On August 8, 1928, a cover letter and a typewritten résumé went out from Cleveland to the men of the local chamber of commerce. The name at the top of the page was Louis Chevrolet. He was forty-nine years old. He was looking for investors in an airplane engine, and he was writing down his employment history for businessmen who had most likely driven cars bearing his surname to work that very morning.
The letter and the résumé still exist, preserved in the Cleveland Public Library, inside the files of a company he had founded that spring and would not own for long. By that date in August, the man and the car that carried his name had been two separate legal entities for fifteen years. The surname had been incorporated, trademarked, recapitalized, and used to acquire General Motors, the market leader in the United States. Of that company, nothing remained to him, because the fifty shares granted to him at its founding had returned to the financier who controlled it under terms no surviving document records.
Everything that made that letter necessary happened within a single decade, inside offices in Detroit and Flint, on paper he himself signed. General Motors, in its own official brand history, admits that legends surround Louis Chevrolet and that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. That warning belongs at the start of the story, because its decisive moments survive in company records and files, while the tidier versions appeared much later. Part of the importance of those documents is that most of his mementos and engineering drawings were destroyed when his sister’s house in New Jersey burned down.
What the records agree on is the beginning. Louis Joseph Chevrolet was born on Christmas Day, 1878, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the French-speaking canton of Neuchâtel in the Swiss Jura. His father, Joseph Félicien Chevrolet, was a watchmaker. His mother was Marianne Angélina Mahon, and the family originally came from Bonfol, a village in the Jura canton, where his father returned to work while Louis was still a small child.
He was the second of seven children in a family that moved wherever work was found. In the late 1880s, the family crossed the border into France and settled in Beaune, in the Côte-d’Or, in the heart of Burgundy wine country; sources disagree on the exact year. What everyone agrees on is what happened next, which is the defining station of his entire formation. His father opened a watch shop in Beaune, and by General Motors’ own account the business venture was not successful.
As a result, the company’s historical record continues, Louis began working at the age of eleven to support his family. The precision trade he was born into failed before his eyes, so the boy who might have become a watchmaker went to work in a bicycle shop, repairing carriages and bicycles. He worked as a guide in the wine cellars of Beaune for extra money, and he built his own bicycles to sell under a trade name he invented for himself. He called them Frontenac.
That detail deserves a pause. Thirty years later, as a grown man in Indianapolis who had lost the commercial right to use his family name, the name he chose was the one he had invented in his teens in a French town famous for wine. He also built a wine pump from a damaged single-cylinder engine salvaged from a tricycle. The Automotive Hall of Fame preserves the questions the boy asked his family at the dinner table, the only sentences from his childhood speech that anyone thought to record: “What makes it work?
How does it go? Can’t it go faster? ”
On July 16, 1895, the Journal de Beaune published the results of a local bicycle race and described its winner as “the daring Louis Chevrolet. ” That provincial French newspaper was the first printed matter anywhere to place his name beside the idea of speed.
He was sixteen. He worked, and he was already fast. The other story from Beaune is the one every popular account reaches for, and it is worth telling the way General Motors’ own historians tell it. In the version repeated for a century, the young mechanic was sent to the Hôtel de la Poste in Beaune to repair a steam tricycle belonging to a visiting American, said to be the millionaire Vanderbilt, who was so impressed that he told the boy there was work for him in America.
General Motors prints the tale, then in the very next line of its brand history states flatly that the truth of this rumor cannot be confirmed. The Swiss society that preserves his memory repeats it as fact. That is how legends work. What is not disputed is that he left for Paris and took up the craft that was replacing his father’s.
Apprenticeships in the late 1890s are recorded in four different arrangements by four different institutions; the name Darracq appears in all of them, while De Dion-Bouton, Mors, and Hotchkiss appear in some. The pattern matters more than the difference. A Swiss-born boy who came out of a failed watch shop spent his adolescence inside workshops where the internal combustion engine was being invented in public, and he learned it the way his father had learned watch balances. Then he bought a ticket west.
He crossed the Atlantic in 1900, arriving via Quebec, worked in Montreal as a chauffeur and mechanic, and reached New York City the following year. In New York he found work with a fellow Swiss immigrant named William Walter, and shortly afterward joined the American branch of De Dion-Bouton, the French company whose engines he already knew. The first surviving American document about him is not a race result but a police report. On June 30, 1901, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that he had struck a bicyclist while driving a De Dion-Bouton.
