Many decades ago, I heard a story that the Ford Motor Co. approached the San Antonio city government about building an auto assembly plant here. According to the rumor, the city turned Ford down because they did not wish to see labor unions come to the city. The outcomes were that Ford located in Arlington , and that San Antonio started a decline from the largest city in Texas to No. 3. Can you determine if this is fact or fiction? I think San Antonio entered the automobile era very early.
At dawn of automobile age, San Antonio was a hub of sales, servicing As for the elusive Ford plant, “That is a perennial comment, and I have been going through work that David Johnson and I have done ,” said Char Miller, author of “San Antonio: A Tricentennial History,” referring to fellow scholar David R. Johnson, author of “In the Loop: A Political and Economic History of San Antonio.” Miller, formerly professor of history at Trinity University and now at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
Ford Model A was a ‘national sensation’ Ford started a sales, service and parts operation in 1909 in Dallas, he said, adding assembly operations there in 1913. “The Dallas assembly plant at 5200 E. Grand Ave. opened in 1925 — 16 years prior to Ford signing its first UAW agreement. So unionization could not have been a concern to the businesses in the San Antonio area.
Short street’s name salutes pioneer car dealer The cornerstone for its plant and showroom was laid March 18, 1919, for the first — and apparently the last — of five buildings that had been planned on a 1-acre site at Roosevelt and Wilkens avenues. When it was completed, general manager J.W. Oswald told the San Antonio Evening News, Sept. 25, 1919, that Lone Star would be buying “certain parts of each machine, this being true of even of the largest plants in this country.
San Antonio or Houston: Which city was first to this major milestone in modern road construction? Lone Star went through three general managers, all with Big Auto experience, in as many years. It made a bit of a splash for hosting the three-day San Antonio Automobile, Truck, Tractor and Trailer Show, opened Feb. 28, 1920, for the San Antonio Auto Trades Association, with 200 exhibits of “the latest models of motordom.