BRATTLEBORO-As described by the Vermont Automobile Enthusiasts club, the automobile "was a rare phenomenon in Vermont in the early 1900s. However, there were a few Vermonters who thought the Automobile was a viable means of transport and they set out to formalize their belief."
One of those men was Andrew Chapin Wright, who lived with his widowed mother, Emily Harriet Wright, and younger brother Sherman on the corner of Greenleaf Street and Abbott Road.
Their three-storied white clapboard farmhouse with detached barn and henhouse was a far cry from their better-heeled upbringing, in Springfield, Massachusetts. The small family had unexpectedly lost their husband and father at a young age. They moved to Brattleboro to start their lives over again in 1912.
By then, "Chape," as he was called locally, was 18, and Sherman was 12.
Born in 1894 and 1900, respectively, the two brothers saw through their young lives the arrival of inventions, utilities, and technologies that redefined the modern era, including electricity, the telegraph, the telephone and, finally, the "horseless carriage."
I know this story because Chapin Wright was my grandfather and Sherman Wright was my great-uncle.
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During his first three years in Brattleboro, the young Chapin Wright took up farming. A few sheep, a couple of cows, some hens, and a large garden provided for the fatherless family.
No one remembers how Chapin Wright became involved with the automobile, but by the time he enlisted in the Army during World War I, he was assigned to the Army's 304th Motor Repair Unit because, according to his son, Chris Wright, who now lives in North Carolina, "when taking down Dad's history, the Army quickly noticed that during a time when few people had ever driven the newfangled contraptions, my father already knew how to drive a truck and repair automobiles."
Deployed to France, the Motor Corps was established to log, track, and maintain the new motor transportation.
Chris Wright suggests that his father was moved up the ladder to sergeant quickly because he was "a little older than the other boys and was one of the few who had actual experience driving and fixing automobiles."
He also was one of the drivers for General John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I.
Upon his return to Brattleboro after the war, A. Chapin Wright was one of the founders of American Legion Post 5 and served as its first post commander. By 1923, the two brothers started one of the first businesses in town to repair and service automobiles. They also sold parts for the new machines.
According to Chapin Wright's grandson - my cousin, David Wright, who still lives in Brattleboro - "Because of the war, most people had what they called 'old jalopies,' since buying a new car was still rare. They needed someone who knew how to fix up their old cars."
The brothers' first shop was on Canal Street, near where Portland Glass is now located.
"They were just getting their feet wet when the owner of the building had a divorce in the family and forced the Wright Brothers to their next location: on the corner of Main and High Street in Brattleboro, where Pliny Park is now located," David Wright says.
This move in late 1925, he says, would become the brothers' most successful location because they were right in the center of town. It would remain the site of a gasoline station for many years until it was torn down to make room for Dunkin' Donuts in 1970.
"They had a visible gas pump, the new kind of gas pumps that you had to crank to bring the gas up to the pump, and they had an oil tank that cranked the oil so that they could put it in glass bottles to sell," David Wright says.
The brand of gas was called Socony, an acronym for Standard Oil Company of New York, the company that later became first Mobil and still later evolved into ExxonMobil.
That building, and a large three-story building behind it, belonged to the Houghton and Simonds Department Store, on lower Main Street.
"The family had purchased the building with the intention of expanding their [business] into all three stories," says Wright.
In their new location, the Wright brothers offered automobile sales, service, and repair, as well as auto parts for the do-it-yourselfer.
The Wright Brothers received assistance from other family members.
Chapin and Sherman's uncle, Horace Kibbee, was an auditor for the Fisk Tire Company in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, so the brothers sold Fisk Tires, advertised with a drawing of a little boy with a candle holding a tire. ("Time to Re-Tire" was the product's advertising slogan.)
"The Fisk company sold both automobile and bicycle tires. They established bicycle clubs in small towns all over the United States," said David Wright.
"Uncle Horace was able to procure Fisk sailor hats, Fisk pendants - all kinds of stuff the kids loved. It was a big deal. Lots of local boys, including my father, Edward Wright, joined the bicycle clubs in high school. They would ride their bicycles to Bennington or to Greenfield on weekends, and thanks to Uncle Horace, they were the best-outfitted bicycle club around," he says, laughing at the thought.
The High Street building was made to showcase cars in the upper story windows. A huge Fisk Tire promotional sign hung in the windows for years.
That bicycle club included quite a group of boys, including Richard Lewis, Francis "Ozzie" Stowell, Frank White, and Dicky Taylor, all still students at Brattleboro High School.
With a central location, a broad spectrum of offerings of sales, and service of vehicles and their parts, Chapin and Sherman Wright were doing a whizbang business.
"But after one year, Houghton and Simonds Department Store decided they couldn't renew their lease because they were ready to expand their business," recalls David Wright.
The Wright Brothers moved their business a third time, back to Canal Street, into a building that, many decades later, would be demolished along with the adjacent Sportsman's Lounge building after a November 2024 fire.
