W. L. Edison at Greenbank

From The Sunday Star May 12, 1907

This is a bit of an odd post, only because I don't really have too much of substance say about it (although to be fair, that's never stopped me in the past). It's honestly not much more than somewhere between a padded-out blurb and a long, "Huh? How about that." It was something that caught my eye as I was looking for other things in the scanned copies of the Wilmington Sunday Morning Star that Google has online. I could get lost for hours just browsing through them. Come to think of it, I have.

What specifically caught my eye this time is the advertisement seen to the right. It appeared in the May 12, 1907 edition, and ran the following week as well. As you can see, it's an ad (almost a short article, really) for Premier* cars, one of the myriad of car manufacturers that popped up in the early days of the automobile, in what is now called the Brass Car Era. What initially jumped out at me and made me take notice of the ad was the address of Greenbank, Del. Since cars were still relatively new and expensive, most dealerships were in the city. Seeing one listed as Greenbank made me curious.

* The Premier Motor Manufacturing Company was founded in Indianapolis in 1903, and lasted until 1926. It changed hands numerous times in its final decade, and in the end made only taxis.

The next thing I did was to try to find any information about the name in the ad, W. L Edison. I was unable to find him in the 1900 or 1910 Census for Delaware, so I started looking more generally. The problem was, whenever I looked, all I kept finding were references to William Leslie Edison, the son of inventor Thomas Edison. I knew this couldn't be the right guy selling cars in Greenbank, so I kept looking.

Eventually, I came across a fact I never knew before -- W. L. Edison (1878-1937), Thomas Edison's son, actually did live in Delaware! For about the last decade of his life, Edison resided in a home in Westover Hills, and died there in 1937. He's buried at Lower Brandywine Presbyterian Church near Centerville. The younger Edison had a strained relationship with his famous father, and seems to have moved around quite a bit. He did many things, including inventing like his father. Below is a picture of him at work in his Wilmington lab, from what has to have been the 1930's.

W. L. Edison at work at his Wilmington lab

But more pertinent to our topic, he did also dabble in car sales, too. Unfortunately, apart from the newspaper ads, I've been unable to find any other references to Edison selling Premiers in Delaware. However, in July 1907, just a few months after our ads, it was announced that he would be selling another brand of car in Philadelphia. In the Quaker City he was selling Colt Runabouts, a car company from Yonkers, New York. That, for the most part, is as much as I know.

The ad at the top of the post ran in the Sunday Morning Star two consecutive weeks, followed by two appearances of the shorter ad below. After that, I can find no other mentions of Edison or Premier cars (although to fair, I was looking for ads and did not read every paper in its entirety). He may have continued to sell Premiers in Delaware, or he may have left here to sell Colts in Philadelphia. I'd love to find out which was the case, and if he did leave, did someone else take over as the Premier agent in Delaware.


From the Sunday Morning Star, May 26, 1907

The other big question is, of course, where was the Premier dealership at Greenbank? I admit to not knowing much about the auto industry at the time, so I don't know whether dealers would have had actual lots like today, or maybe just one or two models and a small office (or at home). And did Edison live near Greenbank, or was the business there and he commuted from Wilmington? My hope is that someday, someone will stumble across this post and have more information about this. In the meantime, I just thought I'd share a little something that struck me as interesting.


Additional Facts and Related Thoughts:

• Hagley has, online, a copy of a letter sent by John J. Raskob to Premier about securing repairs for his own car. Raskob was an executive with DuPont, and owned the estate that later became Archmere Academy. I don't know if there were any other Premier dealers, but he may have purchased his car from Edison.
• If you try to look up W. L. Edison and Wilmington, most of the mentions you'll find are from 1931 and 1932. He was in the news then, because for a time he contested his father's will.

Updated 1-23-19:

I believe I have found the location of W. L. Edison’s residence at Greenbank. In looking more extensively at newspapers from 1907, I came across the first little gem below. On March 21, 1907, the Wilmington paper reported that William L. Edison would be renting the property formerly occupied by Deputy Attorney General William O. Hastings, and would take possession on March 25. So where did Hastings (who would also later serve as DE Secretary of State, DE Supreme Court Justice, and US Senator) live, and was it at Greenbank? The next item, a real estate ad from March 6, 1907, shows that Hastings did, in fact, own a house at Greenbank.

On March 25, 1904, Hastings purchased 3 acres from Isaac and Maria Lloyd along Greenbank Road. This is the property erroneously shown on the 1893 map as belonging to a J. Floyd (close enough, I guess). It lies on the west side of Greenbank Road, just south of Newport Gap Pike. The bottom image shows its location in today’s world. There is an early 20^th Century house on the property today, which county records state was built in 1910. Considering that those records are often not precise, it’s hard to tell whether the house was built by the Lloyds before Hastings came, by Hastings after he bought the land, or by Elgarda Derickson (widow of Aquilla Derickson’s son Bayard) after she bought the property in 1908. In any case, it now seems clear that this is where Edison lived for a short time in 1907. It does appear, though, that his business office was located at the Clayton House Hotel at Fifth and Market Streets in Wilmington. The Clayton House Hotel is what is now known as the Queen Theater.