David Dunbar Buick was born in Scotland in 1854. The Buick family moved to Detroit in 1856 when David was two years old. David quit school when he was about fifteen. He then began working for a company that manufactured plumbing goods. He and a partner purchased the company in 1882, when it was performing poorly. David had a knack for inventing, creating a process for applying vitreous enamel to cast iron. The partnership then became quite successful, pairing Buick’s inventiveness with his partners head for business.
Then Came the Cars
Buick had long been enthralled with automobile engines. This experimentation took so much of his time that he devoted little to his plumbing company partnership, which then dissolved. This freed Buick to work fulltime on his preferred endeavor. He formed the Buick Auto-Vim and Power Company toward this end, in 1899.
Initially intending on producing engines for agriculture, he soon changed his course to the production of automobiles. Unfortunately, he was far more interested in tinkering and experimentation than he was in actual production. By 1902 he had burned through his funds with only a single car built.
In 1903 Buick got a $5,000 loan from businessman Benjamin Briscoe and formed the Buick Motor Company. Sure, he sucked at business management, but he did design and build what would become the first mass produced overhead valve engine. Briscoe became tired of continual investments resulting in no auto production (and no return on investment).
Buick Loses Buick
In 1906, Buick accepted a severance package and left the company that he had founded, with only one share of the company in his possession. The president of Buick, William C. Durant, bought this share from him for $100,000 (equivalent to $3,300,000 in 2023). Buick then went on to other ventures, none being successful. He ended up as an instructor at the Detroit School of Trades, and died of colon cancer on March 5, 1929, at the age of 74.
Here’s Buick in the April Popular Mechanics magazine using his name recognition to promote his employer, the Detroit School of Trades. The red box highlights the address – Woodward Ave! Yes, the same Woodward Avenue that would be the epicenter of muscle car era street racing in the 1960’s and ’70’s!
Interestingly, Woodward was constructed after the Detroit fire of 1805, and follows the Saginaw Trail,which is the collective name for a set of connected roads in Southeast and Central Michigan that runs from Detroit to Saginaw through Pontiac and Flint that was originally a tribal foot trail. The June 11, 1805 fire razed the entire city, then with a population of only about 600. Detroit wouldn’t hit 100,000 residents until after 1870. In 2023 its 620,000 population is equivalent to what it was prior to 1920.
After the fire, territorial judge Augustus Woodward argued that the city was badly planned, and thus should not be rebuilt the same way. He proposed a street plan based on Paris and subsequently Washington D.C., featuring hexagon-based layout with diagonal streets radiating from the city’s center. This proved to be too complex, but parts of his plan can be seen in the city to this day in the form of Gratiot, Michigan and Grand River Avenue.
