Community Corner
Hello Cars, Goodbye Horses
The tipping point came in 1917, and Edmonds would never be the same. The auto had taken over, and in a few short months the downtown core was transformed from streets of mud, ruts and potholes to paved roads.
It started with Allen Yost, but it could have been anyone.
On a clear day in early 1911, Yost walked down to the wharf. But he didn't walk back. On that fateful day, Yost took delivery of a shiny new E-M-F Roadster, the first automobile in Edmonds.
He watched as it was unloaded, carefully inspected it for shipping damage, and took possession. He flipped the ignition switch, set the spark advance, turned the crank and smiled as the engine sprung to life.
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He hopped in, put it in gear and drove off the wharf, across the tracks, up Main Street and into the history of the town.
Heads turned, horses reared, dogs scattered, children ran behind.
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The ensuing years saw Edmonds gripped by a strange "motor mania." Everyone wanted a car, and the town was changed forever.
Yost quickly became the unofficial go-to guy for anyone wanting to join the motoring public. The next year he added a 1912 Cadillac touring car to his collection and opened his garage and dealership on Fifth Avenue between Dayton and Maple.
The Yost Garage was destined to become an Edmonds landmark and institution.
But Allen Yost was not the only one in town dealing in automobiles. Ernest Heberlein, owner of Edmonds Hardware, began selling Flanders cars out of his hardware store (Flanders, a former production manager for Henry Ford, was a partner in the E-M-F company. In 1912 he began producing cars independently.)
A few years later, Heberlein sank a fuel tank under the Main Street sidewalk in front of his store in the Schumacher Building (now home to the Chanterelle), and opened the town's first gas station.
Within a few years, cars had overtaken horses as the primary mode of personal transportation in downtown Edmonds. Cars were everywhere, and they were quickly spreading to outlying areas like Meadowdale.
But the town's infrastructure was not geared to support this new mode of travel.
While mud streets were fine for horses and horse-drawn wagons, they posed a mounting frustration to motorists, who quickly tired of bouncing over wagon-wheel ruts and finding themselves stuck in mud and sinkholes.
The City Council recognized this, and fast-tracked funding to pave our downtown streets and bring Edmonds into the modern world.
Work began in the late 1910s. Construction peaked in 1917, and by the end of that year the city was completely transformed from a 19th century horse-and-buggy village to a modern 20th century town of paved roads and automobiles.