By Melanie Holmes
Once a town with its own post office, Deselm is now a hamlet – an unincorporated part of Rockville Township. Named for Jacob Deselm, this area is where Oliver C. Shreffler went into the auto repair and sales business with his son, Sam. According to the Manteno Historical Society, Shreffler & Son sold their first Rambler from their Deselm business in 1908. A horseless buggy with an engine, a Rambler was touted as “made for country roads.” Country roads being mostly made of dirt or gravel at that time.
Since hard roads did not come to Deselm until 1927, it’s understandable a Rambler was the first auto sold by Shreffler. It’s also easy to see why the Shrefflers moved their auto business from Deselm into the Village of Manteno way before hard roads were built. Dirt or stone roads were hard to navigate, and the autos came via railway. The year was 1915 when the Shrefflers chose the site that would become their permanent home – the northeast corner of Oak and Division. Though the building remains, it’s been divided up and houses various businesses.
Sometime after 1915, once O.C. and Sam no longer needed their Deselm garage, it was disassembled and moved, stone-by-stone, to land that came to be owned by Tom Gorman II (RIP 3/6/23). This story was related to the author in late 2020, during which photos were taken of the old Shreffler garage, as well as a nearby old, rusted-out, white Corvair (with red interior) that Tom said, “…was the first Corvair sold off Shreffler’s lot.” Corvair history shows the year would have been 1960.
As Tom told the story, the garage’s stones were moved, load upon load, and then reassembled where it stands today. The roof and large garage door are different, but the stones are the same. If those stones could talk, what would they say? Perhaps they would speak of Michael Lawrence, who owned that land before Gorman, and whose horses ran around in the small, fenced area adjacent to the gray stone garage.
People didn’t raze old buildings in the early to mid-1900s. That was considered a waste of valuable resources. Instead, homes and buildings were moved. This is how it came to be that the old weigh station from Euziere’s Main Street Elevator ended up on a farm outside of town, as did the original clubhouse for the Sportsman’s Club, and the Parker house that once sat a mile east of town and is now on East Second Street within the village. And it’s how the old Shreffler/Deselm garage came to sit on Gorman land.