When the last Grand Marquis rolled off the line in January of 2011, it signaled the end of the Mercury division of the Ford Motor Company.

When the last Grand Marquis rolled off the line at the St. Thomas, Ontario plant on January 3, 2011, that was the end of the Mercury division. But the event itself was a foregone conclusion, as the Ford Motor Company had officially announced the cancellation of the brand back in the previous June. Mercury production was to be wound down in the fourth quarter of 2010, the car maker reported, but the last Mercury didn’t make it through final assembly until the first Monday in January. Grand Marquis production for the 2011 model year amounted to just 248 cars.

The vision of Edsel Ford, son of Henry, Mercury entered production for 1939 as an upmarket Ford Motor Company product intended to compete against Oldsmobile, Dodge, and the rest of the mid-priced field. (See our feature here.) And while its volume was a fraction of Ford’s total output, the brand did manage to outsell Oldsmobile at times. Mercury reached its peak popularity in the late ’70s with the mid-sized Cougar and full-sized cars that rivaled Lincoln for style and features. But from there, Mercury sales steadily dwindled, and so did the product offerings.

When the end finally came in 2010-2011, the Mercury product line, such as it was, was painfully limited. The meager catalog included the Mariner SUV, a Ford Escape clone, and the Milan, a badge-engineered Ford Fusion. However, the car most identified with the final years of Mercury is the Grand Marquis, a slightly upscale version of the Ford Crown Victoria. Indeed: It could be difficult to tell the two apart on the street.

Fairly described as an older car for older buyers, the Grand Marquis featured body-on-frame construction and a single body style, a four-door sedan. Its Panther platform, shared with the Crown Vic and Lincoln Town Car, dated back to 1979, and naturally it sported a V8 up front and rear-wheel drive. But regular improvements kept it reasonably up to date: The final powerplant was a 4.6-liter single-overhead cam Modular V8 with up to 239 hp, paired to a Ford 4R75E 4-speed automatic transmission with electronic shift control.

Through much of the ’90s, the Grand Marquis soid at 100,000 units per year or more, a sizable share of the Mercury division’s total volume. But a few years into the 21st century the big Mercury’s numbers began to tumble, as did the division’s volume overall. In 2007, Grand Marquis sales dropped 40 percent to fewer than 30,000 cars, while in 2009 total Mercury production slipped below the 100,000 mark. By the summer of 2010 the end was inescapable. Mercury joined Plymouth, Oldsmobile, and the rest as one more of the Motor City’s surplus brands.