He was twenty-two, only months in the country, and already in the papers for driving too fast in a French vehicle. In 1902 the De Dion-Bouton branch closed and he was out of work, so he drove for the Trevoux family, a French household in New York, where he met their daughter, Suzanne Estelle Trevoux. They married in July 1905. In that same year he found the thing he was truly made for.
On May 20, 1905, at Morris Park in New York, Louis Chevrolet entered his first automobile race, driving a 90-horsepower Fiat. He beat Barney Oldfield, the most famous driver in America, and Walter Christie, the most innovative, at a recorded speed of 68 miles per hour. It was his first race and his first victory, and the event is recorded as the first sanctioned race in an American national championship. Later that year he beat Christie again in a one-mile race at Cape May, New Jersey, and defeated Henry Ford at the same event.
The American sporting press, based on all this, decided he was French. He had been born in Switzerland. He had spent his working adolescence in France. He spoke French.
His name sounded wealthy and luxurious to American ears. So the newspapers gave him a nationality he did not hold and marketed him to the crowds as “the daring Frenchman. ” It was the first time others had exploited the commercial value of the name Chevrolet and used it for something Louis Chevrolet did not control. It would not be the last.
The racing career of that decade was not a steady job but a series of short contracts with anyone who owned a fast car. He joined the Bliss automobile company in February 1906, and four months later the incorporation papers of the Chevrolet Cannon Auto Company were filed, the first business venture to bear his name. Almost nothing survives of that company, which is telling in itself. For the rest of his life, his name on a company letterhead was never a good indicator that he owned the company.
Later that year he moved to Philadelphia to work for Walter Christie, the man he had beaten twice, and was appointed first assistant on Christie’s new front-wheel-drive car. In January 1907 he joined Autocar in Philadelphia, and on the first day of 1908 he was made vice president of a company called Direct Motor Drive. Meanwhile his brothers were arriving from France; after their father’s death, Louis brought the family over, and both Arthur and Gaston Chevrolet could drive as well. The police record continued in parallel with the race results.
A newspaper clipping archive assembled by Chevrolet brothers researchers holds an article from the World dated October 12, 1905, documenting his arrest in New York for driving a vehicle without a license plate. Eight years later in Washington, he was stopped for speeding, just four days after a newspaper published his statement that he intended to stay away from racing. The pattern lasted thirty years. By the end of that decade, American racing was consolidating.
Money moved from private owners to factory teams, and the most lavish spender on racing was a carriage salesman from Flint, Michigan, who had acquired a struggling brand called Buick. In 1907, according to the account preserved in the Encyclopedia of World Biography, that man invited the Chevrolet brothers to Flint to test them as his personal driver. That informal test settled the family’s future. Arthur got the job of personal chauffeur because he was the more careful driver.
Louis won the race that day and was invited to work on the racing side of the company, though his official appointment to the Buick team was still two years away. That appointment itself dates to a New York Times report of February 12, 1909, recording that Louis Chevrolet had joined the Buick racing team. The story of how he got that job is the best one anyone has collected about him. At a race meeting in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, his own car broke down beyond repair and put him out of competition.
Instead of going home, he was asked by the Buick team manager, William Pickens, to help get the damaged Buick of Louis Strang back into running condition. He worked all night, improvising parts for a car in which he had no interest. Strang won the next day, and Pickens hired the mechanic who had stayed up all night to make his rival capable of winning. Everything that followed in his life was contained in that night, including the side that destroyed him: he could not stop fixing machines, even for people who were not paying him.
The Buick years gave him factory support and a string of results. In 1909 he won the Cope Cup in Indiana, a race variously described as 395 miles at Lowell and 400 miles at Crown Point, by a margin the Genesee County Historical Society put at 65 seconds, driving a Marquette-Buick hybrid built to his own specifications. He won the Yurick Cup at Lowell, Massachusetts. He won the Giants Despair hill climb, and shared the Prest-O-Lite Cup with Burman and Strang at a new track called the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
He was counted as one of the three designers of the 1910 Buick 60 Special, the stripped-down racing machine known as the Buick Bug, built in his own shop on Grand River Boulevard in Detroit. At the end of the 1909 season, the financier of all this activity, William Crapo Durant, gave every member of the Buick racing team a $10,000 bonus. Louis, Arthur, and Gaston moved to Flint and lived in a house on Root Street just north of downtown. Arthur drove Durant, and the three brothers became the most conspicuous foreigners in the Michigan factory town.
The historians of Genesee preserve one scene worth more than any painting. Chevrolet and Bob Burman raced each other down Saginaw Street, Flint’s main thoroughfare. Chevrolet’s car flipped over, landed back on its wheels, and without stopping to check anything, he hit the throttle and disappeared up a side street. He was a big man, nearly six feet tall and around 200 pounds, and the sport he chose killed men at a rate a modern reader would find hard to accept.
