YouTuber Finds A Chevy In A Field – It's An Ultra-Rare Government Ride

One thing that younger car enthusiasts might not fully appreciate is the sheer number of body styles Detroit's automakers offered in the 1950s and 1960s — all based on the same model. In most cases, you could take your pick of base vehicle and purchase it in one of several forms, ranging from a loaded up, wood-paneled family station wagon to a two-door convertible, and everything in between. Two-door cars were often sold as hardtop coupes or pillared sedans, as were four-door models. In some cases, you could even get two-door station wagons.

And that's what brings us to a fascinating and rare relic that an automotive YouTuber recently pulled out of a North Dakota field. It's a 1960 Chevrolet, but not a more common '60s Chevy, like an Impala with all the performance options or a high-dollar drop top. It's a very rare, strangely optioned Biscayne that served as some sort of government fleet vehicle back in the '60s.

What makes this particular model so unusual? It's a two-door station wagon with side windows but no rear seat, making it a unique hybrid of not one, but two different models that have nearly vanished from American highways and car lineups. Let's take a closer look at this rare find and see what might be in store for it.

The Chevy was found and purchased by YouTuber Jankowski speed and offroad, who discovered the car in a field near Grand Forks, North Dakota, alongside several other weathered American classics. It doesn't take long to see why he was so excited to find this relatively nondescript old Chevy. 

When it comes to two-door Chevy wagons of the '50s and '60s, the first thing that comes to mind is surely something like the rare and iconic 1957 Chevy Nomad. This particular long-roof, two-door Chevy is not that, though. While the Nomad was a sleek, sporty take on the station wagon, this Biscayne is functional to a T. And that's exactly what makes the car so unusual. On the outside, it looks like a normal 1960 Chevy two-door station wagon — cool and relatively rare to see these days, but not a unicorn. There's more to it than that.

Inside the Chevy, there are no rear passenger seats at all, just a cargo shelf directly behind the front seat. In other words, it has the interior layout of a sedan delivery, yet another body style you could choose with a '60 Chevy. A sedan delivery has no rear windows and was designed for hauling cargo rather than people, so this car is a strange mix of both — a windowed sedan delivery.

Both the body color and the hint of old lettering on the door suggest this car initially served as a government vehicle. It could have been a Forest Service vehicle, or perhaps, as the YouTuber suggests, an old Air Force vehicle from the nearby Grand Forks Air Force Base, which opened in 1957. It's possible that the government needed sedan deliveries at the time, but Chevy only had station wagon bodies available — thus, they combined both. While the exact history isn't clear, it seems unlikely this was sold as a civilian car.

Again, that's one of the things that makes American cars from this era so interesting. It's not just the styling or the engines: It's the overwhelming number of options and body styles, which at times could result in highly unusual specimens like this one. It would be great to see this car back on the road someday, and from what we can see, the car looks complete enough to be a restoration candidate.

So what would the modern equivalent of this government-issue Biscayne be? Surely something like a Ford Explorer or Chevy Tahoe. Whether or not you officially categorize this particular car as a station wagon or not, it brings to mind an era before the SUV pushed the wagon to the brink of extinction.  And if you are missing the style of a wagon, at least there are still some modern offerings that offer the look of a traditional wagon for today's buyers.