McLEAN COUNTY HISTORY & GENEALOGY NEWS
By Euleen Rickard
In 1902 there were only 8,000 cars in the United States and the entire country had only one hundred and forty-four miles of paved roads. The maximum speed limit in most cities was ten miles per hour.
The first automobile, a gasoline powered, three wheeled German vehicle was built in 1885 in a factory owned by Karl Benz. He went on to manufacture automobiles and his company merged with another in 1926 to become Mercedes-Benz.
William C. Durant established the General Motors Corporation combining the Buick, Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac in 1908, later adding a firm started by Louis Chevrolet in 1918.
Henry Ford, a machinist, produced his first car, an experimental model in 1896 and in 1908 he introduced the Model T that the company continued to make until 1927. In 1903 he established the Ford Motor Company that last June celebrated its 100th year.
In 1913 Ford was in production with an assembly line turning out cars. Kenneth C. Davis, author of “Don’t Know Much About History” wrote “The innovation in manufacturing of the assembly line induced by Ford cut production costs and the price of a Model T, originally $825.00 was just $270.00 by 1925. On the assembly line conveyor belts brought parts to workers, each of whom performed a particular task instead of building a complete car.”
In a 1969 Messenger-Inquirer article by Frankie Hager, Mrs. Clyde Vickers told of the activities of the Vicker’s Bridge picnics held around the turn of the century near her home in McLean County.
She said, “the most exciting picnic was the advent of the first automobile.
Until the July 1907 picnic many Western Kentuckians had never seen a real horse-less carriage. And certainly they were not expecting to see one.
But an enterprising Owensboroan by the name of Oliver Vaught became the sensation of the day when he brought his auto to Vicker’s Bridge. Not only that, but making the most of his opportunity, he offered to haul passengers round trip to Sacramento for a quarter and did a thriving business all day.”
Anna Pearl (Welch) Mahon Lamb in a story about living in Glenville told the following, “While we lived at the Bristow place my oldest brother Clifton (Curley) bought his first car, a Model T, gas was 12 cents a gallon.
He was seventeen and had started to work at the Livermore Chair Company. One week he rode with someone and left his car at home.
It came up a storm and Dad decided to put the car in the barn, had never been under the wheel in his life. Mom and Myrtle got in the back seat, crazy like, Dad started it up and drove right through the barn. He started hollowing, whoa, whoa, like it was a team of horses but it did not stop until it hit the crib. The top hung on two 2x4s and stripped the top right off. There sat Mom and Sis scared half to death. Well, poor old Dad caught it! Mom jumped out and said, “You go straight up to the Bristows and call Clarence Fulkerson to come quick and get a top on the car before Saturday when Brother gets home. Oh, poor old Dad never lived that down!”
My dad owned a 1926 model T. We never went far from home as the roads were gravel and not very well graded and kept, nor were they marked with signs as they are today. There were a few wooden signs giving mileage from one town to another. Some cars had a “Blue Book” that described a few roads giving landmarks such as farmhouses, schoolhouses, telephone poles, et cetera.
In July 1927 Dad decided that we would visit his family in Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee, a trip just over one hundred miles. On the way, near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a tire went flat. In those days there were no spare tires, the car came with a kit of supplies and a manual of instructions for patching the holes of the damaged tire. Dad had never fixed a flat and had never read the instructions, so before he could begin the repair he had reading to do. Tires had inter tubes and the procedure was to take the tire off the rim and inter tube out of the tire, find the hole in the inter tube, patch it, then test to make sure the patch covered the hole well and the glue was dry. If the patch proved satisfactory, the repaired inter tube was put back inside the tire, the tire back on the rim and then pumped full of air. Pumping the tire up with a hand pump was quite a chore. The whole procedure took Dad about two hours. We were fifty miles from our destination and although hot and tired we made the remainder of the trip without further trouble.
The museum is collecting memorabilia, news articles and stories on cars and car dealerships of McLean County. On display at the museum is a McLean County 1930 license plate that once was used on a Model T that belonged to Ernest and Lillie Troutman of the Buel community.