On October 1, 1910, on the Old Country Road near Hicksville, Long Island, it nearly killed him, and it did kill the man sitting beside him. Chevrolet was leading the first eight laps of the Vanderbilt Cup in his Marquette-Buick, number 29, when a steering knuckle broke at speed on the sixteenth lap. The car hit a parked touring car containing three women, crashed through a fence, struck a tree, and came to rest upside down. His riding mechanic, Charles Miller, was trapped in the wreckage and died on the spot.
The three women in the parked car were unhurt. Chevrolet was thrown clear with a dislocated shoulder or a broken arm, depending on the account you read. Two riding mechanics died on Long Island that evening, and the Vanderbilt Cup never returned there. A year and a half later, one of the accident victims filed a lawsuit against the Buick Motor Company.
Durant’s reaction was to pull his star driver out of racing. General Motors, in its summary of his racing career, says he spent nearly three years in hospital beds as a result of various accidents. Then came the insult he carried to his grave, and it happened at the most famous track in America. On May 30, 1911, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway held its first 500-mile race.
Arthur Chevrolet started fourteenth and dropped out after 30 laps with a broken crankshaft. Louis was assigned as a relief driver for the team. He went out and turned the fastest qualifying lap of anyone on the track, at a speed above 100 miles per hour. The team manager, Doc Warren, had not submitted his entry until after the deadline.
The other drivers were asked to approve the late entry of the fastest man on the track, and they refused. The researcher Ken Kaufmann, who spent decades in the corporate archives on this story, describes the situation in six words: “An insult Louis never forgot or forgave. ” He was thirty-two. He had turned the fastest lap on the track, and a committee had told him he could not race.
Nine weeks earlier, he had opened a shop in Detroit with Durant’s money and arrangements built around him. They were about to take far more from him than a chance to race. The circumstances that produced the Chevrolet Motor Car Company had nothing to do with Louis Chevrolet and everything to do with debt. On September 26, 1910, the bankers who had rescued General Motors took control of it for the five-year term of the loan, and Durant, who had assembled the company from Buick, Oldsmobile, and Cadillac, found himself the founder ejected from the business he had built.
He needed a new company through which to return. The General Motors Heritage Archive keeps his account of what he did about it: “We needed a car, so I built it. ” The company’s official global brand history is less romantic about why he chose the partner he chose. It states that Durant’s interest was not only in Chevrolet’s performance as a race driver, but more in his resonant French surname, which sounded good to financiers, and that, as with the failing Buick company he had bought in 1904, the name was what closed the deal.
That sentence, published by General Motors about General Motors, is the most important line in this entire story. On March 13, 1911, Louis opened a shop in Detroit with Durant’s backing, in a room over a garage on Grand River Avenue, and hired an engineer to design the car. The engineer was Étienne Planche, a Frenchman who had worked alongside him in a Brooklyn shop a decade earlier. The first Chevrolet car came from the two of them together, which disposes of the myth that Louis designed it alone.
For eight months the enterprise operated without being incorporated, and Louis seems to have believed he was forming a partnership. On May 30, the Flint Daily Journal published plans for a Detroit plant to build high-quality, expensive cars, under the headline “Racer Louis Chevrolet as a Partner. ” The next morning, the same paper ran a different headline: “Little as Manager. ” William H.
Little, one of Durant’s assistants, had been made the actual head of operations. Kaufmann records that the appointment came as a shock to Louis’s friends. Little then canceled Louis’s trip to France, scheduled for June 8, stopped his racing activities, and disbanded his racing team. Three weeks later, the New York Times reported that Louis Chevrolet had withdrawn from the French Grand Prix.
He learned that he would not run the company bearing his name by reading a headline in a newspaper. In August, operations moved to the former Corcoran Lamp Company headquarters on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. At the end of October, a separate company called the Little Motor Car Company was formed to build a cheaper car. Then, on November 3, 1911, the Chevrolet Motor Company was incorporated in Michigan and filed with the Secretary of State in Lansing.
The filing listed three shareholders at $100 per share against $100,000 subscribed, with only $10,000 actually paid in. Dr. Edwin R. Campbell, Durant’s son-in-law, owned 500 shares.
William H. Little, Durant’s manager, owned 450 shares. Louis Chevrolet, whose name was on the door, owned 50 shares. Fifty shares out of 1,000 in the company that would eventually sell more cars than any other brand in the United States.
