Before the automobile became a fixture of everyday life, there was no such thing as a gas station. Fuel was sold out of general stores or hardware shops, dispensed from barrels with hand pumps, and buying it was an afterthought. As car ownership spread in the early 1900s, a new kind of roadside business was born — one that would keep changing for the next hundred years.
By the 1910s, dedicated fueling stops were beginning to appear in cities. Paris was already running buses that needed regular resupply. In Washington, D.C., motorists pulled up to early street-side pumps. These early setups were bare-bones — a pump, a tank underground, and a person to operate it. No canopy, no signage, no amenities. Getting fuel was a practical errand, not a branded experience.
The 1920s marked the decade when gas stations began to take on a recognizable shape. Oil companies started building dedicated structures with their own branding. Texaco stations appeared with tidy storefronts. AMOCO ran a station called “Toot-An-Kum-In” that advertised filtered gas. Dome Gas promised premium fuel for 23 cents a gallon. In London, the Anglo-American Oil Company — which would later become Esso — operated a petrol station on Euston Road in 1922, having started out importing lamp oil from the United States.
On the West Coast, Los Angeles was a hub of early station culture. In 1925, Mr. Crary ran a Pan American service station on North Vermont Avenue. By 1927, cars were pulling up to pumps in New Jersey. In England, a new thatched-roof station opened in 1930, blending into the countryside rather than standing out from it. Meanwhile, in Italy, Agip had opened a garage in Venice by the late 1920s.
The 1930s brought more polish to the industry. Oil companies invested in architecture and visual identity. Standard Oil operated a chain of stations across Southern California with a consistent look. Simons service station on South Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles, photographed in 1931, showed how the station-as-business had matured. The Hane Brothers ran their own operation in Southern California by 1934. Tiny stations also popped up in unexpected places — Detroit had what was claimed to be the world’s smallest gas station in the 1930s, tucked next to a bus stop downtown.
Gas stations were community landmarks in small-town America. Along Route 99 between Tulare and Fresno, California, stations clustered together at intervals, competing for the same highway traffic. In North Carolina, locals gathered at a gas station for Fourth of July celebrations. In Caddo, Oklahoma, the station was a departure point for families heading west. Dorothea Lange photographed a farmers’ supply co-op in Nyssa, Oregon, that doubled as a fuel stop — capturing how rural America blended commerce and community at the pump.
By the late 1930s, full-service attendants were a standard feature. A pump employee filling a car in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1937 was doing the same job as attendants from Ohio to Cleveland. In Cleveland, one unusual building served double duty as both a gas station and a gospel mission. In 1937, Paris held a petrol station workers’ strike — a sign that the industry had grown large enough to have organized labor conflicts.
World War II changed everything at the pump. The U.S. government issued a conservation edict limiting how much fuel civilians could buy. In New York City in 1941, gas station attendants filled spare cans under these government restrictions. By 1942, a Gulf station displayed a “No Gas” sign while a horse-drawn buggy waited outside — a stark image of wartime rationing. With men leaving for military service, women stepped in to staff stations across the country. Virginia Lively worked at a station in Louisville, Kentucky in 1943. Women pumped gas at Shell stations in New York and took on mechanical roles that had previously been considered men’s work.
When rationing ended after the war, the crowds returned fast. The scene at a Long Island City service station at the end of gas rationing was chaotic with lines of cars. An early self-service station had already appeared in 1945, though full-service remained the dominant model for years. Gilmore Oil’s “Gas-A-Teria” in Los Angeles, which opened in 1948, was an early landmark of the self-serve concept — customers pumped their own gas and paid a lower price for doing so.
The postwar years brought a boom in station construction. Europe was rebuilding its fueling infrastructure. In Paris in 1947, resupply operations were underway as the city recovered. Hamburg flooded in 1949, and a rowboat delivered gasoline to customers who couldn’t reach the station by road. In France’s Isère region, a tidy service station operated by 1950. In San Donato Milanese, an Agip petrol station combined fuel pumps with a bar — a combination that felt natural in Italian roadside culture.
The 1950s are what most people picture when they think of the classic American gas station. Uniformed attendants checked oil, washed windshields, and checked tire pressure without being asked. Texaco, Shell, and Phillips stations lined the highways. Caltex displayed its pumps at the Milan Trade Fair. In Madison, Wisconsin, a well-built station served a steady flow of postwar cars. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller stopped to refuel in New York in 1956 — an ordinary task made extraordinary only by who was doing it. By 1955, self-service signs were already appearing in Pasadena, pointing toward what would soon replace the full-service model.
The 1960s shifted the industry’s direction. Self-service stations spread as a way to lower prices and reduce labor costs. The architecture became simpler and more functional — flat roofs, wide canopies, fluorescent lighting. In Grimsby, England in 1965, the forecourt looked noticeably more modern than the stations of the 1930s. Police oversaw the rollout of Total’s self-service station on Alison Road, a sign that the new system needed managing. A young boy in a mini-car queued at a UK station in a photograph that captured just how ordinary the gas station had become in daily life.
