The first automobiles: three claims, and no crown

1897 – 1910

The claim the histories carried: Bert J. Griswold's Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), repeating the Fort Wayne Sentinel's pictorial-history installment of 31 October 1914, states the matter flatly: "H. W. Meyer brought the first automobile to the city of Fort Wayne in 1897. Others who appeared with 'horseless carriages' were W. H. W. Peltier, E. B. Kunkle and Dr. G. A. Ross." That sentence, printed seventeen years after the fact, is the source on which the 1897 date and Meyer's name rest.

The first one the contemporary press saw: The Fort Wayne Daily News of 18 August 1899 headlined a different event "THE FIRST ONE TO APPEAR IN THIS CITY." A Weston Motor Carriage, bought for $1,000 from the Weston Motor Carriage Company, was driven into Fort Wayne at three o'clock that morning by Harry S. Pickands and H. Tuttle of Cleveland, on the road from Toledo to Chicago; it was sheltered at the Winklemeyer livery barn and drew crowds. The same article noted that Marion Black of Fort Wayne was then in the east "to secure an automobile." The two claims are not the same claim: Meyer's is the first automobile brought to the city by a resident, on a retrospective account; the Weston was the first automobile the contemporary newspaper recorded appearing in the city, and it belonged to travelers passing through.

The third claim: The Fort Wayne News of 5 January 1910 gave the credit elsewhere: "Marion Black, who had the first automobile in Fort Wayne, is going to have the first aeroplane in this city," adding that "the credit of having the first automobile in the city went to Mr. Black a number of years ago, when in connection with Will Peltier he constructed a car." Black's claim is of a different kind again — not a car bought or a car seen, but a car built here, with W. H. W. Peltier, one of the men Griswold names among the earliest owners. The record carries all three claims; it does not reconcile them, and this section does not crown one.

The electrics and the streets they ran on: Roy M. Bates and Kenneth B. Keller's The Columbia Street Story, written for Fort Wayne's 1994 bicentennial and quoted in the News-Sentinel's history of the period, remembers the first local cars as the "silent, gliding" electrics of the city's leading merchants, and a battery station at Washington and Broadway "where weird lights flickered all night as batteries for the electrics were charged for the next day's use." The streets were mostly unpaved. By 19 June 1904 the Journal Gazette was counting the machines under the headline "Automobiles Worth $60,000," and a 1911 booster publication, Fort Wayne: Indiana's Busiest Happy City, was still reassuring readers that "each year the city is adding several miles of paved roads and sidewalks" — a fair measure of what early motoring here was driven on.

Sources:

1. B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana (1917), ch. XLVI, repeating the Fort Wayne Sentinel's pictorial-history installment of 31 October 1914 — the Meyer 1897 statement and the names Peltier, Kunkle, and Ross; cataloged by the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Automobile History in Allen County.
2. Fort Wayne Daily News, 18 August 1899 — "The First One to Appear in This City": the Weston Motor Carriage, Pickands and Tuttle, the $1,000 purchase, the Winklemeyer livery barn, and Marion Black in the east to secure an automobile; cataloged by ACGSI.
3. Fort Wayne News, 5 January 1910 — the Marion Black "first automobile" credit and the car constructed with Will Peltier.
4. Connie Haas Zuber, "Horseless carriages paved way into century," News-Sentinel history series (2000), quoting Bates and Keller, The Columbia Street Story (1994) — the electrics, the Washington and Broadway battery station, the unpaved streets, and the 1911 booster publication's paving line.
5. ACGSI, Automobile History in Allen County — the Journal Gazette's "Automobiles Worth $60,000 — Machines in Fort Wayne," 19 June 1904.