Durant’s own name never appeared in the incorporation documents as a shareholder at all. When the first officers were elected, Louis was not among them. The official records list his function as consulting designer and engineer. A month later, capital was increased to two and a half million dollars.
Louis signed a waiver of his right to participate in the increase, and by the annual report of December 31 he owned 100 shares, while Arthur owned 20. These are the numbers that any talk of lost fortune must face. A man who owns 5 percent of a company at its founding and less than 2 percent afterward never had a fortune to lose. What he got was a workshop, a salary, a designer, and the use of his family name on stock certificates owned by someone else.
The car they built was a large, expensive six-cylinder Chevrolet, entering a market Durant needed to reach at Ford prices. The Classic Six went into production in the last month of 1912 and was shown to the press at the New York Auto Show the following January, priced above $2,000, while Henry Ford was selling the Model T for a fraction of that. Researchers of the company’s early records believe no more than 500 were ever built. On Christmas Eve of that year, he collided with a streetcar in Detroit and injured its passengers, as the Detroit Times reported while the first cars were still reaching showrooms.
In January 1912, a trade journal announced that Louis Chevrolet had been appointed chief engineer, the peak of his official standing in the company. It lasted about eighteen months. In the summer of 1913, while the company was reorganizing around him, Louis went to France for two months to watch the French Grand Prix. He returned on June 29, and on September 7 the Atlanta Constitution published his impressions, quoting him as saying that although there was no money and plenty of danger in road racing, he had felt tempted to return to the game while in France.
That is a contemporary sentence printed while he still held his title, and it tells you exactly where his attention was: not on the balance sheet of a Detroit car company. The balance sheet had been busy during his absence. In June, shareholders waived their rights to a new issue of preferred stock, and the Little Motor Car Company was absorbed. In July, Chevrolet shares were exchanged for shares in the Mason Motor Company, and on the tenth of that month Durant resigned as president of the Chevrolet Motor Company while continuing to control it through others.
In August, the offices moved from the city where Louis had lived and worked, to Flint. On September 13, 1913, the New York trade paper Automobile Topics published the news under a headline that stated the split without embellishment: “Chevrolet and Johnson Leave Durant. ” The text is the most reliable sentence in the entire dispute: Louis Chevrolet and Ted Johnson had withdrawn from the Chevrolet Motor Company and Durant’s Republic Motor Company respectively, and Chevrolet was seeking to settle his interest in the Chevrolet company. Three days later, the Atlanta Constitution reported the resignation as confirmed fact.
The famous cigar story survives only as a later reminiscence, preserved by the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in Louis’s own words. He lit a cigar. Durant offered him one of his own with the comment that he should not be so stubborn. He said that was the moment he left.
The phrase about selling his name came from Durant’s widow and Chevrolet’s sister decades later: he told his partner he had sold him the car and sold him his name, but he would not sell him his character. Both phrases are memories, not documented texts, and both sound tidier than the reality they describe. Kaufmann’s reading of the surviving documents suggests the grievance was narrower and sharper than legend allows. He argues that what Louis hated was the cheapening of the four-cylinder prototype he had built in Detroit, not the existence of a cheap car in the lineup.
He had designed a fast, expensive, finely made machine, and then watched the company take his engineering, reduce its quality, and print his surname on the result. The other uncomfortable truth is that the break was not final. Between July and September of 1914, less than a year after his resignation, Louis went back to work for Durant at the Chevrolet Motor Company in New York, helping with the H-class racing program through that summer and fall, and raced one of those cars in California late in the year alongside Cliff, Durant’s son. In May of that same year, he appeared at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as a special representative of the Champion Ignition Company, selling spark plugs at the race he had been barred from three years earlier.
Then there is the question of what he actually received, and here the records stop. No primary or institutional source states the amount Louis Chevrolet was paid for his shares. The French Wikipedia circulates a figure of $10,000. A commercial automotive history site circulates a quarter of a million dollars.
Neither rests on a document. The most repeated transaction in this man’s life is a number no one can prove. What the documents show is that the settlement took a very long time: Kaufmann concluded that both Louis Chevrolet and Bill Little held onto their shareholdings for at least another thirty months, until the spring of 1915. The effect was permanent, because when the brothers moved their racing operation to Indianapolis, they could not use the name Chevrolet on their cars.
One date in this sequence needs no interpretation at all. Louis resigned on September 16, 1913. On September 29, 1913, William Durant filed the trademark application for the name Chevrolet. Thirteen days.
