Kirchhayn Auto Parts has been family owned and operated by the Wendtland family since 1975. We started as a body shop in an old block building with five acres of “junk cars” left by the previous owner, in a small town called Kirchhayn (which means “Church in the Woods” in German).  David’s Star Lutheran Church is the 2nd oldest church in Wisconsin.

While we were running our body shop, we frequently had local people coming in and looking for used parts off of the cars we had on the premises. However, with the price of scrap being high at the time, we hauled many of our car bodies to compressing companies. With the money we made with the scrap cars, we bought more cars. Some of them we took to the compressing companies and others we kept for inventory.

Slowly our scrapping business was becoming a larger part of our business than the body shop was. It was at this time we started a car inventory system. The body shop was now just a sideline of our scrapping business and was soon phased out altogether. The parts we sold off the cars were just an extra bonus, until we crushed the car.