An empty lot across the street accommodated sales of used automobiles. Inside, oak showcase cabinets showed off new and used auto parts. With a gas pump just outside the door, the brothers were back in business again on April 1, 1927.
Somewhere along the way, they also purchased a new machine: the Vulcanizer.
Chris Wright remembers his father telling him that the Vulcanizer was, for its day, a highly technical machine invented by B.F. Goodrich.
"It helped repair tires and tubes by melting the rubber," he said.
David Wright remembers that the machine "took rubber and sulfur and mixed it in such a way that a new tread could be put back on old, worn tires."
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By 1929, and for the following 10 years, the Great Depression rocked the country. Business began to dry up as people ran out of funds to keep their cars in running shape. The Wright Brothers focused their skills on finding junk cars to use for parts for consumers who no longer had a budget for anything new.
Both brothers served as listers and appraisers in town. Sherman Wright was called upon to appraise a building on Elm Street which housed new cars. The entire building had been totaled in a fire. After appraising the vehicles for insurance purposes, Wright bought the lot of cars for parts before he left the shop that day.
With a fleet of used automobiles for parts, and declining business, the brothers moved out of their Canal Street shop and split their duties.
According to the writings of Chapin's daughter, Janice Wright Bodor, who died in 2003, "My father and Uncle Sherm moved the location of their auto parts business just a bit nearer Main Street and seemed to be doing [all right]."
Around 1933, she wrote, they established a junkyard on the bank of the Connecticut River in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, just across the river from Brattleboro, stripping used cars for parts.
David Wright remembers speaking to his grandfather and uncle about those slow and lean years.
"Sherm had the new parts in the north end of the Wilder Block next to Brown's Photography [in downtown Brattleboro], and my grandfather had the junkyard. Chapin was the brother that froze his fingers getting parts off the junk cars," he said. "Meanwhile, Uncle Sherm was over there with the steam heat in the winter."
"They used to laugh about that," David Wright said. "One of them froze, while the other one was too warm."
Bodor had happier memories of those times, noting that the innovative entrepreneurs were able to pivot and change course quickly to survive the brutal years of depression.
"My father was an entrepreneur," she wrote. "To attract more people with some money in their pockets, he set up a small amusement park at the junkyard with playground equipment, animals in cages, and a snack bar building with penny machines."
One such attraction was the "Erie Digger," a toy steam shovel that, "for a penny, you could turn a crank and hope to shovel up a prize."
Bodor went on to explain how her mother did her part by running the snack bar each weekend, while she and her brother Edward played with other youngsters on the "Tilt-A-Whirl," a carnival ride where cars rotate freely while pulsing up and down.
Chapin Wright bought three monkeys as an attraction. Others contributed odd animals, including a mud turtle, a woodchuck, and a skunk. For 10 cents, a guests could ride one of three ponies.
"Ed and me dressed in cowboy hats, bandanas, and bright shirts as we led the ponies around the track with young riders aboard. Then Dad began to rent fishing boats and motorboats after building a wooden pier," Bodor wrote.
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In 1935, an ice dam on the Connecticut River suddenly broke up, and 8-foot-high ice floes severely damaged the junkyard.
By the winter of 1936, the junkyard had been wiped out entirely by a similar catastrophe that befell the state and the region. As the Associated Press reported on March 18 of that year, "Rising rivers, roiled by heavy rain, menaced Vermont Connecticut Valley communities today, inundating scores of highways and leaving Brattleboro without electric power.
"All roads to Brattleboro, except from Greenfield, Mass., were impassable as a result of a five-mile ice jam at Vernon Dam. The trouble started when another jam gave way at Bellows Falls, to the north, and sent the Connecticut river waters rushing through Brattleboro."
By that time, the brothers had finally given up on the auto business and purchased a local insurance office, which eventually became The Richards Group. In 1949, Sherman Wright went on to become a lawyer, and Chapin started his next business, Wright's Grille, on Putney Road.
Chapin died at the age of 94 in 1989, and Sherman died at the age of 88 in 1988, leaving behind a lifetime of entrepreneurship in and around their adopted town.
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I've always appreciated how the brothers, having lost their father and essentially being city boys, moved to rural Vermont and figured out how to make enough of a living to survive - and, sometimes, even thrive - no matter what the economics of the day threw at them.
There are still people in town who knew and remember them both as hard-working men, both with a wonderful sense of humor that kept them balanced despite their sometimes-hard luck.
I often wonder how we will describe ourselves as a town and a nation, how we will remember the people who lived through our current days.
Will these years post-pandemic be remembered as those of the wealthy 1%, contrasted with the numbers of homeless folks among us?
Or will we describe ourselves more like the Wright Brothers' era, when we reinvented where we could and persevered until we could eventually thrive again?
It will be interesting to see.
I believe that history continues to show us how the ways of the past, and the stories of yesteryear can continue to guide us on our collective journey into the future in the town of Brattleboro.
Fran Lynggaard Hansen, a Brattleboro native with deep connections to local history and to people everywhere, is a Commons reporter and columnist.
This News column by Fran Lynggaard Hansen was written for The Commons.