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Outdoorsmen have been pitching their tents on flat-bed trailers and building crude tent campers ever since there have been cars to pull them. It isn't clear when or where the first commercial models were made, but probably it was right after World War II. One of the first (and perhaps the very first) person to offer a compact, collapsible, fabric-topped trailer was Ash Ward in Cincinnati. That was in 1956 and he called his creation the Nimrod Camper. But to tell the truth, he had a very hard time selling very many units-for a few years, that is. Only 196 of the original edition were bought, although some of these are still in use. But as with so many other great new ideas, tent trailers suddenly caught on in the late fifties. Today nearly a quarter of all recreational-sleeping vehicles in use are camping trailers. The total is about one-half million. |