View All Events

LaFayette Motors & Indy’s Lost Industrial Suburb

Talk chronicles the rise and fall of luxury automaker LaFayette Motors, once headquartered in Indy’s Mars Hill neighborhood.

LaFayette Motors Company factory, 1921 (left); 1921 LaFayette Touring Car (top right); 1921 LaFayette Roadster (bottom right). Courtesy Ralph Gaebler.

November 6, 2025

6 p.m. EDT
Indiana Landmarks Center, 1201 Central Avenue, Indianapolis and Online

Get Tickets

In the early 1900s automobiles were big business in Indiana with hundreds of competing manufacturers capitalizing on the nation’s new love for automotive travel. On November 6, automotive historian Ralph Gaebler shares the little-known story of luxury automaker LaFayette Motors, the company’s rise and fall in the early 1920s, and its surprising role in the development of Indianapolis’s Mars Hill neighborhood.

Founded in 1919 by top talent from General Motors and Cadillac, LaFayette Motors set out to offer a finely engineered luxury car and bring thousands of skilled workers to its Indianapolis headquarters — a key anchor in the over-ambitious vision of Indy’s industrialists to launch Mars Hill, a planned “industrial suburb” for 50,000 residents that promised well-built homes, parks, and schools within walking distance of factory employment.

Ralph Gaebler is an emeritus member of the Library Faculty at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he served for 34 years as Foreign and International Law Librarian at the Maurer School of Law. He has long been interested in the social history of the automobile, particularly the history of the automobile in Indiana. His work has been most recently published in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History and the Society of Automotive Historians Journal.

Sponsored by Indiana Landmarks’ affinity group Indiana Automotive.

Tickets

Tickets are free for Indiana Automotive and Indiana Landmarks members with RSVP, $10/general public. Doors open at Indiana Landmarks Center at 5:30 p.m., with brief highlights from our Indiana Automotive affinity group beginning at 6 p.m., followed by a talk and Q&A. Join us in person or watch online via Zoom.

Reserve your spot by using the form below or by visiting LaFayetteMotorsTalks.eventbrite.com.