While Louis was still trying to settle his interest, Durant filed to register the Chevrolet name as a trademark, converting the family name into a commercial claim on paper. The story of what the name became after 1913 is a story about banks, and Louis Chevrolet does not appear in it. In June 1914, the Chatham and Phoenix Bank, whose president was Louis J. Kaufman, put up two and three-quarter million dollars to back Durant through the purchase of 50,000 shares of the Chevrolet Motor Company of New York.
Durant used part of it to buy the Maxwell-Briscoe plant in Tarrytown for $267,000. The following year, the company built the car that changed everything, designed by a man Louis Chevrolet never worked with. The Chevrolet 490 was announced on June 1, 1915, priced to compete directly with the Ford Model T, and the commercial record credits its design to Alfred Sturt, a former Buick engineer. It arrived twenty-one months after Louis’s resignation, and it was the machine that turned his family name into a mass-market brand.
Mass-production cars generate cash, and cash buys stock. Durant had a specific block of stock in mind. On September 16, 1915, the seventh anniversary of General Motors’ founding, Durant regained control of the company with the backing of the du Pont family and the banker Louis Kaufman. On December 22, 1915, the New York Times published the news across its financial pages under a headline announcing that Durant again controlled the Motors company, that the stock involved was worth $50 million, and that Chevrolet would take over General Motors.
The next day, Chevrolet shareholders raised the company’s capital from $20 million to $80 million, setting aside the $60 million difference to buy General Motors stock. By June 1916, the Chevrolet Motor Company controlled 54 percent of General Motors’ common stock. Durant announced at a board meeting that he held 54 and a half percent and wrested the chairmanship from Charles Nash. In May 1918, the assets of the Chevrolet Motor Company were purchased and the brand absorbed into General Motors.
Motor Trend, in reviewing Durant’s biography, summarized the entire maneuver in a single sentence. Chevrolet bought General Motors. The other way around never happened. The company bearing the name of a Swiss race driver swallowed the largest automobile combine in the United States, using shares the driver had waived his rights to four years earlier.
By 1927, the brand was selling a million cars a year in the United States alone and led the automobile market. The man whose name adorned every one of those radiator grilles was in Indianapolis making cylinder heads for other people’s Fords. There is one more piece of the brand attributed to him, and it is also not his. The bowtie logo was placed on every car the company sold, and its origin is not truly known, a fact General Motors itself concedes, acknowledging in its own history that the origin of the logo was never clear.
The company’s 1961 fiftieth-anniversary publication offered the romantic account that it came to Durant in a vision while he was traveling around the world in 1908 and saw the pattern repeating endlessly in the wallpaper design of a French hotel. The Chevrolet family has long doubted that story. Katherine, Durant’s widow, told the historian Lawrence Gustin in 1973 something entirely different and far more mundane: they were in a suite reading the papers, and he saw a design and said he thought it would make a very good logo for Chevrolet. Marjorie, Durant’s daughter, remembered him sketching it on a tablecloth at dinner.
Kaufmann, searching newspapers from 1911, found an advertisement for a coal product shaped like a bowtie in the Atlanta Constitution nine days after the company’s founding. A popular theory holds that the logo is a stylized Swiss cross in honor of his birthplace, but it appears only in general coverage and exists in no archive. Even the date is disputed, since the trademark application claims use of the logo on cars since July 22, 1913, while General Motors maintains the bowtie first appeared on a vehicle in 1914. What is undeniable is that in none of the versions of the story, wallpaper, newspaper, or tablecloth, was Louis Chevrolet present.
His surname had become an institutional instrument with its own logo, its own trademark file, its own market share. He was about to spend the rest of his life competing against it under an assumed name. In 1915, the year he became an American citizen, Louis Chevrolet returned to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as a driver for the first time, and he did it in the smallest car in the race. The Cornelian was built by the Blood Brothers Machine Company of Allegan, Michigan, which Howard Blood had joined.
It was a staggering piece of engineering for 1915: a monocoque body, four-wheel independent suspension, chain drive, a Sterling overhead-valve engine of about 100 cubic inches, and a total weight under 1,000 pounds. Joe Boyer qualified it at just over 81 miles per hour. It started twenty-third and a valve failure put it out after 76 laps. His earnings that day were nothing at all.
That fall, in a garage on Grand River in Detroit, he began building a race car of his own design, and he named it after the bicycles he had sold as a boy in Beaune. The Frontenac Motor Corporation was incorporated on December 17, 1915, and two days later the trade journal The Automobile reported the company’s formation, naming Louis Chevrolet as principal shareholder. The articles of incorporation on file in the Michigan State Archives record the company as a joint venture between Chevrolet, the Indianapolis 500 winner Joe Boyer Jr. , the Indianapolis car dealer William Small, and Victor Heftler, president of the Zenith Carburetor Company.
