The trade, part one: implement houses and agencies

1899 – 1939, as dated in the record

The thresherman turned dealer: On 1 March 1905, George W. Stout of Hoagland — the custom thresherman of the ancestor entry above — formed Stout & Gillett with his partner and went into the implement trade at 229 East Columbia Street in Fort Wayne, selling agricultural implements. The move is the trade's shape in one biography: the man who had run threshing machines season after season became a dealer in the machines that replaced the rig, on the street that served as the city's implement and agency row (the Automobiles section carries Columbia Street's car agencies; the implement houses shared the street and the pattern).

The harvester companies were here first: The Wisconsin Historical Society's International Harvester photo albums hold a photograph, dated 1899, of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company's Fort Wayne dealership — a three-story brick building with the company's slogan painted up, "What we say we do we do do," and its general agent, Mr. Frazier, named in the record. The great harvester firms sold through general agents and dealers in this city a generation before the tractor; when the tractor came, it came through that existing trade — implement houses and agencies taking on tractor lines beside their plows and binders — and not through any factory of its own here.

The trade's weight, and where its names live: The Business Owners Roster carries this trade name by name across the directory era — 113 tractor-and-implement names in its count — and this section deliberately narrates the trade's shape rather than re-listing them. Its weight in dollars is in the census: in 1939, Allen County's farmers spent $473,206 on implements and machinery, reported by 1,416 farms — the market the Columbia Street houses, the branch house of the next entry, and their competitors across the county divided among themselves.

Sources:

1. History of the Maumee River Basin (1905) — Stout & Gillett formed 1 March 1905, selling agricultural implements at 229 East Columbia Street, Fort Wayne.
2. Wisconsin Historical Society, International Harvester Company photo albums — the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company's Fort Wayne dealership, photographed 1899; general agent Mr. Frazier; the slogan "What we say we do we do do."
3. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, Volume I — Indiana County Table X, items 40–41: Allen County expenditure on implements and machinery, 1939 — 1,416 farms reporting, $473,206.
4. The Business Owners Roster — the roster's 113 tractor-and-implement names, cross-referenced and not re-listed here.