The Corvette museum knew of only 4. We found one.

Concours-quality, museum-verified 1959 Corvette in White & Dark Turquoise (a color combination so rare, only 48 were ever made) and just 4 are known to remain. 23,743 original miles. 18 Best in Show awards.

A one-of-a-kind and a labor of love

This isn't just a '59 Corvette. It's one of only 48 ever built in the rare White with Dark Turquoise trim color combination — a pairing so uncommon that GM abandoned the Dark Turquoise entirely partway through the 1960 model year. When we tracked down the historian at the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky, he confirmed what the numbers already suggested: of those 48, only 4 are known to still exist today. This is one of them.

The story starts with a search. After losing track of my original '59 Vette and discovering it had been totaled in Wisconsin with no salvage title ever filed, my wife and I set out to find its replacement. In 2014, we struck gold — a '59 Vette tucked away in Montana storage with a jaw-dropping 16,700 original miles on the clock, later verified by the Museum historian to have been originally delivered to Missoula, Montana.

Over the next three years, I poured roughly 2,000 personal hours into a frame-up, show-quality restoration using authentic GM parts throughout — from taillights to hubcaps. The result speaks for itself: 18 "Best in Show" awards across regional car shows and events, along with multiple recognitions for outstanding restoration detail.

You won't find another one like it. The numbers make that almost mathematically certain.

A rare white and turquoise 1959 Corvette convertible car parked on a grassy area with palm trees and a green park in the background.

Close-up of the interior dashboard and steering wheel of a vintage white and turquoise 1959 Corvette convertible, with a view of the speedometer and side mirror.

Black and white vintage photo of a 1959 Chevrolet Corvette sports car on a dirt road in a rural area.

A group of young children in matching outfits sitting and standing in front of a red vintage Corvetter convertible car outdoors.

The History

Vintage advertisement featuring a red 1959 Chevrolet convertible and a light blue 1959 Chevrolet car with people dressed in 1950s attire. Text highlights Chevrolet's leadership with the tagline "Chevy's Got a Car That Leads Your Kind of Life."

Three vintage Chevrolet Corvettes from the 1959 edition in light blue color displayed at an outdoor event, with people viewing and walking nearby.

Black vintage sports car with a person driving on a road. The text underneath reads 'Choose the proper equipment'.

Photograph of a vintage red and white Chevrolet Corvette convertible at a car show with people admiring it, some holding papers, and a large building in the background.

"It probably has more performance per dollar than anything you could buy."
— Road & Track, January 1959

By 1959, the Corvette was no longer an experiment. Just six years after its debut as a show car dream that almost never made it to production, Chevrolet's fiberglass roadster had found its identity. The '59 arrived as a refined evolution of the landmark 1958 redesign with a cleaner interior, sharper instrumentation, and a driving experience more dialed-in than ever. Under the hood, the 283 cubic inch V8 pushed up to a fire-breathing 290 horsepower, producing a then-astonishing one horsepower per cubic inch. In an era when most Americans were driving chrome-laden barges, the Corvette was something else entirely.

Only 9,670 Corvettes were produced that year — a modest number even by the standards of the day. Of those, a tiny fraction carried special order color combinations that were occasionally discontinued before the ink on the order sheets was dry. The White with Dark Turquoise trim package was one of them. Rare at birth, and rarer still today.

1959 was also the last model year before the Corvette began its march toward the iconic Sting Ray era. What you see here is the end of a chapter, the purest expression of the original Corvette vision, built before everything changed.