On April, 3, 1860, in St. Joseph, Missouri, a growing crowd awaited the inaugural run of the Pony Express to San Francisco, scheduled to depart once the express train arrived from the East at fi ve o’clock.In the afternoon light, people milled around the bay mare of the express rider. They pulled so many hairs from her mane and tail as souvenirs that her rider took her back to the livery stable, where, saddled and ready, she would be safe from further depredations. Finally the train pulled in. The mail was tossed to the express agent, who quickly stuffed letters, newspapers, and parcels into a mochila, a poncho with pockets for mail, spread it across the bay mare’s saddle, and made it fast. The rider mounted, and the crowd parted as he galloped down to the ferry dock. As soon as the mare’s hooves clattered onto the deck, the ferry Denver cast off, swung into the current, and steamed to the village of Elwood on the western bank.
Another clatter of hooves, then horse and rider galloped away from the ferry landing, followed by the cheers of the crowd as they rode into the sunset on the first leg of the long journey to California. Twenty-three horses and nine days later, a rider arrived at the Pony Express office in Sacramento to deliver the mochila, while back in St. Joseph the first rider from California was delivering his.1
The horse and its cowboy rider provide one of the most popular and compelling images of horses in nineteenth-century America. As it traverses the expanses of the American West, the Pony Express horse seems the quintessential opposite of Gilded Age industrialization. Reinforced by more than a century of dime novels, Wild West shows, comic books, movies, television shows, cigarette advertisements, car commercials, and presidential rhetoric, the western horses of the late nineteenth century evoke a natural, authentic world in contrast to the human-built world of urban industrial capitalism that was emerging east of the Mississippi.
The western ranch bore similarities to the southern plantation, and the Indian reservation to development of Jim Crow. The farms and ranches of the West were the geographical fringe of urban industrial cap italism. The horses of the West and their human coworkers were industrial workers as much as the horses and their human coworkers of northeastern and midwestern farms and cities. Even the wild horses of the West are industrial creations. These horses are not truly wild, horses having gone extinct in North America over 10,000 years ago, but feral. Living on public lands and protected by the federal government, they symbolize wild and original nature, a concept that gained traction among urban middle and upper classes in the late nineteenth century.2
Pony Express riders and horses were some of the first industrial workers of the West. Rather than sending riders across trackless wilderness, the Express built a network of way stations, stables, corrals, wells, roads, and bridges and used a supply system of ox- and mule-drawn wagon trains to provision the way stations with grain, hay, horseshoes, harness, horses, and food supplies, some of which were shipped in from the East. These stations had to be staffed, and horses cared for. At its peak, the Pony Express employed over 400 horses and over 500 people, including 125 riders, who had to sign time sheets so that supervisors could monitor their work. It took industrial management to coordinate operations over thousands of miles in order to carry the mail, just as it took industrial technology to link western ranches with eastern beef markets.
During the Gilded Age the use of horses grew as technological change expanded the opportunities to use horse power. There were startling gains in the number of horses: the national population rose from approximately seven million in 1860 to nearly twenty-five million in 1900. Most of these resided east of the Mississippi River. They were integral in two of the great transformations of the Gilded Age—the growth of the industrial city and the mechanization of agriculture.
Urban horses made up a relatively small percentage of the overall horse population—around 11 or 12 percent—but their role in urban growth gives them an importance beyond their numbers. Horses powered almost ev ery aspect of urban life. Urban herds grew over 350 percent as horses urbanized 50 percent faster than humans. At any time between 1860 and 1920, a Boston banker was likely to encounter more horses than would a cowboy or rancher in Colorado or Texas. Horse populations grew 371 percent during the Gilded Age. When the Great Epizootic struck eastern cities in the fall of 1872 it underscored the extent to which they relied on these living machines.3
Philadelphia’s center was normally congested with drays, carts, huge brewery wagons, small delivery wagons, city vehicles, omnibuses, carriages, and streetcars that filled the thoroughfares alongside pedestrians, shoppers, street vendors, shopkeepers, city employees and workers of all sorts. However, Monday, November 4, 1872, was no usual day. The streets were virtually empty of traffic. A few delivery boys trundled handcarts, an ox-drawn cart plodded along, its bells swaying in a slow rhythm, and a furniture wagon appeared, two men pulling and two men pushing it down the street. A reporter walking around the city saw only a few horses and one mule between one and eight p.m. The front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported “The City Well Nigh Horseless.
