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I received the following email for a person seeking info about the Stockton, Calif. Pierce-Arrow dealership. Please respond directly to him if you can help….
I belong to a Facebook group, Stockton History, dedicated to the history of Stockton California. We had a totem pole in a local park that stood since the 1930s. As it started to deteriorate, the City removed the pole and put it in storage. The orgin of the pole was a donation to the City by a man named Hart L. Weaver, and the totem originally stood in front of his Pierce Arrow dealership. Nobody in our group has ever seen a photo of it in it’s original location. Would you by any chance have a photo of the dealership? Thank you- Kevin Shawver
If you divide 48 states into the production numbers of Pierce-Arrows
produced after the depression took hold,it would lead you to think that
only big cities like L.A. and S.F. could support a P.A. Dealership.S.F
wasn’t too far away.Pat Craig could fill this gentleman in if anybody
can.
I think such an interesting detail suggests mentioning several points.
Chester H. Weaver was the Studebaker Pierce-Arrow distributor for the Bay Area – which included showrooms in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, from the late 1920s until he retired in 1932 or so. Hart Weaver would have been his relation. Stockton would have been one of Chester Weaver’s smaller dealers, a Stockton City Directory can provide the exact address. A popular commercial photographer named Cohen took many photos of the Weaver Pierces in Oakland at the beginning of the Depression – you might check with the Oakland Museum and the Stockton Historical Society to see if he was active in Stockton, too.
Stockton continued to have a Pierce showroom into 1936. By that time Pierce was retrenching in northern California – the entire distributorship for northern California became headquartered there – a City Directory can provide the name. If it helps, the yearly Schwabacker-Fry Directories, covering all car registrations in California, can provide the names and addresses of who owned Pierces in Stockton in the 1920s.
The suggestion to divide Pierce-Arrow production by the number of states leads to a misleading number. At the beginning of 1935, there were about 100 dealers in the United States, plus the foreign showrooms, selling about 900 cars. Depression or no Depression, it was obviously a commercial treat to sell just a handful of them – after all, were they not the world famous Pierce-Arrow motor cars?
I just realized I was confusing Fresno with Stockton when I mentioned the location of the 1936 northern California distributorship.
I would add that Chester Weaver was one of the Studebaker distributors who added Pierce-Arrow representation after Studebaker took control of Pierce in 1928. It may help find his Stockton location by looking under both S and P.