Barn Find Hunter scours small-town Oklahoma and discovers dusty GM gold - Hagerty Media
Recently, Tom Cotter put a fresh spin on the Barn Find Hunter series by not just finding, but rescuing a Ford Country Squire wagon. The wagon got a remarkable refreshing to respectable condition, which is pretty amazing considering not long ago it was more or less rotting in a yard. Tom’s master plan from there is to pilot the reborn wagon on a road trip to hunt for cars, before finally handing off the wagon to some deserving young automotive restoration students at McPherson College, in Kansas. In his latest episode, Tom motors past Cadillac Ranch in North Texas and into Oklahoma, where he turns up a few classic Chevrolets—and a Pontiac.
If you haven’t watched the first two episodes in this series, it is worth catching up on the revival of the Country Squire, along with Tom’s first couple finds of the adventure, including a GTO Judge. Now Tom is primed to cover ground on his way to the annual C.A.R.S. Show at McPherson College, where he’ll hand the wagon’s keys to its young new owners. Of course, Tom can’t just simply put the shifter in drive and motor down the highway. It’s just not in his nature. He hunts out cars, even in the wide-open spaces that so many folks (incorrectly) refer to as fly over country.
After a quick pass by Cadillac Ranch in Texas, is isn’t long before Tom is scuttling around Guymon, Oklahoma, where a 1959 Chevrolet Impala catches his eye. So he knocks on the shop door to find out more.
“It had been in a field for 14 years, out in the wide open,” Roy Taylor says. “Then a friend called me and wanted to know if I wanted to buy it.”
And buy it, Roy did. Now he is waffling on whether he will re-power it with a modern Chevrolet V-8 or keep the rarer 348 mounted in the massive engine compartment. Roy’s other car has been with him much longer than the Impala. In the back of his shop hides a dusty 1964 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu sporting a factory four-speed and Positraction rear end. After looking around a bit more, Tom gets back on the road.
And then, just 10 minutes down the road, one of the shops that Tom had visited gives him a call and says, “I got this Pontiac in the back you might like. I had forgotten about it.” So back to the shop Tom goes, of course
Turns out it is a late-1940s Pontiac that sports a straight-eight engine. The body shows some damage from its almost 70 years of existence, but it also appears complete and quite savable—a point which Tom underscores by comparing the dusty Poncho to the wagon he left cooling in the parking lot outside the shop. Tom returns to the trail for a spell before finally calling it a day.
The next episode of Barn Find Hunter promises more finds and more stories from the road as Tom crosses into Kansas en route to the Country Squire wagon’s new home. Be sure to subscribe to Hagerty’s YouTube Channel to receive notifications when each video goes live.
