Weber Chevrolet Granite City

1902, Theodore Roosevelt was President, average life expectancy was 47, 14% of homes had a bathtub, 8% had a telephone, average wage was 22 cents an hour, the population of Las Vegas, NV. was 60, there was no Mother's Day or Father's Day, Sugar was 4 cents per pound, Eggs, 14 cents per dozen, and coffee, 15 cents per pound, WW I would not start for 12 more years, there were only 8,000 cars in the United States, and only 144 miles of paved roads.Weber Implement Company was founded by George Weber in 1902 on Main Street which is about where the Gateway Arch is now. The company supplied equipment such as plows, thrashers, sawmill equipment, wagons, buggies, and steam engines. It's sales were to farmers in Missouri, Illinois, and Arkansas.The warehouse for the company was in East St. Louis, Illinois where the goods came in by railroad. The steam engines that did the work on farms were fueled with anything that would burn including coal, wood, and corn cobs. Business was very good from the outset, and three years later the business moved to expanded facilities on the southwest corner of 19th and Locust Street. This was a short walk for farmers from the train depot at Union Station. In those days, everyone traveled by train and all shipping was by rail or packet river boat. In 1908, the company added automobiles to its lines as buggies and wagons were phasing out and the name was changed to Weber Implement and Automobile Company. At that time, there were 300 different manufacturers and Locust Street became known as “automobile row”. Some of the manufactures were the Hupp Motor Company, Mitchell Motor, Moon, Gardner, Doris, Saxon, Lozier, Maxwell and Chalmers, Lexington, and Gray Star. The Weber company became a distributor for Hupp Motor Co. and appointed dealers for the Hupp mobile over a 150-mile radius. Many of these new dealerships were service stations that took on the automobile. George Weber Jr. joined his father at the business during vacations from school