With increasing talk about prospects for an auto worker strike, it has been a little surprising to visit the morning paper's assessment in the "Selling Salem District" promo section of the size of car-related industry in Salem exactly 100 years ago.
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| August 30th, 1923 |
They feature a picture of the Vick Bros. Building on High and Trade, and listed all the affiliated businesses, along with the number of employees.
We would not use quite the same categories today. They included a number of transportation businesses, like trucking, delivery, and motor stages. They estimated
There are at least 1000 people who labor at tasks that are directly connected with the industry, and 5000 people dependent upon the industry. The first automobile came to Salem a little over twenty years ago, and now something like a fifth of the population in Salem and suburbs depend on the industry.
Even with rounding, estimating, and category caveats that's a large proportion!
It is sobering, then, to consider how quickly, in just two decades, autoism became a central part of the local economy, not just nationally and at the factories elsewhere.
And it is another reason that biking and other non-auto travel has struggled to gain a real purchase and grow. There are so many, spread widely, with a deeply vested interest in maintaining our autoism. If the auto industry is so crucial to the economy, how can we move past it?
A second detail of interest is the entry of the national oil companies into the local economy with multiple service stations.
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| Detail on chain gas stations |
We'll return to this, as mapping the sites of early gas stations seems like an interesting project.
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| Epilogue Kitchen corner, State and High Union Oil gas station, c.1925 (detail WHC 2016.090.0001.041) |
They were everywhere!
- Hallie Ford Museum of Art is on an old gas station site
- Epilogue Kitchen and our MPO upstairs are on an old gas station site
- The old UGM shelter was on an old gas station site (and a little more here)
- Liberty Plaza is on an old gas station site
There are also multiple dealership buildings and sites that have been repurposed, multiple dealers have gone on to be Mayor and even Governor, they've sponsored important philanthropy also, and revisiting all this in an overview will be interesting some time. (And also note their current politics. See at Slate, "Want to Stare Into the Republican Soul in 2023?")
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