From the Henderson Daily Dispatch   Corbitt’s day to shine  Brand’s fans keep the name alive  BY REGGIE PONDER  DAILY DISPATCH WRITER  Those who collect and restore Corbitt trucks are on the front line of the move­ment to keep the Corbitt name alive. Several of this special breed displayed their trea­sured trucks at Saturday’s ceremony to unveil the new Corbitt highway marker. Jim McDonald of Morehead City came to Henderson for the ceremony. He owns a 1946 Corbitt TG truck. McDonald said he had been collecting cars about 40 years but that there was nothing like a Corbitt truck. Although he wasn’t able to bring his truck, he didn’t    want to miss the ceremony. Charles Powell, president of the Corbitt Preservation Society, had two trucks at Saturday’s event, a 1946 fourwheel- drive and a 1952 model. The ’46, which he found in Hillsborough, where it had been stored in a barn for 40 years, had worked the roads of Granville County as a state highway commission truck. He found the ’52 in Arizona over the Internet. 1952 was the last production year for Corbitt, making it a special truck to Powell. The ’52 model hauled supplies in the U.S. Navy. His father, Joe Powell, drove many Corbitt trucks, so he grew up around the vehicles. Mac Renn, Powell’s cousin, had a ’49 Corbitt TG truck at the event. The truck has a 602 Continental gasoline engine. Renn bought it in 2002 from Bill Hight, a Henderson native who now lives in Virginia. After receiving the truck and “a whole truckload of parts,” Renn went to work restoring it, getting a lot of help from his son, Andrew Renn Jr., Bobby Vick, and William Hardy. It took extensive metal fabrication work and engine rebuilding to get the truck ready to show — about three years of work in all. The state of North Carolina used the truck to haul produce to prison camps, Renn said. Numerous private owners had it after that before it found its way to Renn. “It’s just like a childhood interest that didn’t ever leave us,” Renn said of his and Powell’s fascination with the Corbitt vehicles. “The most interesting thing to me is that they were made right here in Henderson.” It took a lot of help from a lot of people to establish the preservation society, he said. Renn recalled that when he was a child, all the local oil companies used Corbitt trucks. He explained that Corbitt continued operating a parts business into the 1970s. The oldest truck on display was a 1920s model belonging to the Capps family. Jerry Capps of the Dabney community, whose father, “Mac,” worked the truck on the fami­ly’s tobacco farm, shows the truck at preservation society events. “The truck’s in the family,” Capps said, explaining that his father used it to haul tobacco from a remote field to the barns at the home place. The truck stayed on the job some three decades, until the county started paving roads and the old-style wheels and tires no longer could stand up to the new road surfaces. “It had a big wood bed on it,” Capps said. Capps belongs to the preservation society. “I’ve always been interested in it,” he said. “Daddy had a lot of old things there when I was growing up.” He went to mechanic’s school but wound up installing commercial build­ing sprinkler systems. When he retires, he plans to work on the Corbitt truck. He already has restored an old farm tractor. After the ceremony, John Mitchell, a Henderson resident whose father, Willie Mitchell Sr., worked for the Corbitt company, walked up and took a close look at the trucks. He said he enjoyed seeing the trucks every time they were on display.

A new historical marker was unveiled at the library’s McGregor Hall, by a group including, from left, Charles Powell, a Corbitt truck enthusiast, William S. Corbitt III, a descendant of the company’s owners, and Michael Hill, direc­tor of the state’s historical mark­er program.

Observers look at a Corbitt tractor parked alongside four Corbitt trucks in various stages of restoration Saturday outside the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library in downtown Henderson. The Corbitt vehicles were built in Henderson.

DISPATCH PHOTOS/ EARL KING   Thanks to Earl King for the photos, Reggie Ponder for the article and the Henderson Daily Dispatch for allowing the Corbitt Preservation Association to post their article on our website.