You'd never expect to find one of the country's most outstanding public car museums in such an out-of-the-way spot as Norwich, New York. Yet here it is, the three-year-old Northeast Classic Car Museum midway between Utica and Binghamton in what Empire Staters call the Southern Tier.

Although the museum proclaims to have the largest collection of Franklin cars anywhere - no doubt true - from a car nut's point of view, this has to be one of the most user-friendly museums I've encountered. It is light and bright inside a relatively new series of Butler buildings, with good layout of its more than 100 vehicles, generally grouped by makes, and not overly cramped as so many car museums are.

The Northeast Classic Car Museum owes its origins to a combination of local boosters and a magnanimous local collector, George Staley.

Norwich grew up along the Chenango Canal, which in 1837 connected the Mohawk River at Utica with the Delaware River at Binghamton. In addition to serving local agriculture it soon became a small center for manufacturing, using canal boats to start shipping such goods as gloves, fireplace equipment and patent medicines worldwide. The canal was replaced by railroads in the 1870s, and N.Y. Route 12 had paved over a good bit of it by the 1930s.

But by the 1990s, the town had fallen on hard times as the factories dried up, and local businessmen were looking for another focus to attract dollars. They thought of tourism, but had nothing in particular to offer except fairly pristine 19^th-century architecture and an attractive, New England-like town square. Then one day a visitor from Colorado dropped into the Chamber of Commerce in search of a Franklin car collection he'd heard about.

Storied Franklins