Butler's Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival celebrates 75 years history
The first vehicle that is now popularly known as the jeep rolled off the production line of the American Bantam Car company in Butler 75 years ago this year. None of the originals exist, but Duncan Rolls of Longview, Texas, built a re-creation of the Bantam Reconnaissance Car, taking four years and more than 3,500 hours of his time.
Rolls will drive his re-creation of that 1940 vehicle in the fifth-annual Butler Jeep Heritage Festival parade at 2:30 p.m. June 12 from Butler County Community College to downtown Butler.
In addition to the parade, the festival includes plenty of other jeep-related activities at Coopers Lake Campground in Slippery Rock, including competitions, trail rides, how-to clinics and speakers on the history of the jeep. A Little Jeepers Playground will entertain children.
Other events at Coopers Lake include On-site Trails, Moraine Trail Ride, Mystery Road Rally, Jeep Team Challenge, Glacial Interpretive Driving Tour and Historic Travels Tour. There will be speakers talking about jeep history throughout each day in the History Exhibit Building.
The reason Rolls devoted four years and $80,000 of his money to re-creating the so-called pilot jeep is “there is a lot of propaganda saying the first jeep was made in 1941 by Willys,” the Willys-Overland Motors company that edged out Bantam for mass-producing the vehicle, Rolls says from his Texas home.
“The myth is Willys invented the jeep.”
But Rolls, a student of jeep history, knows better: the original jeep was made by the Butler company that went out of business in 1956.
Reps of other car companies were watching when the original jeep was unveiled as a possible World War II vehicle, Rolls says.
“There's no way the Willys model was a better vehicle than the Bantam,” he says. “Today, you could imagine the lawsuit,” but at the time, manufacturers were more concerned with winning the war, Rolls says.
He will be one of many owners the vehicle in the parade.
“We are leading the parade with one jeep representing each of the 75 years” of the vehicle's existence, festival director Patti Jo Lambert says. “We were blown away by the number of nominations (400) we received.”
Organizers are hoping the Jeep Festival parade is special for another reason: they want the Butler Jeep Parade to continue its status as a Guinness Book of World Records holder for Jeeps in a parade. The festival's previous record was broken by a procession in April in Florida, so organizers are hoping to overtake that record of 1,846 Jeeps by having up to 2,500 show up.
“The jeep was invented in Butler; how can we allow the record to go to Daytona Beach?” says Jack Cohen, president of the Butler County Tourism and Convention Bureau.
Event organizers plan to document the parade with photos, video footage, police department and other witness statements, certification of parade length and traffic counters. At least 20 volunteers will check the vehicles in and watch the parade.
All those efforts are worth the trouble, says Cohen, who knows of no other Guinness Records that have been set in Butler County.
To ensure the event breaks the Florida record, festival volunteers like Sandy Olanyk of Evans City have recruited Jeep owners to turn out for the parade. Olanyk even used her May vacation to approach other Jeep owners on the ferry to Ocracoke, N.C., and at a North Carolina Dairy Queen event to join in the parade.
“I haven't had any Jeep owner look at me like I was crazy,” Olanyk says.
Sandra Fischione Donovan in a contributing writer for Trib Total Media.
