaints about the set-up.
We aren’t here to tell you how to feel, so we’ll just tell you how we felt walking through the abandoned cars and moss-covered engine blocks. It’s incredibly peaceful, a little sad, and very inspiring. A thick layer of pine needles cushions the well-maintained trails, and the light filters down soft and green through the trees. We went on a weekday and wandered for more than an hour without ever seeing another person, our only company the ghosts of the cars’ previous owners, and a brightly feathered bird that watched us suspiciously from his perch on the exposed valve train of a lichened small-block Chrysler. Dean says he’s heard reports of the occasional bear sighting, but the scariest creature we spotted was a spider the size of the previously mentioned small block making a web in the interior of a late 1960s station wagon.
