Great Lakes Dining Car History
Lunch wagons and diners were built in the Great Lakes region from roughly 1913 to 1950. Though not as saturating as the east coast manufacturers, practically any town or village with over a thousand people had a lunch wagon at one time. Places like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo and Cleveland had dozens of wagons and diners over the years.
This page is split up into five sections. First we have the Main Players. The most significant builders to the area are followed by the Secondary builders who are the smaller builders of diners on the shores of Lake Erie. Those companies that were not as wide reaching with their product. Next we have builders from other states Ohio, Indiana & Pennsylvania builders. Diner builders of various importance who were based in some of the surrounding states. This is followed by the Lake Ontario builders who came around a little later and were building a slightly different type of diner. The final section is for Links. Here you will find various links to other information.
Main Players
Closson Lunch Wagon Company
Albert Closson was already building lunch wagons for about a decade in Glens Falls before his company was brought to Westfield by the Welches of grape juice fame. The company only lasted a few years in Westfield, and the true reach of the company is not known. Records are sparse. One page of a ledger mentions 10 screens for wagon #254 at .60 each.
The wagons themselves looked like a small trolley car, with its monitor roof and transom windows. Closson may have been the first person to bring electricity into the lunch wagon. for the time, Closson's wagons were quite spacious. His first wagons had seating for 11, at a time where many lunch carts only had a take out window or maybe seating for three or four people.
Richardson Lunch Car Company
Earle Richardson came from Westfield to Silver Creek with a lunch wagon for old home week in maybe 1909. It was said that his business was so good that he never left. By roughly 1921 Richardson started building and selling lunch cars that resembled the earlier Closson wagons. Earle was probably so personable that over two dozen local residents would end up buying Richardson lunch cars and running them in various locations in a region from Central New York into Ohio and up to Wyandotte, Michigan. When he sold the Penn Yan Diner in May 1925, one article said he had sold 36 diners so far.
Ward & Dickinson Dining Car Company
Ward & Dickinson is by far the best known manufacturer of dining cars in the Great Lakes region. Village mayor Lee Dickinson and hotel manager Charles Ward teamed up and hired the successful contractor Berthel Kofoed to lead construction of the next generation of diners. Not only did the company build roughly 320 diners, but for roughly 10 plus years they supplied many communities with a diner that fit the time very well. We will never know if it was Charles Ward's design patent or Berthel Kofoed's influence who brought Ward & Dickinson's famous look, but when you see a Ward dining car, you know it.
Secondary builders
Liberty Dining Car Company
Liberty Dining Car Company was born when Charles Ward left Ward & Dickinson in late 1927 and found some partners in Buffalo to form his own company. Ward made a few tweaks to the design, including six booths at the one end of his diners. The factory was located in Clarence, but the main offices were in downtown Buffalo. The company may have built as many as 60 or so diners. They were hampered by the depression as told by the company shutting down after their 3 year lease of theri factory was over and multiple confirmed Buffalo diner operators who still owed money had difficulty making the required monthly payments. A couple owners would owe more at the end of one year than the previous year.
Mulholland Dining Car Company
Mulholland of Dunkirk was a company building automobile bodies. Around 1925 they branched off into diners. They put more metal into the frame of their diners than other companies. At least one offshoot sales company was formed, the Dunkirk Dining Car Company by four local men who hired salesmen and went out to find locations for Mulholland built diners.
Sharpe / National Dining Car Company
Dr J.J. Sharpe was a Silver Creek dentist that teamed up with another local doctor to start building lunch cars on a small scale. They changed around with the design, starting with a car similar to Closson's design and then switching over to a barrel roof model later on.
Godell Hardware
Goodell was a hardware store in Silver Creek that decided to build a few diners. Their design was a mixture of a Richardson and a Ward & Dickinson. Buffalo ; Wellington Ohio ; Zelienople, Penna ; Bath, New York are the currently confirmed diners.
Spillman Engineering
Spillman Engineering was an offshoot of the Hershel Carousel builders in North Tonawanda. Around 1931 one of the employees had the company build a cottage style portable restaurant called a "diner dinette." A few more advertisements popped up in 1939, but very little is known of their uniquely designed portable restaurant / diner. There was supposedly one set up in New York city, but otherwise the only validated diners were in the Buffalo region and Sandusky, Ohio
Sorge Dining Car Company
Charles Sorge made an attempt to revive the legacy of diner building in Silver Creek, when in 1946 he teamed up with his brother to see if there was enough interest in diners built in the Ward & Dickinson style. They built maybe three diners with Oil City, Mayville and Ashtabula confirmed. They actually built at least one diner before the USA got involved in W.W. II which was sent to Oil City, Penna.
Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania builders
Bixler Dining Car Company
Bixler started out in 1925 in Fremont, Ohio as a company that built any type of portable building. They built diners, garages and play houses among other things. After a fire at their Fremont plant around 1928 they moved to Norwalk where they chose to dedicate their company to building diners. Their diners had a differnt design. They were built in sections at the factory, knocked down and then pieced together on site. This allowed Bixlers to be wider than other diners at the time. If you believe the one article that mentions a number, there were more than a hundred Bixlers produced. They were surprisingly popular in the lower Hudson Valley of New York state.
Dina-Car / Ohio Body Company
The Ohio Body Company built diners that looked very similar to Brill diners around 1927. Very little is known about the company.
Brill Dining Car Company
Brill was known for building railroad cars. In the mid 1920s they switched possibly four of their factories to building diners. Their best business was done in Springfield, Mass, but they also built diners in Cleveland, Ohio at the Kuhlman plant and possibly in St. Louis, Missouri. Brill diners were very boxy, made of metal and had a train car appearance.
