Ransom Olds and the Car That Survived the Fire
Near Lansing, Michigan
The story of how Lansing became the birthplace of the American automobile industry begins with a fire, a single saved prototype, and a piece of land donated by local businessmen who wanted the future to stop in their town.
Ransom Eli Olds grew up in a Lansing machine shop owned by his father. By eighteen ninety-seven he had founded the Olds Motor Vehicle Company, the earliest predecessor of what we now call Oldsmobile. The initial plant was in Detroit, where Olds had secured investors. On the night of March ninth, nineteen oh one, fire destroyed the Detroit factory. Workers scrambling to save something managed to push just one prototype out of the burning building before the roof came down: a small, lightweight runabout with a curved front dash panel and a one-cylinder engine. That car, the Curved Dash Oldsmobile, became the model Olds put into mass production.
The Lansing Businessmen's Association moved fast. They offered Olds a large parcel of land on the south side of the city, essentially for free. Olds accepted and built a new plant in Lansing. By the end of nineteen oh one his workers had assembled four hundred twenty-five Curved Dash runabouts. The process Olds developed, farming out component production to outside suppliers and bringing the pieces together for final assembly, predated Henry Ford's moving assembly line and made Oldsmobile the first company to mass-produce an internal-combustion automobile at commercial scale.
By nineteen oh four Olds had produced twenty-five hundred cars in a single year and the Curved Dash was the best-selling automobile in the United States. Investor pressure eventually forced him out of his own company. He responded by founding a second automobile company right here in Lansing, taking the initials of his own name, R. E. O., as the brand. The REO Motor Car Company operated on South Washington Avenue from nineteen oh five until nineteen seventy-five.
