The General Lee Will Keep an Honored Place in Car Museum

Those Duke boys and their car, a 1969 Dodge Charger dubbed the General Lee, roared across TV screens in the 1980s with reckless abandon. Today, the General Lee, or rather one of them, sits well north of the Mason-Dixon line in an Illinois museum.

The Volo Auto Museum in Lake County has the only surviving, unrestored General Lee used in the first season of “The Dukes of Hazzard” in 1979. The show aired through 1985.

Aside from the smiling, mischievous Duke boys behind the wheel with the pedal to the metal, the General Lee was defined by its distinctive flame-orange paint job featuring a hand-painted Confederate flag on the roof. This car was one of eight used in the first season.

On Wednesday, Warner Brothers announced “Dukes of Hazzard” toys and model cars featuring the Confederate flag will no longer be licensed by the studio, joining other companies, such as eBay, Amazon and Walmart that have decided to no longer deal in Confederate flag merchandise.

”(We have) one licensee producing die-cast replicas and vehicle model kits featuring the General Lee with the confederate flag on its roof — as it was seen in the TV series. We have elected to cease the licensing of these product categories,” Warner Brothers said in the statement.

Does that mean anything for one of the real General Lees?

“There’s been a lot of activity on our Facebook, asking if we have to take the car off display,” museum director Brian Grams told WBBM Newsradio 780. More than 100 comments were posted Wednesday. “And the simple response to that (is), we are not affiliated with Warner Brothers so we’re not under this Warner Brothers ban on the Confederate flag where we have to take it off display.”

The car, worth $500,000, made its way to the museum in 2006.

The museum posted this statement on its Facebook page expressing its view.

“We are a museum and it’s important to preserve history for what it is. History is not a book to be edited where you can just keep the parts you like and erase the parts you do not like. The TV show happened, the General Lee wore a Confederate Flag, that’s history and should be preserved. Erasing it will not change the facts.”