The Bowser Site — the First Gas Pump and the "First Filling Station" Claim

Fort Wayne's claim on the automobile age begins at a grocery store. On September 5, 1885, Sylvester F. Bowser sold his first pump — a pump for dispensing kerosene — to Jake Gumper's grocery store in Fort Wayne, and from that sale he built the S. F. Bowser Company on the east side of the city. Bowser patented his improved pump in the autumn of 1887, and in 1905 the company introduced its Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump, fitted with a hose for filling automobiles. The installations of that pump became known as "filling stations" — the term itself is credited to a Bowser employee — and with Wayne Pump and Tokheim also manufacturing in Fort Wayne, the city became the gas-pump manufacturing capital of the world. In parts of Europe and Australia, a fuel pump is still generically called a "bowser."

The claim needs to be stated as the record supports it, and this chapter states it that way: what Fort Wayne owns is the pump and the word. The claim sometimes made for the city — the first gas station — attaches, on the documented record, to Bowser's pumps and the coined term "filling station," not to a station building; the first purpose-built drive-in service station in the documented national record was Gulf Oil's, opened in Pittsburgh in 1913. Gumper's store, the site of the 1885 sale, has not been pinned to a verified address in the sources consulted, and no location is given for it.

The works themselves are gone. Bowser's plant and offices stood on the 1300 block of East Creighton Avenue, where the office building was completed in 1917. Fire destroyed most of the plant in the late 1990s; the Fort Wayne Police Department occupied the office building until 2012, and the office — the plant's last substantial structure — was demolished in March 2017. As Indiana Landmarks wrote in its 2017 account of the demolition, in Fort Wayne today the only reminder of S. F. Bowser is a street named for him. The company, its pumps and the fortune it made are in the Business and Wealth chapters; the ground on Creighton Avenue is this chapter's, and what stands there now is nothing that tells the story.

Sources: American Oil & Gas Historical Society (aoghs.org), Bowser pump history and the Pittsburgh 1913 first purpose-built station; Indiana Landmarks, 2017 account of the Creighton Avenue office demolition (police occupancy to 2012; office demolished March 2017); Bowser patent record, 1887. The address of Jake Gumper's grocery store was not established.