LONE STAR SURVIVOR

After 35 years in a bone-dry bit of Texas, this beautiful ’57 Bel Air came to the UK, where it still retains an impressive mix of beauty and originality.

- Nigel Boothman

If you head north out of Austin, Texas and then hang a right on to Highway 79, you'll pass by the malls and the industrial lots and soon find yourself among table-flat farmland. After another few miles you'll be in Thrall. Not 'in thrall' to anyone or anything in particular, but in a tiny town of a few hundred people, a town named after a Methodist minister called Homer Spellman Thrall.

To be honest, you could almost roll through it without noticing. There are a few single-storey buildings in lots next to the highway, while rusting billboards offer you dentistry, bulldozer rental, or the chance to buy real estate from a smiling man in a cowboy hat. Vet this little place once supported a thriving Chevrolet dealership.

Krieg Brothers Chevrolet began trading from a corrugated tin shack with a gasoline pump outside, sometime between the wars. They clearly did well, and expanded into a long, low building on Highway 19 in the Fifties, possibly on the site of what is now a large Shell gas station. But if you double back after the gas station and turn south across the railroad on Main Street, then keep going to the corner of West Sheldon Avenue, there is the original tin shack still proudly labelled 'KRIEG BROS. CHEVROLET CO.' Check it out on Streetview.

The brothers must have been somewhere near their peak in 1957 as America rode the wave of its postwar boom, with customers in Williamson County buying plenty of pick-ups and even the odd Bel Air sedan, like this one. The car in our photos was manufactured in Kansas City on November 7, 1956, one of 499 cars churned out by the plant that day. It probably took a week or two to join a delivery of cars to Texas, then rode the 700 miles down to the Krieg Brothers' showroom.