A persistent legend built on interviews given in the 1950s dates the Frontenac to 1914 and credits its financing to the spark plug manufacturer Albert Champion. But Kaufmann searched the Michigan files and found no company by that name in that year, which means Louis was working as an individual, and Champion, if he was involved at all, was a sponsor rather than a shareholder. For the first time in his racing career, the name on the cars was one he had invented himself. The cars were fast immediately.
In 1916 he brought a Frontenac to Indianapolis, qualified at nearly 88 miles per hour, ran until a connecting rod failed on lap 82, and finished twelfth with no prize money. Later that summer he lapped the Chicago wooden board track at 107 miles per hour and was practicing at 115 for the Astor Cup at Sheepshead Bay. In February 1916 he accepted a position with American Motors, whose Balance Six was revealed that December. In December he won the Universal Films Cup at Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in a Frontenac.
By 1918, Robert Ripley was writing about him in his “Believe It or Not” column, a good indication of how famous he remained years after legally giving up his name. In May 1919, four Frontenacs exceeded 100 miles per hour in trials for the Indianapolis 500. That race was the best performance of his career. He started twelfth, qualified at over 103 miles per hour, completed all 200 laps, led nine of them, and finished seventh.
The prize was $1,800, and that number deserves a pause. According to the track’s official statistics, it is the total amount Louis Chevrolet earned from four Indianapolis 500 appearances in his entire life. For the rest of that season he earned about $3,200, according to estimates by the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America, an amount from which he had to run an entire racing team. He won two events in one day on the Tacoma board track that July.
He won a 10-mile race at Sheepshead Bay in September, on the same afternoon his younger brother Gaston won the main event. In October he was bedridden recovering from burns while Arthur and Gaston drove the cars in his place. In December 1919, the operation left New Jersey and settled permanently in Indianapolis, in a workshop at 705 Fulton Street. There the three brothers built race cars in a building that still stands.
Then the rulebook did to him what committees had been doing since 1911. For 1920, the regulating body cut the engine displacement limit to 183 cubic inches, disqualifying his 300-cubic-inch cars and forcing him to devise a new design in a single winter. The Chevrolet agent in Indianapolis, William Small, the same man who had signed the Frontenac articles, took over the failing Monroe Motor Company and hired Louis as a consulting engineer, giving him use of the small facilities to build the cars. With the former Duesenberg engineer Cornelius Van Ranst, he prepared a fleet for the 1920 season.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum counts seven cars, four Monroes and three Frontenacs; the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America counts eight, all built in the same shop by the same hands. He was forty-one, without a company, without capital, without a brand he could sell to the public, and with a borrowed factory. The brothers had cars fast enough to win Indianapolis and finances flimsy enough to collapse before the end of the season. The year began in Havana, where Louis raced a Frontenac at the Oriental Park track in April.
Then the shadows gathered eleven days before the Indianapolis 500. On May 24, Arthur Chevrolet crashed during practice at the Speedway and was taken to the hospital. His racing career ended at thirty-six. Seven days later, on May 31, 1920, Gaston Chevrolet won the Indianapolis 500.
He was twenty-eight. He started sixth. He averaged just under 89 miles per hour over the 500 miles, and did it without a single tire change, something almost unimaginable at the time, with John Bresnahan beside him as riding mechanic. The car was entered by William Small’s company.
The Speedway’s records describe it as a Monroe with a Frontenac chassis. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum calls it the Monroe Special. A Wikipedia list calls it a Frontenac. They are all describing the same machine, built by the Chevrolet brothers in their own workshop.
It was the first American-built car to win the race since 1912, and no foreign-born driver won it again until 1946. Louis started the race third, was faster than his brother, and went out on lap 94 with a steering failure after handing the car to relief drivers. The family had won the world’s most important automobile race with an engine, chassis, and driver of their own making. The eldest brother watched the finish from the pits with a broken car and no prize money.
Six weeks later, on July 10, the Lansing State Journal reported that Louis Chevrolet was retiring from automobile racing. In August, William Small’s company went into receivership. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum’s judgment on the timing was precise: the 500 victory came too late to change the fate of the Monroe. The triumph that made the family famous did not save the company that funded it, and by the end of the summer the financial support for the workshop had collapsed.
