Road Icon: The Genius of a Nimrod

Ashley Ward Jr. grew up haunting his dad’s machine shop, and the nut didn’t fall far from the die. He was 23 and fresh off an Air Force stint when he filed his first patent for a windproof pipe-lighter he called the Nimrod. Presumably, this was because he pitched the lighter to sportsmen—and “nimrod,” back in the day, was a Bible-derived nickname for a hunter.

It seemed like a good enough brand name, anyway, that Ward stuck with it when he branched out into tent trailers in 1957. Recreational camping was taking off, and Nimrod Equipment Company was part of a small boom of manufacturers launched to meet the demand. Design-wise, turn-of-the-’60s proto-pop-ups were all over the map: Tent trailers unfolded in precarious geometries of tepee tops, awnings, and on-the-ground vestibules. Beds, if they slid or folded out, typically did so from a trailer’s sides.

Then, in 1963, came the Nimrod Riviera: sturdy, self-contained, and—thanks to beds that extended from its front and rear—roomy. Three years later, the Riviera debuted a hardtop that “popped up” on patented, spring-loaded legs. Other manufacturers were similarly innovating—a small Michigan shop had actually first pioneered front-and-back beds— but Nimrods caught on, and the company’s national distribution helped popularize what’s now the classic design of a pop-up camper.

Photo Credit: Cinncinati Museum Center/Getty Images

By 1964, says pop-up historian Joel Silvey, Ward’s company was the country’s largest manufacturer of camping trailers. Its reign, alas, was short: Nimrod changed hands in ’68, shuttered in the ’70s, then faded into obscurity. But for a time, Nimrods were ubiquitous enough that US Forest Service surveys used the phrase “Nimrod-type trailer” as shorthand for all pop-ups.

“Ashley Ward was just a genius of a machinist,” Silvey says. “Nimrod could come in and machine any new ideas: easy flip-tops, easy openings. They improved everything down to the bolts and nuts.”

“They were compact and unique and simple,” says Jim Lockard, who runs a Facebook group of some 450 vintage-Nimrod owners and nostalgists. “You didn’t have to be an engineer to use them, and you could tow them with your Mazda. It was just a simple camping life.”

Share your memories of Nimrod pop-ups and other vintage trailers at [email protected].

This article originally appeared in Wildsam magazine. For more Wildsam content, sign up for our newsletter.

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