Barn Find Sketches Unlock Hidden Chapter in GM Design History

Nick Cavanaugh @Car_Sick_Nick
Sep 4
2 min read

Lost for 80 Years, Sketches Reveal the Birth of Modern Automotive Styling

It’s amazing what you can find in a barn—sometimes, it’s not rusty tractor parts, but a time capsule of automotive history.

In 2024, Josh Quick headed to a farm estate sale in Conesus, New York, hunting for antique tractor parts. He thought he scored big when the seller offered the whole pile for two cases of Busch Light. But tucked among the parts was something far more valuable: a dusty binder filled with pencil sketches of futuristic cars.

“I flipped it open, saw the first picture, and thought, ‘That’s cool,’” Quick recalls. The seller had never seen the binder before and told him to take it. Quick tossed it in his truck and forgot about it for days—more excited about tractor parts than old drawings.

Curiosity eventually won. Inside were nearly 80 pages of hand-drawn visions of Buicks from the summer of 1940—designs for the model year 1942 that never made production. These weren’t just doodles. They were the work of students at the Detroit Institute of Automobile Styling (DIAS), a GM-operated school founded by legendary designer Harley Earl to train the next generation of automotive visionaries.

And what a roster of talent. Among the signatures: Ned Nickles, who later styled the iconic 1963 Buick Riviera; Ed Glowacke, Cadillac’s tail-fin maestro of the 1950s; and Clare MacKichan, the mind behind Chevy’s beloved ’55-’57 sedans and the first Corvette. Even future stars from rival brands were represented—Joe Oros, designer of the original Ford Mustang; Gene Bordinat, Ford VP; and Elwood Engel, who became Chrysler’s design chief.

“These guys designed every single important car in Detroit from 1952 to 1974,” Quick says.

The sketches are stunning—some realistic, dripping with Art Deco elegance, others wildly futuristic, complete with chrome-laden speedsters and soaring airplanes in the background. They capture a moment when car design was pure imagination, before the constraints of production reality.

The mystery? How did this binder travel from a Detroit classroom to a barn in the Finger Lakes? The farm’s late owner was a car enthusiast, but had no known ties to GM. Even stranger, the drawings survived in pristine condition while everything else in the barn was chewed up by mice. “They ate everything else, but they didn’t eat that book,” Quick laughs.

Recognizing its significance, Quick contacted GM. The binder now resides at GM Design headquarters in Warren, Michigan, digitized and preserved alongside Harley Earl’s archives—a priceless artifact of the era that birthed modern automotive styling.

For GM historian Christo Datini, the find underscores GM’s role as the cradle of car design. “General Motors Design has always been a training ground,” he says. “You can trace that story from Harley Earl in 1927 to today’s programs shaping the next generation.”

From a barn in upstate New York to the halls of GM Design, this forgotten binder reminds us that history has a way of hiding in the most unexpected places.