” Philadelphia’s horses had succumbed to a virulent strain of equine influenza known as “the Great Epizootic” that afflicted the nation’s horses in 1872 and 1873. As horses remained in their stalls, shivering, coughing, runnynosed, streaming-eyed, and weak, city life came to a standstill, because horses provided the motive power for urban transportation, hauling, and construction. Streetcar companies suspended ser vice, undelivered freight accumulated at wharves and railroad depots, consumers lacked milk, ice, and groceries, saloons lacked beer, work halted at construction sites, brickyards, and factories, and city governments curtailed fire protection and garbage collection. Only a general strike by ev ery teamster, worker, and municipal employee could have produced the same effect. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “our business houses have been made to feel the important part played by the horse in the daily routine of business life.”
The Great Epizootic of 1872 and 1873 was a dramatic demonstration of the extent to which cities relied on horse power. The disease first erupted in Toronto at the end of September, spread northeast to Montreal and Quebec, south to Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester, and then along the Erie Canal, shutting down traffic. It traveled down the Hudson River and the along the railroad lines, infecting horses in city after city. The epizootic reached Brooklyn, New York City, and Boston by October 22 and spread along the coast and through the interior of New York and New England from the Catskills to Maine. At the end of October it appeared in Philadelphia and New Jersey and progressed to western Pennsylvania, the Upper Midwest, and the Upper South.
By December the epizootic was in Atlanta, Memphis, and Milwaukee, then traveled across the West, sickening horses at army outposts early in 1873 and in Sacramento by April. The scale of the Great Epizootic as an animal epidemic was unprecedented—it sickened horses in thirty-three states.
Its worst impact was in urban areas, where the disease spread “with unexampled rapidity . . . attacking its victims with startling violence.”4 A few horses would begin to cough and sniffle, and then the disease would erupt in stable after stable. Horses with influenza suffered symptoms familiar to any human victim of “the flu” —rapid onset of extreme fatigue, muscular weakness, fever, aches, and a general lack of interest in eating or moving. Horses stood or lay miserably in their stalls. Few actually died; the fatality rate from the influenza itself averaged only 1 or 2 percent. Most horses improved within a few days, but full recovery took ten to fifteen days, and working horses not given enough time to recuperate suffered relapses and developed debilitating or fatal secondary complications.
The epizootic was most severe in the cities of the Northeast. In Boston, where it was estimated that more than 50,000 horses shared the city with 250,000 human residents, the disease appeared on Tuesday, October 22, and within forty-eight hours an estimated seven-eighths of the horses were ill. The disease raced through the city’s stables, especially the large stables of street railways, stage and omnibus lines, express and trucking companies, and the city government.
As one paper put it, “Business requiring the assistance of the equine tribe has received a severe shock.” Farmers feared to bring their horses into the city. Funerals and weddings were disrupted by lack of horses for hearses and carriages. The Fire Department suspended the use of horses, and attached drag ropes to steam engines so that humans could pull them to fires. People talked of using small steam engines or “steam dummies” on streetcar lines.5
Just as the epizootic abated, events in Boston took another catastrophic turn: on the evening of Saturday, November 9, a fire broke out in downtown Boston that burned sixty-five acres of the business district, destroying 766 buildings and one schooner at the wharves before it was finally contained three days later. One of many factors delaying containment of the conflagration was a lack of fire engines, because many of the fire horses were still too weak to work.
The Great Epizootic brings to light a little-recognized aspect of American history: the dense horse populations that resided in Gilded Age cities. So powerful is the association of horses with nature that to many, horses seem inherently incompatible with urban life. Yet into the twentieth century large populations of horses (and other animals) lived and worked in cities alongside humans.
One source of this misconception is the relative absence of horses from many urban photographs before the 1880s. Photographic wet plates needed subjects to remain utterly still for ten to fifteen seconds— an impossible requirement for horses. Photographers often took pictures on Sundays, when there was little vehicle or pedestrian traffic to blur the image. The resulting photographs gave an imposing, classical impression of American cities but excluded evidence of horse-drawn traffic. Occasionally these pictures contained “ghosts” that upon close examination prove to be legged blurs produced by the movement of horses while the plate was being exposed.
