Chassis no. S243FP was one of 58 Springfield-built Rolls-Royce Phantom I chassis fitted with this particularly handsome and dignified formal coachwork, the St. Stephen, a traditional town car design with an open driver’s compartment for the chauffeur. Like many of Brewster’s town car designs for this chassis, it was available with or without a collapsible landaulet roof over the rear seat, in the fashion of horse-drawn carriages.

The original owner of this car, Lina Dolmetsch of Scranton, Pennsylvania, selected the landaulet roof. Heiress to a large lacquer paint and New York real estate fortune, she took delivery of the Phantom I on 9 October 1928. Subsequent owners are recorded by the Rolls-Royce Foundation as Charles R. Bradshaw of Delphi, Indiana, from 1951 to 1956, then Denver B. Cornett, Jr., and James Fogle, both of Kentucky.

Jay and Berta Leon acquired the Rolls-Royce from pharmaceutical heir and well-known car collector, Burt Upjohn of Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1975. The Leons proceeded to drive it home to Hubbard, Texas, and afterward used it extensively for weddings and local celebrations. Well-preserved with a gentle patina of use throughout, the town car is still exceptionally handsome in its regal maroon and black finish, with a sumptuously appointed broadcloth interior in the correct material and pattern, and delightful touches such as heater grates in the floor, to warm passengers’ feet, and a beautiful clock in the division. At the time of cataloguing it had recorded 82,332 miles, almost all of them in the company of friends.

“It can hold a lot of people,” Jay Leon wrote in The Classic Car in 1990, “and so we drive it for special visitors. Anyone who comes to Hubbard from the outside is a special visitor.” There could be no better use.