An old postcard of the Village Ford which lived on Dayton Street before moving to Xenia Ave. in 1962 (postcard courteous of Bob Baldwin Jr.)
Car dealerships in the Village
- Published: July 17, 2012
Two car dealerships? What else was there?
Check out this week’s paper for a special historical look at Dayton Street.
From the Yellow Spring News, 1969
4 Responses to “Car dealerships in the Village”
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I wish I was sharing more than fragments of memories….
Bales Chevrolet was originally in the YS News building. The long alley to the YS news entrance was where you drove your car for service. The garage door at the end of the alley was there until around 1980. I learned of this in the early 1970’s when the steel YS News sign across the alley at the Xenia Ave sidewalk peeled badly and the Bales Chevrolet sign showed through once again.
As a child of 9 or 10, I remember talking to a very elderly Mrs Oster who lived in the yellow house at 126 N Walnut (now beige and brown and looking a lot better that way). She told me that her family had owned the Model T Ford dealership in Yellow Springs and that it was originally Oster Ford. I assume that this is the dealership that was later Burdick Ford, then Baldwin Village Ford. Maybe Bob Baldwin would like to chime in on this one.
Finally, I remember that Aries Foreign Motors on the edge of town on Fairfield Road was an authorized Renault service center. I think that means dealer, but not completely sure. Don’t know if they ever sold any cars though.
I guess Mr. Turner forgot that he and my father also had a car dealership on Xenia Ave. in the 1950’s. I believe it was Seeley/Turner Foreign Cars. I’ll have to find photos to verify the name and dates as I was probably a year or two old at the time. My father also had another dealership before that located at the east end of Dayton St. where the bike and lighting shops are now located. I think it was Seeley Foreign Cars. He eventually moved it to Springfield and then to Austin, TX. I’ll find photos and post them.
Wow Clark thanks for the info! Do you have any photos of your place? You should post it on the Community ‘Fridge and maybe we could do a historical post about it!
From 1958 to 1962 there were three new-car dealerships in Yellow Springs: Village Ford, Bales Chevrolet, and Turner Foreign Cars (Jaguar, Triumph, Lotus, DKW, DB) at 1455 Xenia Avenue. I closed the latter when I returned to graduate school at Ohio State and sold the building to Bob Baldwin, who relocated his Village Ford dealership there from Dayton Street. When I completed graduate school, John Pobst and I opened a city planning consulting office in (who woulda thought?) the old Ford agency building that we rented from Bob.