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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 W. H. W. Peltier, E. B. Kunkle and Dr. G. A. Ross among the other early owners who appeared with horseless carriages in the first years. A second first-car story belongs to the visitors: at 3 o'clock in the morning of 18 August 1899 the first automobile most of the city had ever seen arrived from Toledo, a Weston Motor Carriage its owners, Harry S. Pickands and H. Tuttle of Cleveland, had bought for $1,000; they sheltered the machine in the Winklemeyer livery barn and registered at the Wayne Hotel. And a third credit stands in the city's own paper: on 5 January 1910 the Fort Wayne News, reporting that Marion Black was going east to build an aeroplane, described him as the man who had the first automobile in Fort Wayne, now seeking another distinction. The three stories are all printed because they measure different things — the first car the Sentinel's historians could document, the first car seen arriving, and the first owner the News remembered — and the record does not force them into one.
The first seller: Selling followed owning quickly, and it came out of the bicycle trade. Alfred C. Randall had been in the bicycle business since 1893; in 1902 he switched to an automobile garage and salesroom, and the Randall Motor Car Co. stands in the record as one of the city's first sellers — the pattern of the era everywhere, the bicycle shop's mechanical skill and its customer's trust carried over to the new machine. Randall bought a biographical sketch in a city history published in 1917, which is how his course comes down in his own generation's words.
Sources:
- Allen County Genealogical Society, Automobile History in Allen County (the Sentinel's 1914 installment; the Fort Wayne Daily News of 18 August 1899).
- News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne history project, 1900–1909 chapter (Randall; the research of Bob DeVinney), drawing on Bates and Keller, The Columbia Street Story (1994).