John Devey goes driving Miss Devey -- daughter Alice -- in his buggylike contraption. This is the only photo of Utah's first gasoline-powered car.
By Christopher Smith
from the Deseret News
LEHI -- Utah's first automobile has disappeared, but motorists still battle the same nemesis John Devey faced when he drove his horseless carriage to Salt Lake City in the spring of 1900.
Potholes.
The Lehi pioneer began building the state's first gasoline-powered car in 1899 at his farm. A feature designed to defeat the gaping craters in the road: 4-foot-tall wheels.
"Roads in those days were not like they are now," Mr. Devey wrote in an April 19, 1921, letter to the Deseret News. "Farmers would dig irrigation ditches across the wagon roads, some 2 or 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep and if I had used small wheels I might have gotten into a ditch and never gotten out again."
A leather license plate carrying registration No. 66 is all that remains of his buggylike contraption. It is on display at the John Hutchings Museum of Natural History in Lehi.
"I don't know what ever became of that car," says Harold Hutchings, museum director and cousin of Mr. Devey.
Mr. Hutchings uncle, Sam Hutchings married John Devey's daughter, Alice, who is beside her father in the only existing photograph of the Devey-mobile.
"We used to play in that car when we were kids," says Mr. Hutchings, pulling the photograph from the museum wall. "It was pretty old by then. We would steer the lever and turn the crank, but it wouldn't fire up."
In its heyday, Mr. Devey's contraption was the talk of the Beehive State.
Henry Ford completed his first automobile in 1896 in Detroit in Detroit. Three years later, Mr. Devey coupled a crude gas engine to a horse-drawn carriage so he could drive to LDS conference in Salt Lake.
"I was not able to complete it in time, but did so later," he wrote.
The early auto looked like a buggy. But instead of a yoke for the team, it had a single-cylinder gasoline engine mounted in front of the seat beneath a wire-mesh hood. At first, Mr. Devey used a belt from the motor to a drive shaft, which connected to the wheels with a chain.
Later, he tinkered with a clutch and did away with the belt.
"The machine was speeded up so I could make 20 mph on good roads," he wrote in 1921.
Mr. Devey piloted the 750-pound car up and down the Wasatch Front for 11 years.
"As a kid, I remember somebody saying it was the first car in Utah, but it never occurred to anyone to preserve it," says Mr. Hutchings. "It sure would be nice to go for a ride in it today."
Page Modified February 28, 1999