Then came Thanksgiving. On November 25, 1920, at the Beverly Hills board track in California, Gaston Chevrolet was running a 250-mile race when his car collided with Eddie O’Donnell’s on lap 146 of 200. Gaston was killed. O’Donnell’s riding mechanic died instantly, and O’Donnell himself died the next day of a fractured skull.
The reigning national hero of American auto racing, the winner of that year’s Indianapolis 500, was twenty-eight years old. Louis was on the other side of the continent, driving in an exhibition race in Savannah, Georgia, when the news reached him. He was told of his youngest brother’s death by someone at the track while he sat in a car. General Motors records it clearly in its own account of the family: when his younger brother Gaston died in a racing accident, Louis never set foot in a race car again.
The documents complicate that sentence, because his retirement had already been announced four and a half months before the accident. The more accurate reading is that the decision was made in July and became final in November. Gaston was buried in Holy Cross and St. Joseph Cemetery in Indianapolis.
His signature became so rare that collectors have verified only three examples of it, against 51 known signatures of Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. On January 26, 1921, Louis Chevrolet filed a lawsuit on behalf of his brother’s estate. He had spent eleven years watching what racing did to the men around him, from Charles Miller trapped under a Buick on Long Island to his own brother on a California board track. Now he was the only Chevrolet brother who could still get into a race car and chose not to.
Instead, he put his name on an entry form one last time. On May 30, 1921, Tommy Milton won the Indianapolis 500 in a Frontenac, covering the distance in 5 hours and 34 minutes at an average of just under 90 miles per hour, with Harry Franck riding beside him and starting from twentieth. The registered winner of the race was Louis Chevrolet. The cars from the Fulton Street workshop had won the Indianapolis 500 in consecutive years, the first time in the race’s history anyone had done that.
Louis never won Indianapolis as a driver in his four attempts, and in 1920 and 1921, the winning cars came from his own workshop instead. Ralph Mulford, in a second Frontenac that day, was flagged ninth after 177 laps. The next season, his team became the first to use radio between the riding mechanic and the pits. Of the six cars he entered in 1922, only one finished.
In December 1920, he and Van Ranst had recorded the engineering design in a four-part technical paper for the Society of Automotive Engineers. Racing was the part he understood, and while he was succeeding at it, he was being pushed toward the part he did not. In late 1921, a Frontenac passenger car prototype recorded 75 miles per hour in tests, and its specifications, drawn up with Van Ranst, were unusually advanced for the time. Single overhead camshaft, thermosiphon cooling, four-wheel brakes, 60 horsepower, and front and rear bumpers integrated into the frame.
To build it, the Frontenac Motor Corporation was organized with a capital of one million dollars, and the former Empire plant in Indianapolis was secured for production, financed by Allan A. Ryan, who was manipulating Stutz stock in New York, and William M. Thompson, president of the Stutz company. Within eight months Ryan was bankrupt, ruined by his monopolistic attempt at Stutz stock, and the company’s affairs were reorganized in Indianapolis without him.
Thompson made clear that the new plans excluded anyone from New York. Louis Chevrolet, who had never held any office in the company that bore his name, was made president of this one. The car debuted at the Indianapolis 500 in May 1922, but the economic climate deteriorated around it, and the company filed for bankruptcy on April 14, 1923. The car never reached production, and he absorbed the cost of developing the prototype and, by one account, the debts of Ryan’s Delaware company.
He had broken his leg in a taxi accident in Chicago in January 1922, and Barney Oldfield, whom Louis had beaten three times in a single season years before, came to visit him in the hospital. The reliable income came from a cast-iron cylinder head for the Ford Model T. The Chevrolet Brothers Manufacturing Company, which he ran with Arthur in Indianapolis from 1920 to 1927, produced overhead-valve cylinder heads for Fords under the Frontenac name. Those heads were the only commercially successful product of his later career, turning America’s cheapest car into a contender on dirt tracks.
The Fronty Ford head offered cheap speed to dirt-track drivers who could not afford a race car, and its designer earned a living from it rather than a fortune. In 1926, he and Arthur tried to turn the same expertise toward aviation. General Motors documents the result of that partnership in a single clause: the company was liquidated after a disagreement between the brothers. In 1928, Louis broke with Arthur entirely and founded the Chevrolet Aircraft Company on May 7.
It produced a genuinely innovative engine, an inverted four-cylinder with the crankshaft on top and the cylinder heads and valve gear on the bottom. In August of that year, he wrote to Cleveland, enclosing his résumé, in search of financing. On November 22, 1928, Glenn L. Martin, one of the founding figures of American aviation, bought 90 percent of the Chevrolet Aircraft Company.
