Local used car dealership marks a century of doing business

Andalusia Motor Co. Owner Ward Taylor said his business has come a long way from selling cars out of a wooden box in the early 1900s.

The local car dealership and family-owned business is celebrating its 100th anniversary this month.

“We’ve seen a lot of change,” Taylor said. “Holy cow. Can you imagine? We started off with a car that came in a wooden box that you put together. You would send people home with it and teach them how to drive it.

“We were replacing horses and mules,” he said. “There’s been a lot of history. It’s always been about transportation.”

It all started in 1909 when J.R. Ward — Taylor’s great-grandfather — then an Opp hardware store owner, wanted to buy a Ford Model T.

Because he couldn’t strike a deal with the nearest Ford dealership in Dothan, Ward wrote Henry Ford, of the Ford Motor Co., a letter requesting they send him a car.

According to Star-News archives, Ford wrote back and said that he wouldn’t ship just one car, and that Ward would have to sign a franchise agreement.

Ward agreed and in 1910, the first two Model Ts arrived. Ward kept one and sold the other.

Five years later, the local car business was founded in Andalusia, and members of the Ward family have owned Andalusia Motor Co. since 1915.

Throughout the depression in the 1930s and World War II in the early 1940s, dealers were forced to go without selling cars for months at a time.

Ownership changed hands in 1938 when Ward died. Ward’s son, Howard, bought the dealership and his daughter, Mary Frances, married Taylor’s father, Luther, in 1944. Luther came aboard in 1956.

Taylor came into the business in 1969; right before the used car business started flourishing.

“In the mid 1970s a phenomenon started to occur in the used car business,” Taylor said. “We had very few car auctions. They primarily concentrated in big cities up north.”

At auctions, Taylor said dealers would buy between 200-300 cars at a time and started selling them to compete with newer car sales. These cars were called program cars.

“My dad, who was a dealer at the time at the Ford store, realized that was a huge profit potential,” Taylor said.

Eventually, Taylor got involved in the used car business and decided to sell the Ford part of the dealership in 1994, and strictly concentrated on used cars.

“Since then, that’s what we’ve done,” he said. “We’ve sold one year old and current year model program cars. We’ve kept a lot of trade-ins that are good. I still work auctions. I do all of the buying, all of the selling and most of the reconditioning.”

Taylor said the biggest change in the business has been its manufacturing process.

“People made horse buggies and wagons by hand,” he said. “Henry (Ford) got the assembly line going and enabled mass production to sell cars cheaper.

“Now, we build cars with robots,” he said.

Taylor said the credit to his business’s success goes to the service that it’s provided over the years.

“We have sold hardware, plows, guns, tractors,” he said. “We had the Ford tractor dealership, but we sold it to the Cottons. We’ve sold other cars besides Fords. It’s like any of these other businesses — Mallette Drug Store and CCB Community Bank. It’s a hometown, small town business that provides a service, and it works.

“I went from being a pretty good sized new car dealer to a fairly small used car dealer,” he said. “I carried that philosophy forward and it worked.”