Weird Island

66. MEET ME AT THE BILTMORE: Dutee Wilcox Flint

Episode Summary

This week, I’m joined by Amanda Quay Blount, who just released her new book Meet Me at the Biltmore this October. She brought me a story I’d never heard before about this Rhode Island based Ford dealer. His name was Dutee Wilcox Flint, and he was one of the earliest and most successful Ford dealers in the world before he lost his empire, moved into the Biltmore, and largely vanished from memory. Find Meet Me at the Biltmore at your local bookstore!

Episode Notes

Find Amanda's book, Meet Met at the Biltmore HERE! Meet Me At The Biltmore | Amanda Quay Blount

Episode Source Material

Episode Transcription

In 1903, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated and they sold their first Model A on July 23 of that year. Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, but he did revolutionize not only vehicles, but in many ways, American society, by producing cars that people could actually afford. The company’s big breakthrough came in 1908, when Ford introduced the Model T. This car embodied everything that Henry Ford wanted. It was efficient, reliable and reasonably priced. When it was introduced, a Model T cost only $825. Four years later, as Ford developed the assembly line and increased efficiency of manufacturing, the price dropped even further to $575 and sales soared. At its height, the most basic Model T could be purchased for as low as $260 making it accessible to nearly everyone. By the late 1920s, ⅔ of cars on American roads were Ford Model Ts.
On May 26, 1927 Henry Ford and his son Edsel drove the 15 millionth Model T out of their factory. But just a day before, Ford had made headlines around the world by announcing that this Model T would be the last one produced.
While it continues to be remembered as one of the best-selling vehicles of all time, by the late 1920s, the Model T was outdated. Other manufacturers were eating away at Ford’s market share with more modern entry-priced vehicles. So, Ford made the bold decision to close plants around the world and spend six months scrapping all the outdated infrastructure that had been used in the almost 20 years of production of the Model T to retool the factories for the production of a brand new car.
That last day of production was like a funeral for the Model T. Ford delivered a eulogy, in which he said: “It had stamina and power. It was the car that ran before there were good roads to run on. It broke down the barriers of distance in rural sections, brought people of these sections closer together and placed education within the reach of everyone.”
It was the end of an era, and the factory shutdown–while temporary–meant thousands of people would be out of work. And it meant Ford dealers around the world would have to either sell what they already had in stock or rely on the sale of used cars and replacement parts. And not everyone was prepared for that reality.
I’m Sara and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I’m joined by a special guest who brought me a story I’d never heard before about this Rhode Island based Ford dealer who was once the largest automobile dealer in the world, according to the NY Times. Up until he lost everything. Today I bring you the rise and fall of Dutee Wilcox Flint.
This week I’m joined by a special guest.
“I’m Amanda Blount - Author of Meet Me at the Biltmore. A comprehensive history of the Biltmore Hotel in Downtown Providence.”
I met Amanda a few weeks ago for coffee and to just nerd out about local history and her newly released book. And she told me something about hotels that kind of blew my mind.
“Hotels and apartment buildings were basically the same thing. In the early days of luxury hotels. In fact, it was a wonderful option for the wildly wealthy to own or rent a suite at a luxury hotel because everything they had in their estate, and mansions and country homes was available to them at a hotel. The ballrooms, the kitchens, the wait staff, the 24 hour service, but they didn’t have to pay for it themselves. It was all built into the fee of living in the hotel. So, it was very common particularly from about 1910 to the 1950s for very wealthy people to retain or own suites in hotels.”
This really altered my view of the role hotels played throughout history, because it meant that they were actually very much a snapshot of culture and trends and lifestyles at different moments in time.
“It also helps to really frame when you go back and read historical accounts of things that were happening at the time. You’ll find, when you go back and are looking for it, so many times when a police officer is looking for someone and they find them at their suite at the Waldorf Astoria, or the Plaza or the Biltmore, I think we assumed that everybody was just traveling a lot, but everyone was really living in these hotels.”
Amanda uncovered all of these incredible and often overlooked stories of people who were living in the Biltmore and things that happened there that were significant not just on a local level, but often on a national level. And there was one person living in the Biltmore that she was really captivated by, because she’d never heard his story, even though he was very well-known and significant in the early 1900s. His name was Dutee Wilcox Flint, and he was one of the earliest and most successful Ford dealers in the world before he lost his empire, moved into the Biltmore, and largely vanished from memory. And she pitched the story to me in a way that was very much up my alley.
She told me that in Edgewood (which is part of Cranston, near the water) there are these two columns at the end of a driveway leading to a house. The house isn’t super significant, but the columns are despite the fact that you would never really notice them or think about them. But it turns out that they’re the single physical piece of evidence of Dutee Wilcox Flint’s mansion, where he lived during the height of his success. A mansion which would later, mysteriously, burn down. But before we get to the end, let’s start at the beginning.
