ON the surface, it sounds like a nearly impossible task: assembling a rare brass-era car from scratch, using century-old parts that were tracked down one by one from all the dusty, rust-ridden corners of the collecting world.

And oh, by the way, when finished the car needed to run well enough for a drive across the United States.

That was the job Richard Anderson set out for himself in 2003. A longtime collector of cars from the early 20th century, Mr. Anderson had been intrigued for years by the story of Alice Ramsey, whose 1909 trek from New York to San Francisco in a Maxwell DA made her the first woman to drive a car from coast to coast. It was a defining achievement in the early days of the automobile and for the nascent women’s movement in America.

It was also a bit of history mostly forgotten.

Mr. Anderson and his daughter, Emily, wanted to change that. They decided to honor the 100th anniversary of Ramsey’s pioneering drive — still more than five years away at the time — by crossing the country in a 1909 Maxwell of their own. Unfortunately, only one 1909 Maxwell DA was known to exist. And it wasn’t for sale.