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c. 1900 – 1905 and after
Built, not bought: Before Fort Wayne had a car company it had car builders. The 1910 News item above credits Marion Black and Will Peltier with constructing a car — a one-off machine, assembled by two of the city's earliest motorists, and the earliest documented instance of an automobile built in Fort Wayne. It was not a product and was never offered for sale; it belongs to the record as a construction, not a marque.
The schoolmaster's machine: On 27 September 1905 the Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel ran "Built Auto Many Years Ago — John Bounty, Schoolmaster, Early Chauffeur," an account of another local man who had built his own automobile years before the piece appeared. The item survives in the Allen County Genealogical Society's catalog of the automobile record; its full text was not recovered for this section, and it is printed here at that size — a second homebuilt claim, cataloged but not read first-hand.
The distinction that governs this section: Fort Wayne's brass-era record divides into three classes, and the entries that follow keep them separate: homebuilt one-offs, like the Black–Peltier car and Bounty's; a carriage firm's brief automobile production, in 1899–1900; and one organised motor-buggy company with a factory, officers, models, and a successor life in another state, in 1908–09. Only the second and third are marques, and neither survived the decade.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne News, 5 January 1910 — Black and Peltier's constructed car.
- Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel, 27 September 1905 — "Built Auto Many Years Ago — John Bounty, Schoolmaster, Early Chauffeur," as cataloged by ACGSI, Automobile History in Allen County (headline and date read; full text not recovered).