Ellis, Kansas: The Town That Built Walter Chrysler

The small Kansas town you are passing through produced one of the most consequential industrialists in American history, and the way it produced him says something about what this stretch of the Great Plains once was.

Walter Percy Chrysler was born in April of eighteen seventy-five in Wamego, Kansas, but grew up in Ellis. His father was a locomotive engineer for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and Ellis was a Kansas Pacific town through and through. The railroad arrived in eighteen sixty-seven, and within a few years the town was a cattle shipping point for herds driven up from Texas, a supply depot for the surrounding plains, and a busy node on the transcontinental route. The repair shops, the roundhouse, the constant rhythm of engines rolling in and out, that was the landscape of Chrysler's childhood.

He was a mechanical boy in the right place at the right time. After years of begging, his father finally let him take a job at the railroad yard, starting as an engine wiper, the person who cleaned grease and grime off locomotives. He was thorough. He was obsessive. He taught himself machinery from the inside out, moving from wiper to machinist to apprentice to plant superintendent, working his way across the American rail network until he was running locomotive shops for the American Locomotive Company.

The pivot to automobiles came a few years earlier, when he paid five thousand dollars, most of his savings, for a Locomobile touring car. He did not know how to drive it. He took the car apart instead, reassembling it piece by piece to understand how it worked. Then he drove it. Within a few years he was running the Buick plant for General Motors.

He founded the Chrysler Corporation in nineteen twenty-five. The Chrysler Building in Manhattan, completed in nineteen thirty, was his personal monument, briefly the tallest structure on earth. But the starting point was here, in Ellis, where a railroad engineer's son learned to love machines by cleaning the ones that ran through town.