History of the Limousine
In 1887 Armbruster & Company was formed by Tom Armbruster, Charles Kaiser and Walter Walkford. This company built and repair horse-drawn vehicles in Fort Smith, Arkansas. At that time this company was a busy supply depot catering to settlers moving west into Indian Territory. Armbruster built "holdup proof" stage coaches that featured secret compartments for valuables that were built into the coaches floors and interiors, compartments that would re-appear during prohibition.
Twenty-five years later Armbruster & Co. was in the midst of the automobile revolution and offered their coachbuilding talents to owner of the internal combustion engine. By 1920 the firm was a thriving auto body repair depot and earned a great reputation in and around Fort Smith and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Sometime between 1921 and 1923, Jordan Bus Lines, a Fort Smith bus company, commissioned Armbruster to build them an extended-wheelbase multi-door touring car-based coach that could be used for short inter-city runs as Jordan had found that using a half-empty full-sized 25-29 passenger coach on short runs was a money-losing operation.
Therefore the first "Stretch Limousine" was created in Forth Smith, Arkansas in the United States of America as early as 1928 by a coach company named Armbruster. With their first "stretch" under their belt, Armbruster developed a small regional market for their extended-wheelbase multi-door auto-coaches and built around 20 per year. Until the late 1940s, Armbruster had no real competition and was the only firm producing Chevrolet-based airport buses and multi-door limousines in any quantity. Built using both Chevrolet passenger cars and Suburbans, these 12-passenger people movers were used by hotels, taxis, airlines, corporations, and tour companies. Of course around this time Stretch Limousines were a "must have" by all Hollywood actors and actresses, in addition to the practical use of transporting film crews and stage personnel around the moving sets.
In 1962, Armbruster merged with Stageway Coaches from Cincinnati in Ohio, and became Armbruster-Stageway Coachbuilders. In 1974, the first six-door funeral limousines were built on Cadillac chassis, and eventually a product line of Lincoln Stretch Limousines was included due to the growing popularity of Lincoln within the limousine and funeral industries, however the general mission statement for the cars and the company was simply "to move people from place to place, only in larger cars".
Today's Stretch Limousines along with chauffeured service include: corporate roadshows, airport transportation, weddings, proms, bachelor[ette] parties, birthday events, city tours, shopping, a day at the spa, nights-on-the town, bar-hopping and clubbing, holiday parties, holiday light tours, transportation to or from a resort and crosstown transfers.