Stumbled on a graveyard of 1950s cars deep in the woods near Chattanooga

I was hiking off-trail last fall and found like 20 old cars rusting away in a ravine, all from the 1950s. Turns out a local farmer parked them there when they broke down and just left them to rot. Has anyone else come across a random car dump in the middle of nowhere?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryan_carr596d agoTop Commenter

way more intact than what we found" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, @sarahsullivan. I've been on the flip side of this, where folks get so hyped on the "hidden treasure" angle that they ignore the fact most of these cars are beyond saving. Rust in a ravine doesn't preserve anything, it just makes it worse, the moisture and dirt get into every panel. I've seen guys haul out a '50s pickup thinking they hit gold, then spend two years and ten grand trying to fix frame rot that ain't fixable. And that VIN plate hunt stuff, that's a legal gray area at best, some of those numbers get used for shady rebuilds that end up causing headaches down the road. Honestly, half the time you're better off leaving the junk where it sits and buying a catalog part. But hey, different strokes, if you enjoy digging through mud for scrap metal, more power to you.

sarahsullivan7d ago

I used to think those old car graveyards were just junk piles, honestly figured nobody'd want anything from em. But then my buddy dragged me out to a similar spot in the Appalachians a few years back and we pulled a 57 Bel Air frame that some restorer paid stupid money for. There's a whole underground network of guys hunting these spots for trim pieces or even just VIN plates. Yours sounds way more intact than what we found, that ravine probably kept things from getting stripped bare.