The Wisconsin lakeshore town that gave America the car steering wheel
In 1903, most American cars were still steered with a tiller, like a boat. A Rambler built in Kenosha, Wisconsin, became the first American production car to use a steering wheel instead. For the next 86 years, this Lake Michigan city poured out millions of cars under a string of now-vanished badges.
The city's name comes from fish. Local Potawatomi called the spot something like place of the pike, and an early Ojibwa name described trout arriving all at once, a reference to the yearly spawning runs when thousands of fish swam in from Lake Michigan. European settlers from New York, led by John Bullen Jr., reached Pike Creek on June 6, 1835, after failing to buy land in Milwaukee and Racine. The village became Southport in 1837 and took the name Kenosha, adapted from the Chippewa word for pike, in 1850.
Cars defined the twentieth century here. A prototype steam car was built in town in 1900, and two years later the Thomas B. Jeffery Company, which had been making Sterling bicycles, started producing the Rambler runabout. Rambler and Oldsmobile were the first cars made with mass-production methods. Charles W. Nash bought Jeffery in 1916 to create Nash Motors, and when Nash absorbed Hudson in 1954 the combined firm became American Motors Corporation. A partnership with Renault in the early 1980s produced the Alliance, voted Motor Trend Car of the Year for 1983.
The end came in stages. Renault sold its controlling stake in AMC to Chrysler in 1987, and production that had begun in 1902 wound down in 1988. Like much of the Rust Belt, Kenosha shifted toward services. The smaller lakefront factory was torn down in 1990, and a chimney demolition that June drew 10,000 onlookers. The site became HarborPark, now lined with condominiums, a marina, museums and parks.
A restored electric streetcar line, opened in 2000, loops through the waterfront. Snap-on and Jockey International keep their headquarters in the city, which counted 99,986 residents in 2020 and sits between Milwaukee and Chicago.
Source: Kenosha, Wisconsin
