In 1908, Henry Ford produced the first Model T, an affordable car for the masses, launching the Age of the Automobile. In 1911, Louis Chevrolet formed a competing company, and new cars began pouring out of factories. The traveling public demanded paved roads, and gas and service stations soon followed.
Around 1925, Nelson Kirk opened a Gulf station at Boot Road and West Chester Pike, selling gas for eight cents a gallon. On February 22, 1927, his younger brother, 22-year-old John Lewis (“Lew”) Kirk, signed a franchise agreement with Chevrolet to sell cars from a garage the brothers built on the family property.
The first car Lew sold was a Chevrolet Phaeton for $495. The Great Depression, two years later, was a setback, but the brothers also farmed, and the franchise endured through the Depression, wartime rationing and World War II. When the postwar suburbs began to boom, so did car sales. In 1949, Lew moved his dealership to a new building in the St. Albans Shopping Center in the heart of Newtown Square.
Years later, Lew recalled those early days to a Philadelphia Bulletin reporter: “In those days all one had to do to obtain a dealership was to buy one of the manufacturer’s cars. So I went to a bank, got a loan, and bought a Phaeton, which I sold to James McDowell, a blacksmith who lived on a nearby farm.”
“In those days people didn’t come to the agency,” Kirk continued. “We had to go to their homes in the evening or on weekends. Only a few people had cars, and with those who didn’t, we had to teach them—or a member of the family—how to drive. I went to Tarrytown, New York, to learn how to take a Chevrolet apart and put it together again. I was my own mechanic, salesman, and janitor those first couple of years.”
The original building at Boot Road went through a variety of uses after 1949. Those of us who have been around for the last 30 years knew it as the Mom’s Pizza building, but they were a tenant of the Kirk family. The Kirks sold the property in 2023 to a group that is planning to expand the nearby car dealership, with the use of the Kirk Chevrolet parcel for a “Classic Car Facility.” The old dealership building has had a good long run of about 100 years, but will be replaced by its 21st-century counterpart. And yet it is fitting that the small parcel at Boot and the Pike will continue to house an automotive use. And the location would come full circle if one day a 1927 Chevrolet Phaeton was sitting out front!
For more information on the Edgmont Township Historical Society, visit their Facebook page at: https://facebook.com/groups/edgmonthistoricalsociety/