Early Winchester Auto Dealers

While research­ing the his­to­ry of the Harrod-Early Chevrolet deal­er­ship, I got side­tracked try­ing to piece togeth­er Winchester’s ear­ly auto indus­try.  I was seduced by the Winchester Sun online.  Back issues of the paper were recent­ly added to newspapers.com and are word search­able, a fea­ture that can send one off chas­ing rab­bits all day.  We’ll get back around to Harrod-Early anoth­er time.

There is an endur­ing local leg­end about who owned the first car in Winchester.  Descendants of Thomas M. Walden passed down a sto­ry about him build­ing his own cus­tom-made flivver in the late 1890s.  Walden, the night miller at the Kerr flour mill and invet­er­ate tin­ker­er, sup­pos­ed­ly built every­thing for his “horse­less car­riage” except the gears.  Walden’s feat was accom­plished around the same time the Duryea broth­ers are cred­it­ed with assem­bling the first gaso­line-pow­ered vehi­cles in the United States.

It took a while for the auto­mo­bile to catch on in Winchester.  The 1908 City Directory lists three deal­ers of Buggies and Carriages and five Livery Stables but no one sell­ing cars yet. 

The first one into the busi­ness was Venard Owen who opened an auto garage in the build­ing that had housed Matt Bean’s car­riage shop, next door to the Engine House on Lexington Avenue.  In February 1909 Owen adver­tised that he was the exclu­sive deal­er of the White Steamer, an auto­mo­bile with an inter­est­ing his­to­ry.  Produced by the White Motor Company (an off­shoot of the White Sewing Machine Company), their steam car enjoyed a brief pop­u­lar­i­ty, out­selling the more famous “Stanley Steamer.”  A gaso­line-fueled boil­er that pro­duced the vehicle’s super­heat­ed steam was locat­ed under the driver’s seat.  Sounds scary but pre­sum­ably it was reli­able and worked well.

Owen soon moved to Lexington and no more could be found about his garage.  Upon his return to town in 1920, he was her­ald­ed as the man “who ini­ti­at­ed the garage busi­ness in Winchester.”

In 1912 A. C. Barrow and T. Stanley Clay of Indian Fields con­clud­ed a deal with the Ford Motor Company of Detroit that made Barrow & Clay the exclu­sive agent for Ford cars in Clark County.  A branch of their com­pa­ny oper­at­ed in Winchester:  The Motor Inn, William F. Glass pro­pri­etor, locat­ed at the Speedway cor­ner of Lexington Avenue and Maple Street.  The adver­tised price for a new Model T was $590 (about $19,000 today).  In addi­tion to sell­ing Fords, Glass served as agent for Oldsmobile and Oakland cars, and the busi­ness also rent­ed, stored and repaired auto­mo­biles and sold auto accessories. 

Henry Ford began sell­ing his Model T in 1908, and it took the coun­try by storm.  His assem­bly-line prod­uct with inter­change­able parts became the most afford­able car on the mar­ket.  In 1913 Ford began man­u­fac­tur­ing Model Ts on South Third Street in Louisville.  Within a few years, more than half the cars on the road were Fords.

In the ear­ly days of the auto­mo­bile, peo­ple were look­ing for places to explore in their new cars—they called it “tour­ing.”  In 1913 an auto club in Grand Junction, Colorado, laid out the first transcon­ti­nen­tal auto trail in America.  Using exist­ing high­ways, they marked a route from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles called the “Midland Trail.”  In Kentucky, the route went from Louisville to Ashland, pass­ing through Winchester along the way.

After William Glass died of tuber­cu­lo­sis in 1913, the busi­ness became the People’s Motor Car Company at the same loca­tion.  The pro­pri­etors, James Fishback and Virgil Hieatt, sold Ford, Dodge, Hudson and Overland cars as well as the then-famous “Nobby Tread” tires, guar­an­teed for 5,000 miles.

Dealers back then did not have lots filled with new cars like today.  They had on hand only a few mod­els to show off.  Purchasers had to place an order for their vehi­cle, which was then deliv­ered from the manufacturer.

New car sales were rare enough events to mer­it a men­tion in the news­pa­per.  For exam­ple, a 1916 Sun arti­cle stat­ed that the People’s Motor Car Company sold a Hudson Super-Six tour­ing car to T. J. Williams and a Chevrolet tour­ing car to L. R. Bruner.

Fishback and Hieatt ran People’s until 1917, when they were suc­ceed­ed by William E. Dean.  Dean adver­tised heav­i­ly for a high-end car called the Chalmers made in Detroit.  Its 7‑passenger Town Car sold for $2,550 ($61,000 today).  One ad claimed the Chalmers aver­aged a “star­tling­ly eco­nom­i­cal fig­ure of 14 miles to the gal­lon of gas” while being dri­ven for 24 hours in Chicago’s down­town traf­fic.  After a lat­er merg­er, Chalmers was renamed Chrysler.

In 1919 the deal­er­ship at the cor­ner of Maple Street was incor­po­rat­ed as the Lexington Avenue Garage by J. C. and Ada Williams and M. T. Back.  Alexander H. Cundiff bought out the inter­est of the Williamses lat­er that year.  The garage spe­cial­ized in Chandler and Cleveland cars built in Cleveland and the Liberty Six and Chevrolet cars built in Detroit.  The fol­low­ing year, Cundiff became the sole own­er of the Lexington Avenue Garage and added Reo cars to his line.

In March 1933 Cundiff’s garage was lost to a fire, but he man­aged to reopen the busi­ness a month lat­er.  The Lexington Avenue Garage final­ly closed with the death of Cundiff in 1941. 

By 1940 Winchester boast­ed 8 new car deal­ers:  Harrod-Early Chevrolet, Bush Brothers (Dodge, Plymouth), Hodgkin-Hamilton (Ford, Lincoln-Zephyr, Mercury), Hedrick-Fox Motor Company, Fox Pontiac, Mack’s Auto Shop (Studebaker), Tom Swope Motor Company, and Snapp Brothers and Mastin Garage (Willys). 

Today Winchester can count only one new car dealer—Rod Hatfield on Lexington Avenue—but we have near­ly two dozen used car lots at any giv­en time.