705 Hendricks Street

Fairgrounds Addition

Built: 1890

Style: Colonial Revival with elements of Neoclassical Revival

Colonial/neoclassical revival attributes of the home:

• Symmetrical Facade

• Full-height classical columns

• Front Facing Gable with a Palladian style window

• Simplified detailing – Unlike Queen Anne or Victorian Homes.

• John W. Lambert invented the first gasoline-powered automobile in 1891. His home on Hendricks Street, as well as the myriad of homes on historic West 8th Street, stand as the fruits of the labor of the owners of the numerous businesses (e.g., automobile, tools, metal) that flourished in Anderson and Madison County.

• Lambert was born in Ansonia, Ohio, on January 29th, 1860. At 16 years of age, he invented a three-grain corn planter—the first of over 600 U.S. patents he would file. In his early adulthood, he worked as a farm implement dealer and grain elevator operator in Enterprise (now Ohio City), Ohio. Gas engines had fascinated Lambert since seeing a slide valve coal gas engine at a tannery in his teens. In 1891, he successfully tested a three-wheeled surrey-top automobile powered by a gasoline engine. It was the very first of its kind, but was not successfully marketed to potential buyers. Potential buyers could fill their automobile with the natural gas, discovered in Anderson in 1887, which was dubbed the “Queen City of the Indiana Gas Belt.”

• Failing to sell his three-wheeled automobile, he turned his manufacturing energies solely to the gasoline-powered engine. He founded the Buckeye Manufacturing Company in 1894. The move had perfect timing. His company prospered, enabling him to build his home on 705 Hendricks Street in Anderson—a thriving neighborhood during Anderson’s gas boom. Lambert successfully perfected gearless transmission, and after further experimentation, sold the one-cylinder Lambert car in 1906.

• In the eleven years that followed, the Buckeye Manufacturing Company produced Lambert automobiles ranging from two to four cylinders, as well as commercial vehicles, including trucks, fire engines, and tractors. With the United States' entry into World War I in 1917, the Buckeye Manufacturing Company suspended automobile production. It converted its facilities to a national defense center, where it manufactured shells, caisson wheels, and military fire engines. At the war’s end, Lambert noted that the company’s inability to meet the demands of mass production for automobiles would stall its growth. As a result, the company focused solely on automobile parts. It was renamed Lambert Incorporated, located in both Dayton, Ohio, and Mr. Lambert’s birthplace, Ansonia.

• Mr. Lambert would reside at his home on 705 Hendricks Street for the entirety of his retirement, passing away there on May 20, 1952, at the age of 92. He was laid to rest in Maplewood Cemetery in Anderson. The Lambert House was designated a historical landmark in 1977.