Seems to me that, when there were only, say, 5000 automobiles on the roads, gas stations wouldn’t have been very profitable ventures. So how did they get them fueled up? Did the auto manufacturers also supply gasoline? Were they even gasoline-powered? If so, were there, perhaps, factories using gasoline-powered equipment, from which consumers could buy their gas? My Google search was of no help.
Everything has a faq, even gasoline.
more on gas station history
According to this site, people went to the local dry goods store to buy gas. I think I also remember reading that the more well-to-do car owners had a large gas tank in their backyards for fill-ups.
I remember seeing a picture of a c.1910 chemist shop (drug store) with a sign out the front saying Motoring Spirit Sold Here.
“Gasoline?!?! I’m sure that in 1985, gasoline is available at every corner drug store, but in 1910, it’s a little hard to come by.”
Thanks, Doc. Watch out for that toilet, and don’t forget to wear your Kevlar
I grew up on a poor farm in the 1960’s, and most of our hardware dated from the depression era. I visited lots of older farms and abandoned farms to see what they did.
Basically, the nearest town would have a store that would bring in gas, often in 55 gal barrels. People would go to town to fill up, or they would purchase gas by the barrel and bring it home.
Our farm had a 500 gallon tank up on stilts so that it could gravity feed. We would hire a gas truck to come out and fill it once in a while when necessary, which wasn’t very often. Remember, even today farmers have to truck gas in for their tractors and combines, because you can’t exactly drive those into town.
That’s the way it was for cars early on. Drive your Model T to down, and the grocer would have a 500 gallon tank in back and sell you gas from it. Most people would fill extra tanks at the same time for storage at home.
And you also don’t want to pay road tax on fuel used in agricultural equiptment. Of course, every farmer I ever knew filled the family car from that supply, too. Technically illegal, but I don’t think anybody begrudged the farmer getting a bit of a break.
When cars first started to appear in the horseless carriage era, kerosene was already in wide use for a number of purposes, including lighting (no electricity yet). Gasoline could use the same distribution chain, since the oil companies made both products.
In Canada, untaxed farm gas was dyed purple. And RCMP officers did stop people and do spot checks to make sure that the family car was not running ‘purple gas’.
Still, as you say it was a very common practice. The odds of getting caught were very slim, and the punishment was mild as I recall. Basically a roadside ticket for fifty bucks or something.
It was probably just 150-proof booze to steel the driver’s nerves for the journey.
Yes, here in Canada farmers didn’t have to pay road tax on the gas they used on their farms (although you had to prove you were a farmer by giving land numbers, etc…). It ended up getting them maybe 1/3 off the price. Here in Alberta, my parents/grandparents would go into town with 8 or 9 45-gallon steel drums on the back of the truck to the service station (there were a few) or small refinery, where ever… to gas up for a while. An orange dye was added at that time (you could get white or blue gas from these places) that turned the gas purple, and made a lot of whitish-blue smoke when it was burned. Sometimes in a cold winter when the attendant’s hands were freezing grandad told the attendant he’d put the dye in. The guy would give it to him, he’d climb on the truck and start putting it in; the attendant figured everything was fine and went back inside to write out the bill, which was grandad’s cue to stop adding it and dispose of it somewhere else, ending up with 8 drums of cheap white gas (larcenous old guy he was). There actually was a fair chance of getting caught driving on the highway with purple gas since there were so many fewer cars for the RCMP to watch, and when you made $500/year, any ticket wasn’t welcome. Your neibors could also rat you out, but it depended who was doing the same of course. This stuff dates back to about the 40’s-50’s
The same thing is happening here in the UK with LPG (liquified petroleum gas)cars. People are loath to buy these cars until they can be sure that wherever they go they can fill up, and the oil companies will not install LPG pumps until there is enough demand for the product . A real “chicken and egg” situation. Tax free fuel for farms is also available here and you sometimes see trucks which have visited farms being stopped at the roadside and the fuel being checked by the Customes and Excise people.
WHen I was growing up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, the barn in our backyard had an old (nonfunctioning) gas pump in it, right against the wall next to where the car would be parked.