Jacksonville was a racing town.
Steamboats, sailboats and yachts, and power swimmers plowed the river. Horses and bicycles were big business and lots of fun. Motorcycles and automobiles coursing the beaches brought in lots of money and people.
However, excluding Oscar and the other ostriches, the race extraordinaire was in 1910, when Cadillac and biplane sped down the Moncrief Racetrack.
Like every crossroads in the nation, Jacksonville longed to be an automobile town. 
John Einig (1854-1912) chugging along in his horseless carriage
John Einig, inventor of Big Jim, the steam whistle, tinkered around in 1895 and built the first auto in Jacksonville, then cranked along Bay Street in his chug-chug machine at 5 or 6 miles per hour.
In 1900, Charles A. Clark, an undertaker, owned the first store-bought auto in the city and Claude Nolan opened the Claude Nolan Cadillac Co. in 1907. He headed the dealership for 35 years, expanding through Florida and beyond, creating the first installment purchase plan for automobiles in the country.
At 22, Nolan had graduated from Vanderbilt University Law School and immediately returned to Jacksonville to enter the automobile business. In an era of horse-drawn carriages and dirt roads, the entrepreneur actively promoted the new machines and where they ran.
As a member of the Good Roads movement, he believed all Floridians, as well as automobile dealers, deserved smoother road surfaces for travel and business transportation than rutted sand and oyster shells.
Part of the Good Roads movement included efforts to require public and private fencing to restrain livestock. It had traditionally been a four-legged habit to bum about paths and byways, colliding with mobile contraptions while destroying themselves, the rolling object and the well-laid travel plans of humans.
Nolan was the first to drive an auto into Key West. He traveled over the Florida East Coast railroad trestle before the overseas highway was built. There were other auto races, but none like the weird one in which a pilot challenged Nolan to race. Pilot and driver, after some aerial showboating, settled into a serious match.
The automobile won, the aeroplane pilot blaming a headwind for his loss, and Claude Nolan was awarded a victory spin around the racetrack in the biplane. Reported to be the second successful flight in the state, Nolan became the first native Floridian to breeze in the clouds.
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| Claude Nolan Cadillac Co., 1911 |
In 1948, the building was unfortunately remodeled by another architect into what has been called a monstrosity. The complex that included additional garages in the rear still abuts Hogans Creek.
Claude Nolan died of a brief illness in 1943 at age 57 and is buried at Oaklawn Cemetery. On the bright side, he was born in Sanford in 1884, where his father, an attorney and Confederate veteran from Henry County, Ga., had recently moved with his wife and five children.
A decade later, George M. Nolan again moved the family, this time to Jacksonville, where he continued to practice law. Nolan lived in a beautiful home, now demolished, on the corner of Second Street and Main overlooking Springfield Park. Second Street was considered to be the most beautiful street in the city.
After serving in the Legislature in 1899, a decade after his arrival in Jacksonville, George Nolan was elected mayor of the town. During his mayoralty, beginning two years after the Great Fire, the city's growth was spiking, although numerous fires continued to break out across the city.
That was also the year of the worst flood in Jacksonville history. A week of heavy rain caused the overflow of McCoy's Creek, and water covered Broad Street to the Union Depot and throughout the railroad yards. Rowboats were used to cross Bay Street near the depot. The floodwaters extended as far north as Springfield Park and the waterworks grounds across the street from Nolan's home.
Not simply enmeshed in the purple, journalistic prose of the day, Nolan, a popular politician, orator and "entertainer," seemed genuinely liked by the people. He died during his second term, during the Carnival week he loved. All Carnival flags were lowered to half-staff.
Eight children survived Nolan, including his sons, Claude Nolan and E.M. Nolan, and he is buried at Evergreen Cemetery.
Jacksonville attorney Louise Stanton Warren shared the stories behind the headstones in the city's oldest cemeteries for the Port of Jacksonville Pilot Club's annual cemetery tours.
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