Not every 1940 Ford spent its life on the road for the living. This Deluxe was stretched into a flower car, built by Eureka Manufacturing to haul funeral wreaths and the occasional casket instead of passengers. Only a handful were ever built this way, and it still runs the original 239 CID flathead V8 and 3-speed manual. See why professional cars like this one, quiet, rare, and built for a job nobody wanted to think about, still stop collectors cold at car shows decades later.
Most 1940 Fords rolling off the line were headed for driveways and Sunday drives. This one was built for funerals. Stretched behind the cowl into a flatbed with raised side rails, it wasn’t hauling groceries or a family of five – it was hauling wreaths, sprays, and the occasional overflow casket when the hearse ran out of room. Only a handful of these dual-purpose Deluxes ever left the conversion shop, and fewer still survived the decades since. Dig into the story behind this one, and you start to understand why small-town funeral directors loved it, and why almost nobody else has ever laid eyes on one in person.
Built by Eureka, Not Just Ford
Ford didn’t stretch this car itself. The conversion came from the Eureka Manufacturing Company out of Illinois, one of the old-school “professional car” builders that took a stock Deluxe coupe and reworked the back half into a flower bed with raised rails, all while keeping that coupe roofline intact. That’s actually what makes this one interesting to look at next to the Cadillac and Packard-based flower cars of the era: most funeral fleets went upscale for their combination cars, but this Ford was built for the smaller home on a tighter budget, and it still manages to look organic and purposeful rather than like a cheap afterthought.
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A Flathead V8 Doing Somber Work
Under that long hood sits a 239 cubic inch flathead V8 backed by a 3-speed manual, and that number is worth a second look on its own: Ford’s 1940 passenger cars left the factory with the smaller 221 cubic inch flathead, so a 239 sitting here means either a Mercury-sourced block or a swap done somewhere along this car’s working life. Either way it’s the same basic mill hot rodders have been chasing horsepower out of for eight decades. It’s a strange thing to appreciate a flathead for its restraint rather than its output, but that’s exactly the case here. This one wasn’t built to run quarter miles, it was built to glide a family through the worst day of their lives, and the factory-style wheels and factory interior back up just how close to stock the running gear was left. There’s even a tonneau cover that could be thrown over the bed for foul weather, or on the days a family didn’t want the flower load on display at all.
Photos courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars.
Why a Car Like This Still Turns Heads at Shows
Professional cars, hearses, flower cars, ambulances built on passenger platforms, occupy a strange corner of the collector world. They’re not fast, they’re not flashy, and they were built in tiny numbers to begin with because there simply wasn’t a mass market for them. That’s exactly why the Professional Car Society and diehard fans of oddball Detroit iron chase them down. A survivor like this Deluxe flower car, believed to be one of just six Ford ever produced in this configuration, is the kind of piece that stops people cold at a show specifically because they’ve never seen anything like it, and probably never will again.
Professional Cars Were Their Own Industry
Combination cars, flower cars, ambulances, and hearses built on stock passenger platforms made up an entire dedicated segment of the auto industry for decades, supplied by specialist coachbuilders who worked directly with funeral homes rather than retail car buyers — companies like Eureka carved out a lasting niche precisely because Cadillac, Packard, and Ford themselves had no interest in building these low-volume, specialized bodies in-house.
Why Small Towns Needed a Combination Car
A small-town funeral home rarely had the budget or the call volume to justify separate dedicated flower cars and hearses sitting idle between services — a combination car that could haul flowers one day and double as backup capacity the next made far more financial sense for operators serving smaller communities than big-city funeral homes with larger fleets.
The Professional Car Society Keeps the History Alive
Dedicated collector organizations like the Professional Car Society exist specifically because these vehicles occupy such a narrow, easily-overlooked corner of automotive history — without collectors and clubs actively tracking down and preserving surviving examples, oddities like this Ford flower car would have almost certainly been lost entirely rather than surviving long enough to end up on a dealer floor today.
A Flathead Story With a Mercury Twist
The mismatch between this car’s 239 cubic inch flathead and Ford’s standard 1940 221 cubic inch passenger car engine is exactly the kind of detail serious professional-car collectors dig into — Mercury, launched that same year as Ford’s new upscale brand, used a larger-displacement version of the same basic flathead architecture, which is the most likely explanation for a bigger block finding its way under this car’s long hood.
Documentation Matters More on a Car This Rare
With so few professional cars like this one surviving, and even fewer with clear paperwork tracing their conversion history back to a specific coachbuilder, a documented Eureka-built example carries real weight with serious collectors — the alternative, an undocumented car simply claimed to be one of six, is a much harder sell to anyone who actually knows the segment.
Why Gateway Classic Cars Handles Cars Like This
Multi-location consignment dealers built their reputation specifically on sourcing and selling oddball, low-volume vehicles that don’t fit neatly on a typical used car lot — a niche professional car like this flower car needs exactly the kind of specialized buyer network a dealer like Gateway has spent years building.
A car built for such a specific, solemn purpose ending up preserved well enough to sit on a showroom floor eight decades later is its own small miracle of automotive survival.
Whoever eventually adds this one to their collection will be taking on a genuine piece of a nearly forgotten corner of the classic car hobby, not just another old Ford coupe.
Take a moment to study each photo above before it finds its next home.
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