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The Dealerships · The houses that sold Fort Wayne its cars
Fort Wayne built trucks by the hundreds of thousands and designed the Scout, but the car most residents actually knew was the one a local house sold them, serviced for them, and took back in trade. The dealer trade has its own geography and its own dynasties: it begins in holes in the wall on Columbia Street, where an agency was little more than a place to make contact with a manufacturer, and it ends, for the purposes of this record, on the boulevards — Coliseum, Illinois Road, Lima Road — where the postwar houses still stand under their founders' names. What follows is the trade as history: the first sellers, the war that emptied the showrooms, and the family houses that started a long time ago and are still around, each carried at full size. The founding dates the houses publish for themselves are printed as they give them; where the public record brackets a founding without fixing it, the bracket is printed and the gap is named.
The first sellers: a bicycle man changes trades
1897 — 1902
The first car: The record gives Fort Wayne's first automobile to H. W. Meyer, who brought the first one to the city in 1897; the Fort Wayne Sentinel's pictorial history named him in its installment of 31 October 1914, and named…
Columbia Street: the first Ford dealer and a hole in the wall
1909 — 1910s
The first Ford dealer: The honor, on the evidence of the 1910 city directory, goes to the Brosius brothers. Andy and Jesse Brosius traded as the Brosius-Sesline Auto Co. at 117 E. Columbia St., and Bates and Keller's history of…
Grieger Chevrolet: the manager who went into business for himself
1923 — early 1970s
The founding: Clarence A. Grieger (30 April 1894 — March 1970) came up through the service side of the trade: the newspaper record has him first as a shop foreman at the Terre Haute Cadillac service station, then as the local…
The war years: the showrooms empty
1942 — 1945
The freeze: The dealer trade's hardest years came not from any failure of demand but from an order. On 2 January 1942 the Indianapolis Times carried the Office of Production Management's ruling under the headline "Sales of New…
Kelley: the pilot who became a Dodge dealer in ninety days
1952 — present
The founding: Jim Kelley was born in 1918 and raised on the family farm in the Depression, one of nine children, and he credited his work ethic to those years for the rest of his life. Off the farm he earned a pilot's license and…
DeHaven Chevrolet: one family, three generations, one near-death
1964 — present
The founding: Jack DeHaven Sr. founded DeHaven Chevrolet in 1964, in the middle of the postwar trade's best decade, and the house joined the city's Chevrolet succession in the years when Grieger's long run was ending: for a brief…
Don Ayres Honda: a Honda store from Honda's first American year
1970 — present
The founding: Don Ayres founded his Honda store in Fort Wayne in 1970 — the date the house gives for itself, and a date with a significance beyond the family. Honda had sold its first cars in America only the year before, a…
Glenbrook Dodge and the flag: eighteen employees to a landmark
1979 — present
The founding: Douglas McKibben opened Glenbrook Dodge in 1979 with eighteen employees, one building, and less than five acres of land. Dodge was the whole of it at the start. The house's own account measures the growth in the…
Bob Thomas Ford: the second Ford name on Coliseum
1980s — present
What the record supports: Fort Wayne's Ford trade began with the Brosius brothers' hole in the wall in 1910; its modern house is Bob Thomas Ford. The group's own public account brackets the founding rather than dating it …
Vorderman: the service shop that became the Volkswagen store
1990 — present
The founding: Reg Vorderman founded his business the other way around from most houses in this section: service first, sales after. In 1990, with his wife Connie and a small team of skilled technicians, he opened Vorderman Motor…
The auto rows: how the trade moved across the map
1910 — present
Downtown first: Read in sequence, the addresses in this section are the trade's map of the city. It starts downtown, where everything started: Columbia Street and Pearl Street and Maiden Lane in the 1910s, within walking distance…
