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 Columbia Street — Fort Wayne's first main street — describes their showroom as little more than a "hole in the wall." Local historian Bob DeVinney's reading of the earliest directories agrees with the picture the phrase paints: the city's first dealerships were modest affairs, more like agencies where buyers could make contact with the manufacturers than the showrooms the word now suggests.

The Auburn connection: A block away, at 205 E. Columbia, the Fort Wayne Auburn Auto Co. was in the record by 1909, advertising "High Grade Automobiles" through page after page of the 1910 city directory. Its line was built thirty miles north in Auburn, where the Eckhart family's Auburn Automobile Co. had incorporated on 29 September 1903 out of a carriage works, and the store is the dealer trade's first expression of the region's own industry: Fort Wayne selling the cars its neighboring town manufactured.

The makers next door: In the same years the sellers shared their small world with a maker of their own. The Economy Motor Buggy Co. stands in the directories from 1908, its factory in the Commercial Addition off Taylor Street, its owners J. Ferd and Kenneth H. Beuret and its president William R. Everett, an experimenter who had built an electric roadster and a light delivery vehicle before the company. Economy built electric buggies from 1908 to 1911 before the emphasis shifted to commercial vehicles and car production ended. The full account stands in Automobiles; here it is enough that in the trade's first decade a Fort Wayne buyer could purchase a car made in Fort Wayne, from a company whose president the directories name.

The first row: The directories of the same years place the Ideal Auto Co. at 714 and 716 Maiden Lane and the Roussey Automobile Co. at 219–223 Pearl St. — the trade already a small district of its own around the downtown streets, a decade before it had a boulevard to move to.

Sources:

1. News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne history project, 1900–1909 chapter (Brosius-Sesline; Fort Wayne Auburn Auto Co.; Ideal; Roussey), from the 1910 city directory and Bates and Keller, The Columbia Street Story (1994).
2. Allen County Genealogical Society, timeline and places pages (the 1910 directory's Auburn advertising).