In 1931, brothers Henry and Elmer Nickle of Powell, Tennessee, opened a gasoline filling station in the unusual shape of an airplane to tap the market newly created by the evolution of transportation and the mobility of Americans. The airplane is one of Tennessee's finest examples of mimetic design, a novelty type of architecture in which buildings take the form of the product sold there or some other novel design to attract drive-by customers. The Airplane Filling Station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.