All this changed in 1879, when John Carbutt introduced the first commercially successful dry plates, with an exposure time of slightly over one second. These plates had the ability to capture motion. This technological advance brought photography closer to being “an art of actuality.” From then on, horses appeared in pictures of urban life.6
They pulled fire engines, ambulances, street sweepers, and garbage wagons. Horses provided virtually all the power for the internal circulation of city life because no other prime mover could compete with them technologically. Railroads stimulated urban growth, but they did not fit very well into urban life. Many municipal governments were reluctant to have steam locomotives traveling within city limits. The chief concerns were fires started by sparks scattered from passing engines, and accidents at crossings. Moreover, locomotives were nuisances: they were deafeningly loud even apart from their bells and whistles; they belched thick smoke, shook foundations, and cracked street pavements.
Because of the political and economic power of railroad companies there were tracks through some urban neighborhoods, and their presence prompted ongoing battles between railroad and residents. The files of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad are filled with letters of complaint about fires that occurred at properties adjacent to the tracks, demands to limit the ringing of bells and whistles, and claims for runaway horses and smashed carriages.
The company posted flagment and constructed barriers at grade crossings, investigated accidents, and determined liability for horses, vehicles, and dead or injured pedestrians and passengers. Chronic conflict over the ways in which railroads disrupted urban life and endangered urban residents fueled labor agitation against the railroads in some cities and contributed to the Great Strike of 1877. Danger and inefficiency kept the use of steam limited in urban transportation except on tracks leading out of the city. There simply was no viable mechanical alternative to horses as urban prime movers.7
Photographs taken along Philadelphia’s Market Street near the turn of the century reveal a city inhabited by horses and humans. At the Delaware ferry pier at the foot of Market Street, wagons, horsedrawn cabs, and carriages crowd the area, discharging passengers, baggage, and packages. In the first half-dozen blocks away from the river, electric streetcars mingle with heavy wagons, light wagons, covered wagons, two-wheeled drays, buggies, and pedestrians.
Large wagons line the street backed into the curb at an angle, their two-horse teams eating a midday meal from small portable troughs set in front of them on the street. Men with wheelbarrows and handcarts trundle through the traffic. By the corner of Eighth and Market, the angle-parked wagons have disappeared, but wagons, carts, and carriages fill the street. Pedestrians are everywhere, on the sidewalk and in the street, crossing at ev ery point and intermingling with the streetcars and wagons.8
In 1900, when urban horse populations were at their peak, the average density in the cities of the Northeast was 396 horses per square mile, and in midwestern cities 541 per square mile. (Densities were lower in western and southern cities). The average density for the forty-six largest cities in the country was 426 horses per square mile. In that same year, New York and Chicago each averaged just under 500, Boston nearly 700, Cincinnati over 600, and Milwaukee came in highest with 709 horses per square mile. In Philadelphia there were nearly 400 horses per square mile, or over 50,000 horses in the entire city. Given the still rural nature of the northwestern and far northeastern sections, densities in the center city and its adjacent districts were probably higher.9
The residential patterns of horses reflected the income and occupation of their owners and users. Elite carriage and riding horses lived in private stables in the best neighborhoods or in luxury livery stables. Working-class horses lived in large, sometimes multistoried livery, freight, express, or streetcar stables, or in small stables tucked between homes and businesses. Lower-class horses lived in shacks, sheds, and cheap livery stables with poor sanitation.10
Fire insurance maps for the city of Philadelphia in 1872 show stables located in every neighborhood. In the section bounded by Front Street and the Delaware River on the east and Eleventh Street on the west, and from Vine Street on the north to South Street, an area of approximately 130 blocks, there were as many as 175 identified stables of varying sizes. Streets such as Cherry, Arch, and Filbert, which ran parallel to Market Street to the north, had a stable on almost every block, and stables were clustered within a few blocks of Market on the north-south streets as well.
Urban horses presented a more varied assortment of breeds and types than were seen in the countryside: teams of enormous draft horses, weighing a ton or more each, pulling the largest, heaviest wagons, mid-sized workhorses and leggy carriage horses, elegant thoroughbreds, hackney carriage ponies with high-stepping action, even the occasional mule and donkey. Purebred heavy draft horses were most likely to be found in the cities, because of their useful status appeal there but also because only year-round urban work could justify the expense of their daily grain requirements.
