History for sale: Rare 1904 Chicago license plate to be auctioned Sunday

A piece of local history could be yours this weekend: A rare 1904 Chicago license plate is up for sale.

The aluminum plate, numbered “1,″ will be in a live auction at Union’s Donley Auction Services on Sunday. It’s already fetched a top bid of $3,750 online.

The artifact is so old that it was issued three years before the state of Illinois took over license plate administration, said Mike Donley, the auction house’s consignment specialist. The artifact is stamped “City of Chicago” and “1904.”

The roads looked quite different then, back when Michigan Avenue wasn’t so full of cars (because it was full of horses).

“You had some brick-paved of the main thoroughfares, but beyond that, everything was just dirt roads,” Donley said. “99.99% of the vehicles were horse-drawn, so they were pulling through the mud and the dirt.”

When the license plate was in use, drivers had to carry their own supplies, he added. There were no gas stations, and drivers hauled multiple wheels because tires regularly blew out. There were barely suburbs around Chicago then, Donley said.

The city had started issuing badges to licensed drivers in 1900 in an effort to pay for better roads, according to Donley. Chicago tried leather license plates next, one of which is also up for auction this weekend. But the stamped aluminum plates that were first produced in 1904 are the rarest, Donley said.

“They’re only about five known to even exist,” he said. “And this one is number one. It doesn’t get any rarer than that.”

The city then opted for sturdier brass plates before the state took over licensing in 1907, he added.

Car enthusiasts might be even more excited about the plate when they hear who owned it. It had been assigned to Arthur J. Eddy, an attorney and art collector who was a fierce early advocate for cars.

Eddy took a 2,000-mile trip in his car, Donley said. The trip broke records at the time, and the book Eddy published about it was one of the first written about automobiles.

He was also a founding member of the Chicago Motor Club, which eventually became AAA, and helped organize the first Chicago Auto Show, Donley said.

Prospective buyers can preview the plates and bid onlineahead of Sunday’s auction.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of fighting over it. My gut feeling is it’s probably going to somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000,” Donley said.

For a piece of history that shows just how far we’ve driven, he thinks it’s worth it.

“We take for granted that we walk out the door, get in our car, get on an expressway, go over 60 miles an hour,” Donley said. “This is it. This is the beginning of it all.”

jsheridan@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @jakesheridan_