For the second time in his life, Louis Chevrolet built something bearing his name, ran out of capital, and watched a man with more capital take the majority share. The engine itself was good enough to outlast its maker’s business. It was developed and re-certified in July 1930 as the Martin 333, and the Smithsonian Institution holds one in its national collection with a description of this arrangement. The company failed, and the design was sold to the Glenn L.
Martin Company in Baltimore. The Indiana corporation was dissolved in the spring of 1930. Creditors were taking legal action against the aircraft venture by March 1931. That same month, the Baltimore Sun reported that Martin had renamed the company, and Louis Chevrolet was now its vice president.
He designed a 10-cylinder radial engine in 1932 and applied for a patent. General Motors supplies the ending: by the time the patent was granted in 1935, Louis Chevrolet no longer had the strength to build another company. On April 30, 1934, Time magazine published a short item about the Glenn L. Martin Company’s stock offering and reported that the company had only two shareholders, Glenn L.
Martin and Louis Chevrolet. The magazine noted that “Mr. Chevrolet,” who had given his name to the best-selling car in the United States, owned 1,000 shares acquired in an airplane engine deal. A stake of 1,000 shares in someone else’s aircraft company.
By the time that item ran, he was back in Detroit looking for wages. The last seven years of his career survive in evidence lists and news clippings rather than in a single clear closing scene. General Motors’ own history says he worked again as a mechanic in a Chevrolet production plant in Detroit. That sentence has been passed down for eighty years because it closes the circle so neatly.
The contemporary paper record suggests a less cinematic, more precise reality. In July 1934, the Associated Press reported that he was working for the Axle Manufacturing Company. In November, he was promoting a brand of motor oil. The Polk city directory for January 1935 lists him as a salesman at a Chevrolet dealership in Detroit, and about a year later he was in sales for an oil company.
In June 1934, he was appearing at General Motors auto shows. In 1936, according to Britannica, he returned to the General Motors division bearing his name. In June 1935, he testified in federal court against the Ford Motor Company. The evidence does not place him on an assembly line.
It places him in a series of sales jobs, promotional work, and the Chevrolet division. The phrase that stuck by the 1960s was Britannica’s, describing an enterprise from which he had derived little profit and in which he had been a minor employee in his last years. Arthur was forced to liquidate his assets in May 1932, and in February 1933 the Detroit Free Press reported that Louis was returning to Detroit. Between those listings lies the worst day of all of them.
On May 29, 1934, the eve of the Indianapolis 500, his eldest son Charles died at twenty-seven, leaving a widow and a four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. A week later, his father was attending a General Motors auto show. The Society of Automotive Engineers made him guest of honor at a special meeting in 1937. He retired to spend winters in Florida by 1939, and made his last public appearance in Flint, Michigan, in 1940, the city where he had lived on Root Street as a young race driver with money in his pocket.
He and Suzanne were living in Lake Worth, Florida, in January 1941. On June 6, 1941, at his home in Lakewood, east of Detroit, Louis Chevrolet died at sixty-two. The Detroit News reported that day that his death resulted from complications after the amputation of one leg. He died without money and without a documented estate.
No will or legal appraisal of his property was ever found. The honors accumulated after his death. Halls of fame, a bronze bust at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a Swiss high-speed train bearing his name, a statue in Flint, a monument in his Swiss birthplace. The bust at the track carries the two words he took as his motto: Never give up.
The graves tell the other half of the story. Gaston’s headstone in Holy Cross Cemetery in Indianapolis reaches waist height. Charles’s grave marker is no bigger than a loaf of bread, and the sculptor misspelled the family name on it. And Louis Chevrolet’s headstone, bearing the name that sold more cars than any other in the country’s history, stands, according to the journalists who went to find it, about one foot tall.
Arthur ended his life in Slidell, Louisiana, in April 1946, nine days before his sixty-second birthday, after a war spent building landing craft. He left written instructions that he did not want to be buried with his brothers and that his grave should remain unmarked. His grave has never been found because the cemetery records were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. When the Indianapolis Motor Speedway placed a headstone for him in 2011, it turned out to belong to his son.
The Baton Rouge Advocate wrote at Arthur’s death an epitaph no corporate history could surpass: fortune and fame had knocked at the Chevrolet brothers’ door, but they were busy with other things, preferring racing cars to selling them, and building racing engines to mass-producing cheap ones. More than 200 million cars and light trucks have been sold under his family name. All he ever owned in the company that bore it was 50 shares out of 1,000. In Cleveland, he once had to print his qualifications for people who were parking Chevrolets outside.
And the headstone they finally placed on his grave is shorter than that letter.
