One of the things my Wifey likes about me is that I geek out over weird things. A few summers ago, while we were cruising rummage sales around Fargo, I started to geek out over a small building in an alley in the older section of town. Yes, I’m a garage nerd, but for one particular one: The Rusk Auto-House was a solution to the fact that houses built before automobiles were common weren’t built with garages, or even planning on a garage on the property. Fargo Cornice had the machinery and the know-how to build almost anything out of pressed steel. In the early 1900s they saw this new market made up of new car owners, and the Rusk Auto-House filled their need for automobile storage. Amazingly, many still survive, still in the back yards of hundred-year-old houses. One was once on the Register of Historic Places, and I’ve got photos of a couple more I’ve run across since I first posted the Auto-House page here; and, I didn’t even know there was a restored one over in North Fargo! The advertisement above was a 1/2 page ad that appeared in the Fargo Forum in 1915, while an auto show was going on in town. $139 in 1914 dollars is about $3,200 in 2013 dollars — and that’s about what it’ll cost you to get a steel garage today.
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