“I think the story about Dutee Wilcox Flint really starts on a train, traveling from somewhere in the midwest to somewhere in Providence when Dutee himself was a very young man. And he was flipping through a magazine and saw an advertisement posted from Henry Ford, about Henry Ford’s new concept of the automobile. And Henry Ford was putting out an advertisement for anyone who was “intelligent” as it read, or considered themselves intelligent to open the very first automotive dealerships in the country. And Dutee Flint, instead of going to Providence, got off the train in Detroit and walked right into Henry Ford’s office and signed up for the job.”
Flint called up his Grandfather and namesake, Dutee Wilcox, back in Providence, asked to borrow $10K dollars to get started, and with that he became one of the earliest dealers for the fledgling Ford Motor Company, which had only been incorporated one year earlier.
In an interview some years later, Flint was quoted saying, “My idea was that the train I was riding on, when I read about Ford in a magazine, was on wheels, that the horseless carriage was on wheels, that the whole future of the country was on wheels, and I wanted to get in on it. I was sure I had the right thing.”
“And the reason I think that’s where this story starts is because that is such a profound character sketch of who Dutee Flint was and the kind of man he was in Providence. He had this unbelievable personality. He was magnetic, he was charismatic, he was an entertainer. He was somebody who clearly wanted to be larger than life. And for a long time he was, so it was really no surprise to me that he started to show up everywhere in the story of the Biltmore Hotel. Because the Biltmore Hotel was larger than life, and it was the grandest hotel ever built when it was built in 1922 and Dutee Wilcox Flint was right there from the very beginning.”
Looking back on Flint’s early days selling cars, his first few years of sales seem slow. He reported that he only sold ten cars in 1905. In 1906, he doubled it, selling 20. And in 1907, he sold 100 cars. But by 1910, Ford was so happy with Flint’s sales that he allowed him to expand his empire to include multiple dealerships across RI, CT and later NY and NJ. By the time the US entered WWI in 1917, Flint’s agencies were selling an estimated 10K cars a year. At his height, Flint advertised that he had 30 dealerships.
Today, car dealerships are kind of unremarkable. But in the early days of Ford and really the early days of vehicle manufacturing and ownership, agents like Dutee Wilcox Flint were central to the success of the companies they represented. Flint’s Providence headquarters was set up like a Ford factory, because the shop would actually complete the assembly of cars that were shipped via railroad in a knocked-down form. The shop was full of specialized tools for each purpose, jigs that could hold each part of a car that might need repair, and even workstations that could be adjusted to the right height for the person doing the work. Dealerships would also fix broken down vehicles, and some could even build up a Ford car just from parts maintained in stock.
The job of the salesman also went beyond just selling a vehicle. Often, salesmen found themselves educating a buyer about cars in general, and even sometimes teaching them how to drive. Which is kind of funny because Dutee Flint himself was reportedly not a very great driver.
“Dutee was sued many times in his life. He was perpetually getting into car accidents because he would hit people. I’m not sure if cars were just not that great at the time or if Dutee was a particularly bad driver, but he was sued at least a half dozen times in his life for car accidents that he got into. And because of that, he was constantly in litigation in court. So he spent lots of time at the Biltmore because there were lots of business meeting and lawyer meetings there.”
In addition to owning dealerships, Flint also owned something like 37 gas stations across New England. This was practical, because the first purpose-built, drive-in gas station as we know them today wasn’t constructed until 1913. By that time, some 500K people already owned cars. So, in the early days of car ownership, drivers were filling their tanks at pharmacies, general stores, hardware stores or even blacksmith shops. In owning gas stations, or filling stations, Flint could offer both the car and the gas needed to run it. And to sweeten the deal for prospective car buyers, he would offer gas at 4 cents below the market rate to Ford owners.
All in, Dutee Flint was very successful, so successful that he actually had a problem on his hands. The volume of cars being transported from factories to his dealerships via train was actually too high to be practical. So he bought a steamship.
“He was the very first person, that we know of at least, to transport cars by boat. Because prior to that they had been transported by railway, so he bought boats to transport cars between the manufacturing in NJ to sell them in New England. In fact, he named his boat the Transford.”
Flint made sure that his success and his wealth didn’t go unnoticed. In 1922, when the Biltmore opened its doors, his empire was booming. And he wasn’t shy about showcasing that.
“The Biltmore hotel was built with the investments and the private funding from lots and lots of the wealthiest people in Providence, and those people were invited to the opening day ceremonies. And one of them was our character, Dutee Flint. Who was, at the time, had just amassed a huge fortune. Because he had over 30 Ford dealerships. So, on opening day, Dutee Flint was there and he had lined up outside of the old Union station this long line of Model A Fords and when all of the delegations of hotel men showed up on the train that afternoon, Dutee was there waiting for them with his cars, because cars were still very fashionable, and he actually had everyone get into the Fords and he drove them out to Edgewood, to his estate, for a very brief lunch where he just showed off how wealthy he was and then drove them back to the hotel so they could go to the opening day ceremonies.”
His success was also recognized, very early on, by Henry Ford.
“Dutee Flint was critical to Henry Ford’s operations in the beginning of the Ford empire. He and Henry became very close friends. Dutee and his wife Rose hosted Henry and Clara Ford at their home and on their many yachts. Many times.
