The street record: garages, gasoline, jitneys, and the motor club

ROW 11 · HIGHWAY HALF OWNED BY TRANSPORTATION; THIS HALF PART-DUG, PART-GAP

The highway half of this row is already whole — State Road 23's designation (1930), the Toll Road (1956) and its late interchange, the widening and roundabout era stand in the transportation leg and are not re-run here. What remains is the street-level half, and it divides honestly in two: the motor club digs, and the garage record gaps: the organized motorist arrives in this county's record through Indianapolis. The Hoosier Motor Club began in 1902 as the "Flat Tire Club" of Indianapolis enthusiasts, reorganized under its lasting name in 1911, and affiliated with the American Automobile Association in 1917 with nearly 500 members; by the 1960s AAA Hoosier Motor Club served 50 of Indiana's 92 counties — this county among the AAA's Indiana territory in the mature system — from 11 branches statewide in the 2020s count. Its federation partner, the Hoosier State Automobile Association, is the body the South Bend press of record shows at work in this county's own decade: the South Bend News-Times of 2 August 1915 carried the new Hoosier Motor Club's state organization plan (local clubs in the principal cities, AAA affiliation intended — the two state bodies' near-identical names print here exactly as the papers give them, a confusion the era itself maintained), and the News-Times of 8 July 1917 reported the Hoosier State Automobile Association's annual meeting: credit claimed for the state highway bill, the road-sign bill, the auto-theft felony bill and the dimmer bill, and the adoption of a statewide system of marked automobile trails — the law of the street and the signing of the roads, made in the years when Harris Prairie's roads were still dirt. The BMV leg prints the association's other street function: its 1921 plan for local branches holding license plates, so a motorist need not mail Indianapolis and wait — the club as the licensing system's first storefront, though whether it ever kept a counter in this county is that leg's GAP-BMV-9, undisturbed.

GAP-AUTO-11 — first garages and agencies, the gasoline record, and the jitney course on this ground. No first garage, first agency, first gasoline sale or pump, and no jitney operation seated in Clay or Harris townships appears in the Polk directory, gazetteer, or press record reached; the one dealer-side fact in hand runs the other way — the business leg's tested negative that no automobile dealership ever seated in the CDP, with residents buying on the Mishawaka and South Bend dealer rows (the News-Times of 1917 already carries the cities' dealer advertising, the Overland South Bend Company, distributors, among it). Jitneys — the five-cent informal taxis that flooded American cities in 1914–16 and were regulated out within the decade — ran, where they ran in this county, on city streets; no township jitney, route, or ordinance fight for this ground is in the record reached. Settlers: the Polk classified sections and Indiana State Gazetteer village listings (Indiana State Library; St. Joseph County Public Library), the Tribune and News-Times full text 1905–1930, and the Hoosier State Automobile Association's own records — the same shelf, in short, that settles GAP-AUTO-1 and GAP-AUTO-2, and the four gaps should be dug in one pass when the library read is run.

Sources:

1. Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, "Hoosier Motor Club" (revised November 2024) — the Flat Tire Club (1902), reorganization (1911), AAA affiliation (1917), 50 counties by the 1960s, 11 branches in the 2020s.
2. South Bend News-Times, 2 August 1915 and 8 July 1917 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the state motor-club organization plan; the Hoosier State Automobile Association's legislative record and marked-trails system; dealer advertising in the same runs.
3. BMV leg — the association's 1921 plate-branch plan (Kokomo Tribune, 13 July 1921) and GAP-BMV-9, undisturbed.