FRANKFORT – Long before global suppliers and modern assembly lines, Frankfort briefly had its very own automobile manufacturer – the Bour-Davis – turning out cars on West Kyger Street in 1917.
The Bour-Davis story began in Detroit, where the company produced its first cars in 1916, named for Chicago advertising executive Charles J. Bour and engineer Robert C. Davis. In 1917, the company’s assets were acquired by the Shadburne Brothers of Chicago, who moved production to Frankfort, Indiana, bringing carloads of parts and machinery into an existing building at 300 West Kyger Street.
According to automotive historians, the first Bour-Davis assembled in Frankfort went on public display on August 11, 1917, announced with a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper. Just ten days later, another full-page ad proclaimed, “Now There Are Three,” referring to three Bour-Davis Six models that had been put together in the Frankfort plant.
The cars themselves were notable for their slightly slanted, pointed radiator design on the Model 17 and Model 18B – a look that set them apart from many other cars on the road at the time. Priced in the $1,250 to $1,500 range in 1916, Bour-Davis aimed to compete in the mid- to upper-priced market, with plans at one point to sell a car for about $800 to broaden its appeal.
But the Frankfort chapter was short-lived. Production here remained very small – one historical account notes that only about twenty Bour-Davis cars were actually produced in Frankfort before the operation collapsed financially in early 1918. One former employee later recalled that when a car was finished, workers simply drove it to the freight depot; if it made it that far, it was considered road-tested and ready to ship.
By early 1918, the Frankfort venture had “ended in a snowbank three miles south of town,” as one historian put it, and the receivers for the original Bour-Davis company in Detroit stepped back in. In 1918, the manufacturing rights were sold to the Louisiana Motor Car Company of Shreveport, Louisiana, which moved production south and continued building Bour-Davis automobiles until the early 1920s.
In total, historians estimate that only a few hundred Bour-Davis cars were ever built, with total production between 1916 and 1922 somewhere around 1,500 vehicles at most – and a tiny fraction of those trace back to Frankfort.
Today, the Bour-Davis name is virtually unknown, even in the city where it was once assembled. Yet for a brief moment in 1917, Frankfort stood alongside Detroit and Shreveport as one of the few places in America where an automobile carrying its own marque rolled out of a local factory.
For residents who drive past West Kyger Street today, it’s hard to imagine that a little over a century ago a small group of workers there were building cars they hoped would compete with the likes of Hudson and Cadillac. The Bour-Davis never became a household name, but it left Frankfort with a little-known claim to fame: Clinton County’s quiet brush with the early American auto industry.
CLICK HERE for Wikipedia article on Bour-Davis