mdh157
Senior Member
I thought you guys would appreciate this. Just north of Carlisle Boro at the intersection of RT 11 and Wolfs Bridge Road is an old garage with a distinctive design.
This garage is part of an old home/dealership complex that sat in this location for many years. The garage was built around 1940. In this next pic you can see where the house used to be (they tore it down about a month ago). There is a pile of cinder blocks on the left foreground of the photo, that is the foundation fill. You can see Wolf's Bridge Road in the background.
I had the chance to go to the estate auction back in 2020. Plenty of old neat stuff for sale. I purchased a bunch of the old dealer plates. I also had the chance to talk to the granddaughter of the man who started and ran the business from the 40's-60's, when her father took it over. He ran it until the mid 80's. What you had was that garage, the house and a few outbuildings out back including a huge pole barn where her grandfather took old business signs and used them to cover the walls and ceiling, much like sheetrock nowadays. (see the Gulf sign in the pic above) She said when she was a kid (she's about 70 now) there were cars not only on the west side of the garage but between the house and garage and alongside the back of the house going up Wolf's Bridge Road. Her grandfather was one of the first vendors to have a contract with the Pa Turnpike Commission so he had to build a bigger garage to accommodate some of the trucks he needed to work on. When the turnpike was initially opened it only ran from the Philadelphia area and ended at Carlisle right by where the Expo Center is now (for those familiar with the Carlisle Fairgrounds layout). The place started to significantly slow down in the 80's with her grandfather having passed away and her father aging and he closed it sometime in the mid-late 80's. This is part of an offset intersection that the township plans to straighten out so it will be redone and the location of the house will be about where Wolf's Bridge Road intersects RT 11. The property has been sold and the new owner plans to keep the garage and restore it. He is a local used car dealer and owns the dealership adjacent to the garage.
Below are a few of the dealer plates I got. Unfortunately they had nothing older than the early 70's still there.
This garage is part of an old home/dealership complex that sat in this location for many years. The garage was built around 1940. In this next pic you can see where the house used to be (they tore it down about a month ago). There is a pile of cinder blocks on the left foreground of the photo, that is the foundation fill. You can see Wolf's Bridge Road in the background.
I had the chance to go to the estate auction back in 2020. Plenty of old neat stuff for sale. I purchased a bunch of the old dealer plates. I also had the chance to talk to the granddaughter of the man who started and ran the business from the 40's-60's, when her father took it over. He ran it until the mid 80's. What you had was that garage, the house and a few outbuildings out back including a huge pole barn where her grandfather took old business signs and used them to cover the walls and ceiling, much like sheetrock nowadays. (see the Gulf sign in the pic above) She said when she was a kid (she's about 70 now) there were cars not only on the west side of the garage but between the house and garage and alongside the back of the house going up Wolf's Bridge Road. Her grandfather was one of the first vendors to have a contract with the Pa Turnpike Commission so he had to build a bigger garage to accommodate some of the trucks he needed to work on. When the turnpike was initially opened it only ran from the Philadelphia area and ended at Carlisle right by where the Expo Center is now (for those familiar with the Carlisle Fairgrounds layout). The place started to significantly slow down in the 80's with her grandfather having passed away and her father aging and he closed it sometime in the mid-late 80's. This is part of an offset intersection that the township plans to straighten out so it will be redone and the location of the house will be about where Wolf's Bridge Road intersects RT 11. The property has been sold and the new owner plans to keep the garage and restore it. He is a local used car dealer and owns the dealership adjacent to the garage.
Below are a few of the dealer plates I got. Unfortunately they had nothing older than the early 70's still there.
