Plymouth Suburban 1959 Station Wagon

Plymouth built well over 120,000 Suburban wagons for 1959, split across Deluxe, Custom, and Sport trims, with the mid-range Custom alone accounting for 53,869 units. They rode a wagon-specific 122-inch wheelbase with torsion-bar front suspension, came standard with a 132-horsepower flathead six, and could be ordered with a 305-horsepower Golden Commando V8. Almost none survived, because families used them up. Read on for what made the Big Fin wagons worth a second look.

Nobody kept the family car. Hardtops got parked in garages and covered, convertibles got restored and shown, and the wagon that hauled four kids, a dog, and every sheet of plywood the family ever bought went to the scrapyard around 1974 with the seats worn through. That is the entire reason a 1959 Plymouth Suburban in decent condition now draws a bigger crowd at a show than the two-door parked next to it. What makes this one worth stopping for is not just survival, though, but the fact that it came from a year when Plymouth was building more wagons than most people would ever guess. The numbers are genuinely surprising.

The Year the Fins Reached Their Peak

Virgil Exner’s Forward Look arrived for 1957 and reshaped the entire Chrysler corporation’s lineup, and 1959 is where the idea reached its most extreme expression at Plymouth before the industry started walking it back. The fins stood tall and sharp, the greenhouse was thin and glassy, and for 1959 the front end picked up a new egg-crate grille treatment with revised side trim to distinguish it from the 1958 cars. On a wagon body, that styling produces something genuinely odd looking: a practical box wearing the same aerospace ambitions as the hardtop, and it works far better than it should.

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Three Suburbans for Three Different Wallets

Plymouth had consolidated its wagons under the Suburban name a few years earlier, and by 1959 the range covered three distinct trim levels aimed at clearly separated buyers. Deluxe sat at the bottom, Custom occupied the middle, and Sport Suburban topped the range with the brightwork and interior appointments of Plymouth’s upper series. Body configurations included a two-door, a four-door seating six, and a longer-roofed four-door arranged for nine passengers with a rear-facing third bench. Between trim and seating, a family could walk into the same showroom and leave with wagons separated by several hundred dollars.

The Corner Plymouth Cut on the Cheap One

The compromise on the entry-level two-door Deluxe is the sort of detail that gets forgotten entirely once the cars are gone. Rather than fit the roll-up glass used on the pricier models, Plymouth specified sliding rear side windows, saving the cost of the regulator mechanism and the labor to install it. Buyers who needed a wagon more than they needed conveniences got exactly that. It is a small thing, but it is the clearest surviving evidence of how carefully manufacturers of the period sliced a model range into price points measured in tens of dollars rather than thousands.

Where the Buyers Actually Spent Their Money

The production split shows where the volume genuinely landed. Custom Suburban led the range with 53,869 units, Deluxe followed closely at 50,160, and the top-trim Sport Suburban accounted for 19,773. Add those together and Plymouth moved well over 120,000 wagons in a single model year, a figure that reframes what the Suburban actually was for the company. This was not a niche body style built to round out a brochure. It was one of Plymouth’s most important products, and the middle of the range was doing the heavy commercial lifting.

The Flathead Six That Did Most of the Work

Standard power came from Chrysler’s L-head inline six displacing 230.2 cubic inches and rated at 132 horsepower at 3,600 rpm, breathing through a Carter single-barrel carburetor. Nothing about that specification is exciting, and nothing about it was meant to be. The flathead six was a low-revving, low-stress design with a reputation for tolerating neglect that few engines of any era have matched, and in a vehicle whose job description involved a full load of passengers and luggage on a two-lane highway, durability mattered considerably more than acceleration.

The V8s Most People Forget Were on the List

Buyers with more ambition had options. The 318 V8 in Fury V-800 form was available in outputs around 230 and 260 horsepower depending on carburetion, and above that sat the 361-cubic-inch Golden Commando rated at 305 horsepower, an engine that turns a nine-passenger family wagon into something genuinely quick for 1959. Chrysler also offered a fuel-injected version of the 361 that year, a technically ambitious setup that proved troublesome in service and was quietly recalled and converted back to carburetors, which is why survivors with the original injection hardware are essentially nonexistent.

Driving by Push Button

Transmission choices covered a three-speed manual, the same manual with overdrive, the two-speed PowerFlite automatic, and the three-speed TorqueFlite, and Chrysler’s automatics of this era were operated by push buttons mounted in a pod to the left of the instrument cluster rather than by a lever. There is no column shifter and no floor selector. A driver simply pressed a button for drive, and the arrangement is one of the most distinctive tactile experiences in any American car of the late fifties, alien enough that first-time drivers usually need a moment to find reverse.

A Chassis Built Specifically for Wagons

The wagon body rode a 122-inch wheelbase, four inches longer than the sedans, stretching the overall length to roughly 214 inches to make room for the cargo floor and the third seat. Underneath sat Chrysler’s Torsion-Aire front suspension, using longitudinal torsion bars rather than coil springs, a system introduced across the corporation in 1957 that gave these cars a genuine handling advantage over Ford and Chevrolet rivals. A period Plymouth wagon rides flatter and steers with more precision than its size suggests, and the difference was noticeable enough that competitors spent years catching up.

What Twenty-Six Hundred Dollars Bought in 1959

Sticker prices spanned roughly $2,570 to $3,135 depending on trim, seating, and engine, which placed a well-equipped Suburban comfortably above the average new-car transaction of the period. That was the reality of the wagon market: families paid a real premium for the space, then used it hard enough that the premium never came back. Options like power steering, power brakes, a radio, and the larger V8s pushed a loaded Sport Suburban past three thousand dollars, into territory where a buyer could have had a very nicely equipped hardtop instead.

Why Clean Survivors Are So Hard to Find

Everything that made these wagons useful is also what destroyed them. They carried loads, sat outside, rusted from the tailgate forward, and were worth so little by the seventies that nobody could justify saving one. Restoration parts remain scarce compared with the equivalent hardtop, tailgate mechanisms and third-seat hardware are difficult to source, and the sheer amount of glass and trim on a finned wagon makes a proper rebuild expensive. The upside is that a clean example now stands out at a show precisely because everyone else brought the car their family did not actually use.

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