This article published in the Charleston Gazette in 1922
New Fangled Machines Gave Owners More Fun Than Ride
Richard Grill “Daddy of Them All” Locally and Dr Butts Tells of First Automobiles Here
A middle-aged unassuming man in work clothes spotted with grease mounted a rail partition talked.....
And
as he talked, gesturing occasionally with one hand, there was unrolled
before his hearers the panorama of a mighty industry, now the second in
the country.
For he was Richard Grill, “the daddy of them all”
in the automobile game in Charleston. He has more “firsts” to his
credit in the game than Charlie Paddock has on the cinder track.
Dick
Grill took on the automobile business as a sideline 21 years ago when
he conducted a bicycle repair shop where the new municipal building now
stands. He considered it more attractive from an amusement
standpoint than he did from a financial angle. He did not realize
how quickly and how amazingly the automobile business was to develop.
With
Grill in the bicycle shop and later in the first “garage” in
Charleston, as well as the first in West Virginia, was Roy Couch.
Couch later went to Florida where he became interested in the orchard
business, but recently he has been lured back by the automobile game.
“In
those days,” Grill said, as he sat on a rail at the plant of the Triple
State electric company where he is foreman, “we did not handle one make
of car. We sold a man any kind of car he wanted.”
 1903 Curved Dash Olds
First Car a One-Cylinder
“I
remember one of the first cars we had was a one-cylinder Olds. It
looked just like a buggy without shafts. It had a big carved
dashboard in front and one of those handle steering gears.”
He laughed as he recalled the first cars that were driven over Charleston streets.
“Then
we had the Cadillac one cylinder and several other single cylinder
cars,” he continued. “After a while Ford came out with the first
two-cylinder car, and then Overland brought out a two-cylinder machine.”
Dr.
J. Fleetwood Butts, dentist, owned the first car brought in Charleston,
the veteran of “automobile row” said. He brought it in from
Rochester, and it was the first car in West Virginia as well as the
first in Charleston.
“Just about that time I built an automobile
of my own,” Grill continued. “I made it over in the bicycle shop
from what information I had picked up through reading about the first
automobiles in the east. It ran as good as any of them. I
saw it on a dump about three years ago.”
Dr. Butts laughed also as he told of the first “horseless carriage” in the city.
“I
remember when I first drove it down Summers street,” he said.
When I got to State street, the horses up and down the street as far as
Court street on the one side and Capitol street on the other began
cutting up all kinds of capers. People all ran after me to see
the buggy that was running by itself.
Horses and People Afraid
“One
of the first trips I took was out the Sissonville road. It was a
funny thing that the country horses did not pay any attention to the
machine like the city horses did. The country horses acted as if
they had always been used to automobiles. But some of the people
in the country acted funny. When they saw me coming they ran for
the back of the house, and after I had passed they ran back out again
to look at me while I went down the road. We were limited then to
a radius of about 13 to 18 miles because when we had gone that far we
had to return to charge the machine up again. I had to do all my
repair work then because there were no garages. I usually took an
afternoon each week to do it, for you could not adjust one of the
things, you had to take it all apart and put it back again.”
After
Dr. Butts had blazed the way with his car, others in Charleston began
buying the new machines. Among the first few to own automobiles
were M. F. Mohler, M. S Johnson, the late Dr. T. L Barber, S. M. (??)
Snyder, Dave Patterson, and D. C. Boyce.
It was when these first few cars came to town that Grill and Couch opened their automobile repair shop.
“The
first car brought to us was a French car – a single cylinder,” Grill
said. “After that they came in every once in a while, and more
people wanted cars so we started to sell them. We moved from the place
where the city hall now is to the place where Marshall’s grocery is in
Quarrier street.
How First Garage Moved
Later
the first garage moved to the site now occupied by the Elks club, then
to the site where the Daily Mail now stands and then to the place where
the first Triple State electric company building is in McFarland
street. The garage was situated there when one partner left for
Florida.
“That little group of first automobile owners had a lot
of fun in those days,” the veteran auto man of Charleston went
on. “Every horse in town was afraid of those machines. Wen
you approached a horse, you had to stop so that the horse could be led
by the machine. Then you had to get out and crank for half an
hour so that you could get to the next corner where you would have to
pass another horse. If you dressed up and went out for a ride you
would come back looking like you put in a day working in a boiler
factory.”
“They used to claim that those machines would make 25
miles an hour, but I never saw one that did. If you made 15 miles
you were going fast. Six miles was about the average speed around
town.
And he laughed again as he recalled the first days of motoring.
I
was the first man to climb the Bigley School hill grade on high,” he
said. “It was the talk of the town. For a long time after
that if someone would pull that grade on high it was the conversation
of the afternoon.”
“The hills on the country roads used
to give us trouble. We could pull them all right if we were
prepared, but you see those cars ran by steam generated by
gasoline. If you fired up and got a lot of steam before you
started up the hill you could make it. But if you did not, you
would have to back down and get up steam before trying it again.”
And
the veteran of automobile row laughed again as he motioned to the
liveried chauffeur of a large modern luxurious seven-passenger
automobile to “come on in.”
The End
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