The Great Fire of 1911 started here and consumed half of Block One. Emil Lawrenz opened the first Ford dealership on this site. An anecdote about Lawrenz illustrates the trauma that the automobile caused. In 1916, he and his wife and a mechanic headed out for relatives in the Midwest in a brand new Model T Ford, only to discover that there were very few roads to travel on. Lawrenz's kinfolk, shocked by the condition of the car and its passengers when it arrived in Minnesota, offered to buy the travelers a train ticket back to Sherwood, but Emil refused. When the automobile was finally seen again in Old Sherwood Town, an exhausted Mrs. Lawrenz climbed to the ground and announced that she had pushed the car half way to Minnesota and back. At that moment, it would have been easy for a disinterested bystander to accept the conclusion of a 1909 Scientific American editorial, that "...the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development."