Mercury M-3 Truck!

I'm on a book tour in eastern Canada, promoting my new novel, THE O'BRIENS, which is out in Canada this month (but not until March 2012 in the U.S., when Pantheon publishes the American edition). Of course I have been keeping an eye out for trucks, and came across this gorgeous machine in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia.

It's a 1951 Mercury M-3 1-ton pickup: original, unrestored, Canadian. From April 1946 until March 23, 1968 Mercury trucks were built and sold in Canada.  They are rebadged versions of Ford Trucks, often with better interior appointments and more options.  Sizes range from the basic M-1/M-100 personal pickup and panel delivery to heavy-duty dump trucks and semis.  

Canadian truck buyers always had a choice of two nameplates on the Fords built in Canada. Because smaller Canadian towns had either a Ford-Monarch or Lincoln-Mercury-Meteor dealer, but not both, the L-M-M network got the Mercury truck. 
      If you follow this blog you may know that Autoliterate has a thang for Ford trucks of this era: see the posts "Trucking With Basha" and Henry with the F-2, featuring a robin's-egg-blue West Texas F-2.
      We came across this truck on a sunny summer day, 

 parked beside a mid-19th century frame house at Grand Pre, near Wolfville, N.S. Wilhelmus Peters, the Nova Scotia farmer who owns the truck, is restoring the house. 

             The M-3 is pretty much all original and spent most of its life on the high, dry plains of southern Saskatchewan, where Wilhelmus found it last year. He had it shipped to Nova Scotia. It has the original flathead V8, and everything works. About the only thing not original is the chrome front grill. 
              These trucks all came from the factory with fenders painted black: if you wanted them the same color as the body, you had to pay a little more.

           Here's a link to a youtube video of a 1952 Mercury M-3 that was sale in Saskatchewan a few years back. To learn more about the Mercury trucks, go to the winged messenger website.