Dag-Wood
Dag-Wood was a company started in Toledo around 1946 that went a different route with manufacturing. Dag-Wood built their diners as kits, which then had to be put togther by the owner. These were metal boxy affairs, similar to the boxy White Tower like hamburger buildings all over the mid-west. The original owner of the Ann Arbor, Michigan Dag-wood said that the company went out of business before the entire kit was shipped to him, and that the company maybe built half a dozen kits. One of their diners stayed in Toledo, another went to Erie, Michigan.
Richardson Lunch Car Company
Kind of a repeat listing, but did want to point out that after Earl Richardson passed away in 1925, his song Raymond took over the business. His wife's father, a real estate agent, became involved in the business and since they lived in Dayton, it was decided to move the company to Dayton in order to tap into a potential new market. the company did not last long in Dayton.
Brookville Lumber Company
John Carr of Brookville Lumber in Brookville, Penna built somewhere around a dozen diners between the mid 1930s and a few years after World War 2. His diners were unique as they had a barrel roof and a transom area with vents above the barrel part of the roof. Shortly, we will put a small page dedicated to the known diners that this company built. One article listed all the locations and most have been documented.
Wood Dining Car Company
C.G. Wood of Girard, Pennsylvania was building diners in Springville, Penna around 1926. Wood, and his father, built metal kids toys in Girard. How he branched off into diners. I do not know yet. It seemed to be, oh by the way, news in the Conneautville, Penna newspaper. One went to Conneaut Lake before it was moved elsewhere. The greatly remodeled diner in downtown Conneaut was built by Wood, as he was concerned with the mortgage of the diner in the 1930s. Wood was also noted as being concerned with the mortgage of a diner in Bowling Green, Ohio known as "The Jenny." He may have built one for Ashtabula.
Wood Dining Car Company
Brightmire was a builder in Indianapolis who around 1926 started building diners. They were building sectional garages and cottagettes, which seemed to be in line with what Bixler did. For may a few years, they branched off into diners.
Lake Ontario builders
Rochester Grills
Rochester Grills was started when J. Harry Shale left Bixler in 1935 and took a job in Rochester with the Barnard & Simonds Company. Through some arrangement, Rochester Grills was run by Shale with Barnard & Simonds doing the actual building of the diners so it seems. They often hired John Cody of Canadice to install the diners. Since Shale was familiar with Bixler's design, a Rochester Grills shared many of the same sectional design features as a Bixler.
Sterling / J. B. Judkins
Although the company was located in Merrimac, Massachusetts there are a number of reasons to include this company here. Judkins was building high end automobile bodies, and with the Great Depression in full swing, business was bad. In 1935 they bought a design patent from Bertrand Harley of Penn Yan for a sectional diner.' Between Harley and Anthony Tomberelli of Rochester selling customers on Sterling's new diner, New York state received quite a number of Sterling diners. Sterlings were built similar to Bixlers, but the diners were porcelain enamel clad inside and out.
General Diners
General Diners was started around 1939 in the Oswego / Watertown area by Morris Whitehouse and Arthur H. Halladay. After building three diners in Watertown they decided to rent a factory building in Oswego. For a year or so they were busy building knock down sectional diners in Oswego. Within a year or so they disappeared from the map other than a 1942 tiny blurb saying they were "building diners" in Syracuse.
Orleans / Superior Dining Car Company
Superior was a company out of Albion that built three diners in the late 1940s. This was another company that built sectional diners. One stayed in Rochester while the other two went to Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Future Expansion
Valentine
For the moment, check out the Valentine Facebook page and the Valentine pages at the Kansas State Historical Society.
Starlite / Valiant
Starlite was a retro diner builder from roughly 1992 to the early 2000s out of Florida.
Pioneer
There was a company offering modular restaurants / diners around 1940 in Kansas City
TBA
Probably a listing of the small diner builders of the recent past, who mostly hired modular home builders to build diner like modular restaurants. There were a few of them.
Links
Newspaper Articles
To be updated. Here are links to newspaper blurbs dealing with the Silver Creek vicinity.
Silver Creek Times
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Silver Creek Gazette
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Grape Belt & Chautauqua Farmer
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Dunkirk Observer
Individual Builders
Guy E. Russell - Was located in Ripley, NY and built at least one diner in his yard. In the 1930 census, his occupation was listed as a lunch car maker. The diner went to nearby North East, PA in 1930.
Peter Schneider - Built at least one dining car in Gowanda in 1922. Peter was a resident of Silver Creek in 1921. He moved to Gowanda late in 1922. His building of a dining car in Gowanda did not make the Gowanda newspaper. His car was probably replaced by a Liberty, Nelson's Diner, as it was owned by his son-in-law.
Ellis Omnibus and Cab Co. - A company that built some lunch wagons in Cortland, NY in 1896. A photo exists from a magazine called "Carriage Monthly".
Guedelhoefer Wagon Co. - Located at 307 Kentucky Ave. in Indianapolis, they offered a lunch car for sale in the classifieds section in 1910.
Meas Novelty Co. - Located in Warren, Penna they built at least one lunch wagon before World War 1.
Links
I'll place some links in here.
Unidentified Diners
THIS NEEDS TO BE CHANGED... This type of diner was scattered in western Pennsylvania. Starting in the mid 1930s, there were two of these type of diners in Brookville, one in Clarion, Franklin, Linesville and Altoona and probably more. No one has been able to figure out who built them. The above photo is from 1949 in Altoona, so it is unsure of Arthur Kramer was just a remodeler or the actual builder.
Contact Information
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