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NEAR MISS? Finally, the Story of How Bay City Almost Became Home to Buick

March 21, 2015       1 Comments
By: Dave Rogers

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How the Buick Motor Car Company nearly came to Bay City
 

For years, at least in my lifetime, the rumor has floated about how the Buick Motor Car Company nearly came to Bay City.

"The lumber barons kept Buick out, and Ford, too; they didn't want wages to go up," ran one school of thought.

"Nobody wanted the engine foundries that would belch smoke all day," was another theory.

No, the old-timers surely knew the real reason why Buick never came; they either were unable (unlikely with all the lumber millionaires here) or unwilling to raise the money Billy Durant wanted.

Or was there another, darker answer nobody wants to talk about?

Now Larry Gustin, an old State News pal from Michigan State, has nailed down the answer with direct quotes from Mr. Durant himself.

All this becomes even more dreadfully pertinent now that Buick is one of the "hot" cars on the market after being a stodgy "grandpa's car" for much of its first century.

Mr. Gustin, along with Buick maven Kevin M. Kirbitz, sails through 276 pages of a well-documented, and illustrated, yarn about the iconic firm under title of "David Buick's Marvelous Motor Car: The men and the automobile that launched General Motors."


Louis Chevrolet in 1914
Published by the Buick Gallery and Research Center of the Alfred P. Sloan Museum, the book has won high praise from the likes of the New York Times; "A good succinct history of the early days of one of America's great mainstream automobiles, and the men responsible for it."

"Larry Gustin fills a gaping hole in automotive history," wrote David L. Lewis, business history professor at the University of Michigan.

That this is the revised third edition says it all -- the book is a good read and is selling like Billy Durant's cigars.

"I walked all over Bay City," General Motors founder Durant reportedly told a friend, according to Gustin and Kirbitz. "I talked with businessmen I had once sold cigars to." (Durant had sold cigars in Flint before he turned to carriage making.)

"I talked to men who were working in lumber mills and in small factories. I visited the waterfront and determined that the harbor was available for shipping in raw material...and that automobiles could be shipped to distant places by barge and boat...

"I made an offer to the town that if the citizens would raise $100,000 I would match it and move the Buick Motor Company to Bay City. But the money was not raised and Bay City lost the Buick company."

Looking back, one has to guess that the stiff-necked burghers of Bay City were suspicious of Mr. Durant, what with his cigar selling past and their conservative old school attitudes rooted in easy money from buying timber lands for almost nothing and reaping the green harvest at $1 per man per day.

Why should they put up $100 grand for an uncertain automobile venture in a crowded field when that amount would buy most of the pine lands from here to the Straits of Mackinac?

Lumber must have seemed a better bet than horseless carriages; after all this was 1905 and autos were just coming into their own.

Race car driver Louis Chevrolet would not come to town until 1916 and the plant he bought was still producing pipe out of logs drilled in the center and wrapped with tar paper. Whispers had it Louie came here on the way to the Thumb where he knew a girl, but you can't prove it by me.

The Michigan Pipe Company and the National Bicycle Company of Henry B. Smith made legal history when the Smith family insisted on $125,000 cash instead of GM stock. The Michigan Supreme Court forced them all to become millionaires for generations by ruling the stock tender valid.

The filthy rich denizens of the Shoppenagon Grotto at the Bay City Club, 411 Center Avenue, may have heard that Buick had nearly gone bust the year before. They couldn't have guessed that by 1908, however, the firm was going gang-busters with sales topping Cadillac and Ford combined.

Buick was the first real success of the auto industry and was the foundation of the General Motors Corporation, several authors have written.

However, looking at the recent history of the demise of the auto industry dominated towns -- Detroit, Flint, Saginaw -- maybe the old Bay City cigar chompers could forsee what might happen a century later.

But no doubt -- looking at history in the rear view mirror -- had someone here had the foresight to tap a few pocketbooks, Bay City might have ridden the auto boom for a century. Who knows how big and prosperous the burg might have become?

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ggallagh Says:       On March 23, 2015 at 01:02 PM
Nive coverage, Mr. ROGERS.
Agree? or Disagree?


Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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