20+ First-Generation Ford Mustangs Are Junkyard Treasure

And they’re in a U-Pull-It yard with good prices.

Ford began selling Mustangs in 1964, and production of the spectacularly successful first-generation Mustang continued through the 1973 model year. Prior to now, I had documented just six first-generation Mustangs in junkyards… but now a legendary Denver-area self-service boneyard has just put more than 20 of them out in the regular inventory.

In fact, the employees of Colorado Auto & Parts, located just south of Denver, have just placed well over a hundred interesting cars and trucks from the 1930s through the 1970s in their pull-yer-own-parts yard.

I’ll be sharing more of them—including a Packard Patrician, an Austin Princess and all the flathead-powered 1940s Detroit cars you could want—in the near future, but all these first-generation Mustangs deserve a separate article. Go ahead, look on Row52 and see how many are available in other self-service yards around the continent (right now the number is zero).

For many years, CAP had a private-reserve storage yard full of tantalizingly old vehicles next to their open-to-the-public U-Pull-It yard. Every so often, they’d make room in the special yard by moving some cars from it to the regular public yard (the 1965 Chevy Biscayne and 1966 Studebaker Commander we saw recently were the result of this process). During the last couple of years, they have auctioned off a bunch of those cars, including dozens and dozens of classic Mustangs.

Then they decided to rent out the storage yard, and so now all these machines (which, presumably, failed to sell at auction but are still glorious) are available to those who wish to bring their own tools to Englewood, Colorado, and yank their own parts. At the time of this writing, most of these machines have yet to be organized with the rest of the inventory and access can be challenging… but get there before the competition and the best parts will be yours! CAP’s prices are quite reasonable, too.

Because Denver is something of an island in the American classic-car universe, a 20-hour tow from the big cities of the West Coast and the Midwest, these cars are a bit rough to be considered viable restoration candidates. If this ’66 convertible had been auctioned in Michigan or New Jersey, it might have found a buyer who’d have paid what it took to get it back on the road.

Still, there are many great parts to be had at steal-grade prices here.

You’ll even find a couple of examples of the first-gen Mustang’s Mercury-badged brother, the Cougar.

If you need parts from a 1974-1978 Mustang II, they’ve got one of those as well (right next to a ’66 Galaxie 500 and a couple of early-1970s Mercury Montegos).