Cecil’s new book on sale now

BROOKINGS — A professor at the then South Dakota State College in Brooking owned the first automobile in town and was an early advocate for good roads and highways in the state at a time when transport in was mostly over wagon roads and usually muddy trails.

After Dr. Halvor Solberg, professor of Mechanical Engineering, became a proud owner of a one-cylinder Cadillac for $900 in 1904, he became a vocal advocate and active promoter for good roads in the state.

To make his point, Soberg set out to build what then would be a model South Dakota dirt road. With funds from the Brooking Commercial Club and the help of a road expert sent to South Dakota from the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., Solberg supervised a mile-long prototype using the latest technology to ensure longevity and improve dirt road travel.

Using his engineering students for most of the work, Solberg’s “road” soon appeared on a section of what is today Brookings’ 28th Avenue west, which is now graveled.

Interviewed by the press at the time, Solberg said the one-mile dirt road “was the first attempt in South Dakota to demonstrate to the people how substantial dirt grade could be constructed at a small cost per mile”.

He noted that his model road was built in one of the lowest areas of land, yet it had stood for years as a “monument to dirt road construction.”

Good road advocates in Redfield were so impressed with Brookings’ dirt road that they convinced the federal government to send the same Department of Agriculture’s engineer who had built the Brookings model dirt road to build another one near that Spink County community

The story of Solberg’s Cadillac and his model dirt road are one of the many in a new book about the early history of the automobile in South Dakota written by Chuck Cecil, Brookings author. His book is the first to explore South Dakota’s early and often bumpy introduction to the automobile.

His book, Grandpa’s Tin Lizzies, tells of the first spindly, hard-rubbered tired horseless carriage to raise dust in the state. It was a four-horse powered electric machine that appeared at the 1897 State Fair then held in Yankton. Grandpa’s Tin Lizzies book is available by mail for $25 at PO Box 872, Brookings. It’s also at the Brookings Book Company, Allegra, Ugly Duckling and the S.D. Agricultural Heritage Museum at South Dakota State University.

The first vehicle in the state was sponsored by the Montgomery Ward Catalogue Company to celebrate the automobile as the “Wonder of the Century,” and to promote the thick Montgomery Ward Catalogue. Montgomery Ward never marketed automobiles, but filled the catalogue with auto parts like batteries, tires and car maintenance tools.

Competitor Sears Roebuck did sell a car from 1908 to 1912. It came by rail in a wooden crate with tools and instructions on how to put it together.

Many early South Dakotans built their own versions of the horseless carriage. One, Thomas Fawick of Sioux Falls, while still in his teens, manufactured the Fawick Sioux and the Fawick Flyer, but production and sale was limited to less than a dozen automobiles before Fawick, a mechanic genius, went to Iowa to design farm tractors, He later became a millionaire for his inventions of clutch mechanisms, some of which were used by the nation in many of its WW II warships.

The first automobile owned by a South Dakotan was purchased in 1900 by Aberdeen real estate agent Ralph Brown, In the late 1890s, two Pierre men invented an internal combustion contraption, but financial difficulties limited their efforts to add enough power to their engine to enable it to climb the hills near the city. Their intention had been to compete with stage coaches which were then transporting people to and from Deadwood and Fort Pierre.

Although they failed, they deserve credit for inventing South Dakota’s first home-grown automobile.

Watertown during those early automobile days, had the most automobiles grinding up their streets than any other South Dakota community. The method of auto purchase, the purchase agreement and other correspondence between the buyer, a Wentworth physician, and the manufacturer of the $650 Stanhope Carriage is documented in the book.

Cecil’s book contains nearly 100 pictures and advertisements of old automobiles popular in the state from the 1890s to the 1920s, with the Ford Model T leading the way, includes legislative actions to establish automobile rules of the road. The legislature also directed the state’s less than 400 auto owners to register their machines with the Secretary of State in 1905, the first year that licensing of automobiles was required. Licenses cost $1 each.

The first ever South Dakota license, No. 1, went to James T. Bigelow of Flandreau, owner of a four horse powered 1904 Oldsmobile with tiller bar steering and a top speed of 20 miles an hour.

The book also recounts adventurous auto trips over the prairie from Ft. Pierre to Custer in 1905 by Peter Norbeck, future South Dakota governor. The West River jaunt was followed in 1915 by good roads legislator Joseph Parmley of Ipswich promoting the future Black and Yellow Highway to the Black Hills and Yellowstone Park. Parmley drove a Studebaker Six 349 miles over bad roads and quagmires from Lemmon to Big Stone City in 16 hours, which amazed everyone.