Between 1860 and 1880 crossbreeding with large European draft horses increased the average size of the American draft horse from 900–1,100 pounds to 1,800–2,000 pounds. The majority of horses on the streets were geldings, since stallions were considered dangerous and often banned from city streets by ordinance, and mares were sometimes considered less prestigious or useful as work animals.12
Horses were ubiquitous in the urban landscape: standing, walking, trotting, sometimes shying, starting, falling, rearing, plunging, or bolting. They were large beings with which to share space, standing from four to six feet at the shoulder, eight or more feet in length, and weighing 800 to 2,000 pounds. Pedestrians moved around horses on the streets and encountered them at eye level, their work clearly visible in their flexing of muscles, straining, and sweating as they pulled heavily loaded wagons and streetcars. The smells of manure, sweat, and horsehair mingled with other urban smells of garbage, human waste, and industrial production.
Horses contributed to the symphony of urban noise—hooves clattering and scrapping on the streets, wagons rattling and banging, wheels creaking, harness jingling, horses whinnying, neighing, groaning, and bugling. Along with human residents, horses contributed to the growing filthiness of American cities with their rudimentary infrastructures. The average horse produced twenty to fifty pounds of manure and a gallon of urine daily, distributed freely between stables and streets.
With 131,000 horses in New York City by 1900, the result was 1,300–3,300 tons of horse manure daily in the city as a whole, or 5–12 tons per square mile given a horse density of 486. The carcasses of horses that died in the streets often lay for several days before being removed by street or sanitation departments or by jobbers contracted to the city. New York had 15,000 horse carcasses per year in the 1880s. Adding to manure and carcasses was the enormous amount of garbage, refuse, and waste generated by humans.
City governments established street-cleaning departments and invested in street-sweeping equipment (pulled by horses, who of course dropped more manure as they were driven around cleaning up piles of manure), tried to pave streets with materials that would be easier to clean, and passed ordinances regulating manure piles at stables. They passed laws regarding human waste and garbage as well. Many cities sold stable manure, street sweepings, and night soil to farmers in the immediate hinterlands, whose farms produced the hay, grain, vegetables, fruits, and meat consumed by equine and human urbanites.13
Horses were also important urban consumers. Necessities like hay and grain were provided at first by a number of small dealers, and purchased directly from farmers in the local markets. However, the demand for hay and grain from many, large urban horse-based establishments, like the railways, express companies, and teaming firms, aided a shift to larger dealers and commodification of hay and grain. Many businesses supplied an ever-widening array of vehicles and all manner of horse furnishings to urban markets.
Abbot, Downing & Company produced a wide range of vehicles for commercial, institutional, and private use: stage coaches, fire wagons, patrol wagons, express wagons, New York drays, and dry-goods wagons (styles unique to New York), ice wagons, hotel buses, ambulances, sleighs, streetcar sleighs. Companies produced an astounding range of products for horses. Some businesses made goods for horses as part of a wider array of products. For example, hatmakers also made straw sunhats for horses; these were good for keeping flies and sun off city horses in the summer and amounted to a sizable business.
A long list of jobs depended on urban horses: smiths, farriers, cabmen, stable jobs, carters, horse dealers, horse breakers, horse breeders, knackers, livery stable owners and workers, manufacturers of horse-related objects such as harness and wagons, and the many people they employed. Economic historian F. M. L. Thompson classifies the urban horse as “a producer good with a vital economic function.”14
The majority of urban horses worked hauling freight into and around the city. There was hardly a raw material or finished good that did not travel by horse power at some point between production and consumption. Large companies, such as the railroads, express companies, and department stores, maintained quite large stables, but smaller businesses kept their own horses and wagons as well. Freighting absorbed horses from mass transit; horses that had worked for four or five years pulling streetcars were moved into urban hauling. As markets and outputs expanded, the number of freight horses rose even higher. The number of urban teamsters grew faster than the rest of the urban population.
