The Saturn car brand died last month of natural causes. It was 19.

Saturn’s 350 dealers may continue to operate for much of 2010, but after that the network will be phased out.

The brand is survived by four siblings: Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick and GMC. It was preceded in death by Oldsmobile and Pontiac.

Saturn’s parent company, General Motors, is convalescing in government intensive care.

For car guys like me, reading the obituary of a car brand is always disappointing. Saturn’s passing last month, after a deal fell apart to sell the brand to Penske Automotive Group Inc., felt especially personal.

I grew up near Spring Hill, Tenn., the birthplace of Saturn. When I was a boy, Maury County’s biggest claim to fame was our annual Mule Day Parade, a throwback to the early 20th century when nearby Columbia, Tenn., was the mule-trading capital of the mid-South.

New acclaim arrived in 1990, when GM’s revolutionary new Saturn division began producing quirky, plastic-body cars at a sprawling new plant nestled in the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee.

I remember visiting the Spring Hill plant soon after it opened. An assembly-line worker dropped a plastic door panel on the plant floor. Then, he jumped on top of it with both steel-toed boots to prove its durability. I thought to myself, “This will come in handy if an Army brigade ever marches across the hood of your car.”

It was amazing to see the transformation of a farm into a modern car plant. The Saturn property is ringed by a white fence that my buddies used to paint in high-school summers.

The first sedans off the assembly line — the so-called S-series cars — were fuel-sippers that quickly caught on with the American buying public. By 1992, Saturn dealers, using an innovative “no-haggle” sales strategy, were moving more cars per store than any other brand.

The Saturn concept got its start in the early 1980s, when Japanese car makers were gobbling up market share in the United States with durable, fuel-efficient vehicles. American car buyers, burned by the oil shocks of the 1970s and shoddy American econoboxes, were turning to thrifty imports.

Panicked by the way things were heading, GM announced in 1983 that it was embarking on a new venture that would change the way American cars were made and sold. Coincidentally, it was the same year that Nissan began production of small trucks in Smyrna, Tenn., another hamlet in the far suburbs of Nashville.

Later in the decade, GM announced that Spring Hill, about 30 miles south of Nashville, had won the worldwide lottery for the Saturn plant. The challenge was clear: GM was trying to distance its new company from the gravitational force of its Detroit bureaucracy and go toe-to-toe with the Japanese — namely Nissan — on neutral turf in middle Tennessee.

The early 1990s were a heady time for Saturn. About 38,000 Saturn owners gathered in Spring Hill in 1994 to celebrate the brand and its durable — if unremarkable — small sedans. At its peak, the plant employed about 7,000 workers.

But the euphoria of the early years soon waned. Saturn was slow to change its product line, and the S-series cars grew long in the tooth. By 1999, when Saturn began production of larger L-series cars, Americans had begun their infatuation with SUVs. Saturn unveiled its Vue SUV in 2000, but it was late to the party.

As recently at 2005, the Spring Hill plant had 5,700 employees. Over time, though, Saturn lost much of its independence inside GM. The last Spring Hill Saturn was produced in 2007, and the plant was retooled to produce the Chevrolet Traverse SUV. We all know what happened to the SUV market in 2008 when gas prices hit $4 per gallon.

GM has announced that the Spring Hill plant will be idled in November. Because it’s a state-of-the-art assembly plant, hope remains that it might reopen if demand for GM products picks up. (There is speculation on automotive Web sites that the Spring Hill plant might build a small truck down the line.)

Car folks have told me privately it was inevitable that GM would emerge from the Great Recession as a leaner company with fewer nameplates.

The irony is that today’s Saturns are wonderful cars. The Aura sedan, which I recently reviewed for the Times Free Press, is one of the best cars I’ve driven this year.

But in the auto business, as in life, timing is everything. And sometimes our best efforts are ultimately too little too late.