Notes and letters preserved by Henry and his wife Clara Ford document the close relationship the two families had. The Fords introduced Flint to a world of big-name celebrities, including Thomas Edison. And Ford trusted Flint in business dealings. In the early 1920s, Flint traveled on Ford’s behalf to examine the car business in Denmark, Germany, Spain and France to see about expanding the company’s footprint overseas. Flint helped Ford purchase a hotel in Massachusetts. And generally speaking, Ford recognized Flint as one of his most important agents.
Henry Ford actually wrote Dutee Flint a letter that essentially said, “You are my most important automotive dealer, and you will be selling cars for me for as long as the Ford company is selling cars,” which of course was a terrible way to jinx poor Duty Flint.
But that’s exactly what happened. When the Ford company shut down in 1927 to retool from the Model T to the brand new Model A, Dutee Wilcox Flint wasn’t in a position to withstand the loss of sales. And his massive, successful empire crumbled around him.
“It’s a little ambiguous what actually happened. In Dutee Flint’s obituary, it’s suggested that Dutee lost his fortune due to the stock market crash in 1929. Realistically, his fortune had been losing value since well before the stock market crash.”
“Dutee Flint had borrowed an incredible amount of money, and he had based this level of debt on the assumption that he would have a huge amount of profit from the sales of all of these cars. Well, when the Ford company stopped producing cars, he went into terrible arrears with his debt.
“Unfortunately for Dutee Flint, he was not exactly very honest about what was happening within his business transactions. So he reported to Ford that he had significantly more assets than he actually had. When the Ford finance team caught wind of the reality of Duty Flint’s assets, they came to Providence on a train, due haste, and liquidated everything that he owned.”
In just over 20 years, Dutee Wilcox Flint built up and then lost his whole automotive empire.
“He also, when the Ford business men came in and dismantled Dutee’s dealership holdings, pretty much overnight, Dutee’s fortune went from very wealthy to having almost no assets. And at the exact same time, there was a mysterious fire that took place at the same time at Edgewood. It was surmised, or gossiped in the papers, at the time that he had burned his own house down. What I later found in my research, was that this probably was something Dutee Flint was very good at. Because there were multiple fires over the course of Dutee’s lifetime in his barns and garages that burned enough assets, cars, machinery, equipment, that he was able to take insurance claims out on them. So this wouldn’t be the first time Dutee was committing insurance fraud. After that, he moved to the Biltmore hotel, taking his radio towers and many of his musical instruments and inventions with him.
Dutee Wilcox Flint, his wife, and his daughter would live in the Biltmore off and on for the next 20 or so years and many milestones were celebrated in the hotel. Like their daughter’s 16th birthday, which was held in the Biltmore’s grand ballroom. Flint never rebuilt his Ford empire, but he and his wife maintained appearances and continued to show up in the social columns of local papers throughout their lives.
When Flint moved into the Biltmore, he brought his hobbies with him, which were incredibly diverse and interesting on their own beyond his business achievements. He was something of an inventor, and today you can find patents he held on gas pumps and golf clubs. And he dabbled in radio in the early 1920s.
“And radio at the time was very very new. It was this cool new technology, and he had a lot of money, so he built huge radio towers. People noted in the newspapers at the time that Dutee Flint had massive radio towers on the top of his mansion, which probably looked like having a spaceship on the top of your mansion because it was such new technology. Dutee broadcast his own radio shows, sometimes it was just talk radio, and then sometimes he would hire someone to play the massive pipe organ that he had in his home.”
When he moved into the Biltmore, Flint brought all of his interests with him, and even continued to broadcast from the hotel.
“Henry and Dutee Flint remained very close, even after the Ford Company, perhaps involving Henry, perhaps not, dismantled Dutee’s empire. But Duty Flint to his dying day would not speak a negative word about Henry Ford.”
But today, no one is really talking much about Dutee Flint and the role he played in the early days of the Ford Company.
Dutee Flint is largely forgotten in the history of RI and the history of the world, though at the time he was alive, he was an incredibly important person to society. Now, i would say the memory of Dutee Flint is much like the only standing artifact of Dutee flint which are the two stone columns which mark the driveway of where his mansion used to be facing the Narragansett bay. And there is literally nothing left that reminds us of Dutee Flint, there are no artifacts of his life other than these two stone columns. But I think it’s important to note that Dutee himself is responsible for the fact that there is nothing left.
That’s really true in more ways than one. This is just one example of the many stories Amanda shares in her book. Stories that are geographically happening in this one relatively small place, but sprawling in scope and impact.
Hotels are such a fascinating place to start if you want to learn about a city or town or region because hotels are the great melting pot of any city. The Biltmore is a great example, but you could use any hotel here. The wildly wealthy would live at these hotels and the people who had nothing, they would work at the hotels. So you had a full melting pot of people who were celebrities or anonymous. So hotels are fabulous places to get to know the inner workings of the nefarious and famous in a city.
Thank you so much for listening, and a huge huge thank you to Amanda Blount. I can’t recommend the book enough, so Amanda if people want to buy it, where should they go?
If you liked this episode, I would love it if you could share it with your family or friends, or you can send me a note at Weird Rhode Island at Gmail.com or on IG at Weird Island Podcast. And if there’s a topic you’d really like to hear about, let me know! See you next time as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island.