The electrification of the streetcars in the 1890s that eliminated most of the streetcar horses hardly affected the size of the urban horse population, which underwent one of its largest increases during the same decade. The surge in freighting occurred in tandem with growing mechanization in the wagon industry, which increased production and lowered the price of vehicles.15
Horses and wagons helped advertise businesses and products by being part of the message being conveyed to consumers. Some businesses made a specific breed or color of horse their trademark or used elaborate turnouts of wagons, horses, and harness. Horses were a symbol that identified the company on sight. In Philadelphia the department store Strawbridge and Clothier had a fleet of elegant delivery wagons pulled by dapple-gray horses, housed in a large company stable in the center of the city. The R. McAllister Coal Company used matched four-pony teams decked out in elaborately studded harness with jaunty cockades between their ears.
Four gray horses in fancy harness and bells pulled the sturdy, elegant wagon of the Great Western Meat Market. The Knickerbocker Ice Company identified its product and address prominently on the side of its boxy covered wagons and put bells on its horses. Small proprietors used their wagons for advertising too—a photograph of Mr. P. Castelli, of Castelli Fruit and Produce, 7286 Woodland Avenue, shows him standing proudly with his wagon and two horses.16
Less visible were the horses that worked in manufacturing, construction, and shipping. Horse treadmills provided power for small enterprises and enabled people with limited cap ital to enter mechanized production. Philadelphia brickyards and lumberyards used horses to drive brickmaking machines and saws until the end of the century. On construction sites, horses excavated foundations and lifted materials into place. Horse-powered cranes loaded and unloaded ships; horses powered dredging pumps in the harbors and hauled in nets of shad along the Delaware River.17
City governments employed growing numbers of horses, especially in the wake of the city consolidation and reorganization that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. As municipal governments achieved more social and political control, they established professionalized departments for fire, police, and public health that used many horses as part of their work. As police departments were responsible for larger urban areas, they organized mounted police units to patrol outlying districts and to provide crowd control in case of riots and strikes. With an expanded jurisdiction, they needed paddy wagons to convey prisoners to jail.
Municipal fire departments with paid personnel on duty around the clock replaced volunteer, neighborhood-based hose companies. When heavy steam engines replaced hand-pumped machinery, horses were necessary to pull them. Elaborate mechanisms swung the harness onto the horses and rapidly hitched them to the equipment. Changes in fire-fight ing equipment and organization shifted human labor to horse labor. Public health departments maintained fleets of horses, wagons, and equipment for street sweeping and waste removal of all kinds—garbage, human waste, manure, dead animals, and so on.18
It is unclear whether urban horses were dangerous, whether nineteenth-century urban dwellers perceived them as dangerous, or whether they saw horse behavior and incidents as normative and took them in stride. On the one hand, horses were a familiar technology whose limits and risks were well known, but on the other hand, many urban dwellers did not directly own or use horses, and their knowledge of their handling and behavior may have resembled the average automobile driver’s understanding of the physics of driving and the mechanics of engines. City folk were around horses, but they did not always know very much about them.
Few accident statistics predate the earliest twentieth century, and much evidence is anecdotal. Risk and danger are not inherent conditions, but highly relative perceptions. The cited dangers of horsedriven traffic must be understood within the context of nineteenth century traffic control, of which there was none. Cities did not institute systems of traffic police and mechanical signals until the twentieth century. Traffic controls relied on systems of one-way streets, parking and speed regulations, and rules about right of way.
There were few policemen delegated to traffic duty. New York City gave right of way at intersections to north- and southbound vehicles, mandated signaling by drivers, forbade stopping and parking except in designated areas, and limited speeds to five miles per hour for business vehicles and eight miles per hour for passenger ones. Speed limits could not be enforced because there was no way to measure speed anyway. Since the streets were congested, speeding was rarely an issue. It is hard to imagine that horse-drawn vehicles traveling two to five miles per hour were dramatically more dangerous than heavy metal cars and trucks traveling ten to forty miles an hour.19
They first appeared in 1829 on New York City streets, where they were immediately popular, multiplying to seventy within a year. In 1831 the Boxall Hourly Stage Coach inaugurated regular service along Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Philadelphia had eighteen lines of omnibuses by 1848, employing 138 omnibuses, 600 horses, and almost 700 drivers and hostlers. By the 1850s there were 700 New York City omnibuses while Philadelphia had over 300; St.Louis had ten different omnibus routes, each running cars every ten minutes.
