In 1895, Ernest Bowen and Walter Fay established a bicycle parts company in Auburn NY. Within 5 years, they had sold the company to a Connecticut firm and reinvested the fund sin a company for the construction of motor-powered boats. The engine and boat building shops were physically separated from one another in Auburn and the boats had to be shipped to Owasco Lake for testing. This inconvenience caused Fay & Bowen to move to the Geneva lakefront in 1904. Here, they perfected their production of motor launches as well as gasoline engines for other uses.

Their Geneva location included a boat building shop, machine shop, paint shop, testing room, boiler house, blacksmith shop and a warehouse for boats. Between 1901 and 1929 the company manufactured 900 boats. During World War I, the company made fuselages for Curtiss Wright of Buffalo.

The urge for speed and the expensive nature of Fay & Bowen’s boats spelled trouble for the company in the 1920s. The company continued to build pleasure boats rather than retool for faster vessels and gradually lost more and more of their dealers and customers. In 1929, the Fay & Bowen Company dissolved and an attempt was made to reorganize. A group incorporated as the FayBow Company and manufactured the mahogany FayBow Middy. By 1937, FayBow faded from existence and within eight years the factory on the lakefront had sold. The building was demolished in 1951 to make room for the arterial highway.