Louisville, Kentucky. Virginia Lively used to be a beauty operator. Today she works at a gas station. Howard R Hollem 1943. Buy prints.
Before the ubiquitous gas stations people bought gasoline literally out of a barrel at a grocery or hardware store. Some of which even offered gasoline home delivery in five-gallon jugs. The world’s first purpose-built gas station was built in St. Louis, Missouri in 1905 at 420 South Theresa Avenue. Although the Smithsonian magazine says that the first proper drive-in service station opened in Pennsylvania in 1913 – “Unlike earlier simple curbside gasoline filling stations, an architect purposefully designed the pagoda-style brick facility [that] offered free air, water, crankcase service and tire and tube installation.”
The motoring world changed quickly and by the mid 1930s there were around 200,000 filling stations in the US selling an incredible 15 billion gallons of gas. The gas stations were the first commercial buildings to be set back from the street allowing cars to come off the road and not disrupt the traffic. The American oil industry by then employed over a million people.
A Greyhound bus that has been stopped while the driver fills the water tank at a gas station on the road between Gettysburg and Pennsylvania, Ester Bubley, 1943
Edcouch, Texas, gas station, Texas, 1939 -Russell Lee
Washington DC, 1939 – David Myers
Gas station, Benton Harbor, Michigan 1940 – John Vachon. Buy prints.
Kern County California – Dorothea Lange, November 1938
Arthur Rothstein, Gas Station Butte Montana 1939. Buy prints.
Paul Bunyan atop gas station, Bemidji, Minnesota – John Vachon 1939
General store and gas station, Venus, Florida – Marion Post Wolcott, 1939. Buy prints.
Gas station attendant at service station filling tank of a motorists Dodge car, Washington DC – Albert Freeman, 1942
Gas station along Highway US 50, Winchester Virginia – Arthur Rothstein, 1940
Melrose Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana crossroads store bar, ‘Jook Joint’ and gas station in cotton plantation area – Marion Post Wolcott, 1940
Gas station and dance hall Osage, West Virginia – Marion Post Wolcott, 1938
Gas station in front of old colonial house, Jackson, Mississippi Delta – Marion Post Wolcott, 1939
Melrose Natchitoches Parish Louisiana Crossroads – Marion Post Wolcott 1940
Gas station, Frederick, Maryland John Vachon 1937
These extraordinary photographs are from the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
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