As omnibuses proliferated, new vehicles were designed that looked like boxier stagecoaches and could hold twenty or more passengers. Some of these had seating on the roof, accessed by a small, steep stairway on the back. However, they were quite heavy and had a high center of gravity that added to overall draft. Ill-maintained cobblestone streets and unpaved muddy streets made them even harder to pull and maneuver. Competition between omnibus lines sent omnibuses careening through the streets, adding to traffic congestion and chaos and sometimes capsizing at corners or colliding with other vehicles.20
The 1850s saw the construction of horse or street railways to replace many omnibus lines, though some omnibuses remained in ser vice where the railways did not run. These omnibuses on rails combined the benefits of horse-drawn transportation with low-friction rails. They traveled six to eight miles per hour, about twice as fast as the omnibuses. The first streetcar operated in New York City in 1832, but it was the 1850s before streetcars were widely adopted, once the technical innovation of using a grooved rail set flush with the pavement removed people’s objections to raised rails that obstructed other street traffic.
Proponents argued that railways would bring more order to traffic and be easier on the horses. With this technical logjam eliminated, horse railways, “a fundamental American innovation in public transit,” expanded rapidly, and the 1860 census listed fifty-seven companies with 403 miles of track in seven cities. Street railways operated under franchise agreements with state or city governments; in many municipalities they were required to purchase the equipment of omnibus companies in order to overcome the strenuous opposition of the latter, which rightly foresaw their own displacement.21
Even smaller horse railways employed hundreds of horses, and the largest ones employed thousands, housing them in huge, multistoried city stables. In 1859 the Metropolitan Railway Company in Boston owned 528 horses to operate forty-four cars over twelve miles of track, and the Third Avenue Railroad of New York City owned 570 horses to operate twelve omnibuses and seventy-one cars over six miles of track. In 1890 the eleventh census enumerated 488 companies with 4,062 miles of track employing 84,000 horses in 331 municipalities, and there may have been as many as 100,000.
A sixth of these were small railways of less than 10 horses in small towns, newer western towns, or smaller cities with several small lines, while Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, Detroit, Minneapolis, Brooklyn, New York, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Providence had multiple railways, some of them employing more than 1,000 horses. The nine Philadelphia railways that answered census in quir ies averaged 527 horses apiece; the largest of the group owned 1,460. The West Chicago Street Rail Road Company listed 4,200 horses and the Brooklyn City Rail Road Company a whopping 5,300. The West End Company of Boston claimed 7,600 horses, and the city was said to contain 10,000 in all, while the City of New York (exclusive of Brooklyn) had 12,000.
Railway horses were generally indeed horses, as there was little or no use of mules in northern cities, though southern lines used them. A Minneapolis street railway used mules for a few years but abandoned the experiment.22 Streetcar work, with its constant stopping and starting, was fatiguing, and horses could work effectively for only three to six hours a day. Companies quickly learned that it was cheaper to keep more horses working fewer hours than the reverse. Streetcars ran frequently, some lines as often as every five or seven minutes. Companies maintained anywhere from four to twelve horses per car, depending on whether it was a one- or two-horse car, and on length of route, and tried to keep reserve horses to replace those sick or injured, and to augment teams on steep hills or in bad weather.
Street railways were particularly lucrative enterprises, and they attracted the interest of people with cap ital and power. There was stiff competition for franchises to operate a business for private profit on public streets. Horse railways demonstrated the growing availability of cap ital and the development of business vehicles that could pool cap ital and invest in new technology. In keeping with the business trends of the times, horse railways tried to control markets and reduce costs by consolidating into larger systems.23
Philadelphia had one of the largest horse railway networks. The state chartered three railways in 1857, and a year later the first one, the Frankford and Southwark, began ser vice. By 1860 franchises had been awarded to sixteen more companies, and the city had 148 miles of track, or 37 percent of the national mileage. By the time crowds poured into the city for the Centennial of 1876, Philadelphia had seventeen companies and 289 miles of track under the cooperative control of the Board of Railway Presidents. That year the city’s horse railways carried 117 million passengers. By the mid-1880s there were 429 miles of track over which 222 million passengers rode.
The Union Passenger Railway Company leased the Continental Passenger Railway Company and the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Streets Passenger Railway Company in 1880 to bring its holdings to seventy miles of track, while the People’s Passenger Railway Company leased the Germantown Passenger Railway Company and the Green and Coates Streets Passenger Railway Company to unite forty-four miles of track. Together the Union and the People’s served 41 percent of the city’s railway passengers.
In 1883 two of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia, P. A. B. Widener and W. L. Elkins, merged six companies to form the Philadelphia Traction Company, which soon controlled a third of Philadelphia’s 320 miles of track and served 117 million passengers as part of a national syndicate that controlled horse railways in Chicago, New York, and Pittsburgh. Electrification further hastened the process of consolidation, and by 1896 there was only one street railway company in Philadelphia.24
Most of the expenses of horse railway companies were horse related. The companies were large consumers of hay, grain, shoes, harness, horses, horse tools, medicines, and the services of farriers and hostlers on a scale that would have been familiar to any Civil War quartermaster. They also purchased streetcars, rails, paving materials, and other equipment. Railways tried to rationalize their operations as much as possible. Even the smaller horse railways needed considerable management to coordinate diverse inputs of capital, labor, and commodities in order to achieve the complex goal of providing a schedule of streetcar service. Streetcars did not run twenty-four hours a day, but the companies did because of the need to care for the horses.
As they dealt with horse ailments, they considered whether to employ people trained in veterinary medicine. They debated different methods of shoeing and different brands of shoes. They evaluated different paving materials in terms of direct cost and in terms of the traction it provided, perhaps offering savings in horse fatigue and reducing the number of leg injuries, and calculated the maximum gradients for hills. They established operating rules to minimize accidents and liability. Knowing that the work life of a car horse was only three to five years, they calculated the best age at which to buy and sell horses. They might reduce a horse’s shift in exchange for getting maximum effort during each hour the horse worked. They looked for lighter, stronger streetcars from manufacturers, and other improvements in horsedrawn rail. They had to meld work schedules, duties, and rules oriented to equine needs with quite different work schedules for humans.
Managers used horse behavior to rationalize operations. They encouraged strong bonds between horses and drivers by assigning horses to the same drivers. They permitted drivers to name the horses and encouraged them to groom them, an activity that copied horse grooming behaviors and encouraged horse-human bonding. In heavy urban traffic, with its lack of traffic controls, horses had to rely on their drivers for direction and reassurance. Horses learned to recognize their own names and their drivers’ voices. A skilled driver could steer through traffic, avoid accidents, and limit unwelcome horse behaviors by using his voice as well as reins and brakes in the cacophonous streets.
Companies also tried to use new standards of public behaviors, collectively defined as “respectability,” as a form of labor control. Owners of railways joined humane organizations, which by raising awareness about animal welfare provided an audience to monitor and enforce driver behaviors and treatment of their horses. But drivers of streetcars (and also drivers of freight wagons) could be caught between the needs of their horses and the needs of their bosses, find ing that their job was in public view even as they were squeezed by demands for speed and efficiency from management that a middle-class public did not see or chose to ignore.25
Horse railways altered the physical area and spatial organization of the city as a whole. The preindustrial “walking city” had remained geographically compact because the distance a person could commute on foot was approximately two miles. Neighborhoods, though distinguished by social, commercial, and manufacturing differences, still lay in close physical proximity to each other and made the city socially and economically heterogeneous through this physical and visual contact. But the widening use of streetcars— which coincided with many city consolidation efforts—expanded the average commuting distance from two to three miles, and more than doubled the potential residential area of cities from 12.6 to 28.3 square miles.
For example, in West Philadelphia real estate developers obtained charters for streetcar lines to connect the central business district with suburban areas and to facilitate the sale of lots and homes. In Boston the number of commuters had already tripled by 1860. Though not alone a sufficient explanation for suburbanization, horse-driven mass transit nonetheless provided the technological component creating the “streetcar suburb.”26
The horse railways inserted travel space between work and residential areas, and between the neighborhoods of different classes and ethnicities. In doing so they broke the city into components organized around economic function and class, and then rearranged them into a new pattern of concentric rings fanning out from the center. Horse railways eased some of the congestion of the cities but also segmented urban life. Affluent residents began to withdraw from urban life. They moved to the periphery of the city and or the suburbs, fled environments and populations they found distasteful, pursued the pastoral ideal of a country or suburban home, and dealt only with select aspects of city life.
At the same time, the expansion of mass transit began to change the meaning of the streets as urban public space. Urban residents often mounted strenuous opposition to railways, opposing not only the use of steam engines on the streets but also the construction of horse-drawn railways, because any railway changed the purpose, meaning, and control of the streets. As a letter from residents of Fifth and Sixth Streets in Philadelphia to the state legislature stated, “But while this company only asks you this year for passenger travel by horse locomotion, what reason have you to believe that next year they will not be knocking at your doors for freight trains and steam? ”27
Streets had traditionally been multipurpose spaces used for commerce, socializing, recreation, parades, speeches, demonstrations, and transportation, and clogged with vehicles, vendors, pedestrians, playing children, and foraging animals. Owners of street frontage, known as abutters or fronters, considered themselves the owners of the street space between their properties, in part because they traditionally footed the cost of street repairs. Any kind of railway, with its fixed rails, encouraged through traffic and faster-moving vehicles, redefined the street’s primary purpose as a transportation artery— a space to go through rather than a place to go to—and lessened the neighborhood’s power to enforce invisible social boundaries. Nor were horse railways the only special interest to claim the use of public space. Urban elites persuaded city governments to construct parkways and carriage roads at public expense, which much of the public was prohibited from using.28
Urban residents claimed that streetcars would increase traffic congestion, ruin property values, endanger pedestrians, disrupt other traffic, create noise, cause accidents, and make neighborhoods accessible to unwelcome populations. They also objected to city and state governments’ asserting authority over the streets through railway franchises and giving public space to private railways to use for private gain. The railways asserted their authority by reconstructing and paving the streets.
Horse-powered railways were in struments by which legal principles of reasonable use, powerful private interests, and a broadly defined public interest altered the meanings of common space and neighborhood space. One example was the issue of snow removal. Horse railways needed to clear their rails in order to keep functioning, but residents objected because cleared streets made it hard to use sleighs and other vehicles with runners during snowy weather. Through these and countless other issues, horse-drawn mass transit reshaped the physical, social, and political landscape of cities.29
People experimented with alternatives to both horse power and steam power for mass transit and urban hauling. In the innovative spirit of the times, they explored the use of compressed air, ammonia gas, giant batteries, internal combustion, mammoth springs, and mechanical draft animals. While there were some successful prototypes using these power sources, most were less economical, efficient, and reliable than horses. Some cities built cable railways, in which the cars attached to cables that were pulled through underground conduits and driven by steam engines located in central power stations. This arrangement applied steam to mass transit without using steam locomotives. Advocates of cable promised enormous savings, unlimited passenger capacity, and clean, noiseless, effortless operation.30
Cable railways proved useful in cities with steep hills where using horse-drawn cars was extremely difficult. San Francisco built the first (and only remaining) cable system in 1873. Newer cities that were just beginning to build transportation infrastructure were interested in cable technology too. Chicago, Los Angeles, and twenty five other cities constructed cable lines. But cable railways proved to be in efficient, expensive, and cumbersome. Conduits and powerhouses required elaborate and expensive construction. A mile of single cable could cost more than $65,000 dollars, and a double cable $100,000, six to ten times more than an equivalent mile of horse car line. Ninety-five percent of the energy went into moving the cable, and because the whole cable always had to move, no energy savings were possible during off-peak hours.
There were miles of complicated underground mechanisms that frequently broke down. Engine problems, frayed cables, broken mechanisms, and driver error could bring the entire system to a halt because it was so highly centralized. Some cable railways gave up and began using horses. In 1897 a fire in the main powerhouse for the Washington, D.C., cable system shut down the entire system, stranding cars everywhere along the line and leaving managers scrambling to find horses and harness so they could rescue the cars and resume some kind of service. The company converted to electricity shortly thereafter.31
Horse railways are often described as deficient and in efficient because horses could get sick or injured. Yet one incapacitated horse did not stop the whole system, while one broken cable or engine brought an entire cable railway to a halt. Horse railways remained sufficiently decentralized in terms of power to prevent system wide collapse. In 1872 there were those who announced that the Great Epizootic demonstrated the limits of horse power and who called for alternatives. But although the epizootic had shut down entire streetcar systems, such widespread horse epidemics were rare, and despite persistent fears, the Great Epizootic did not repeat itself.
Horses continued to be superior prime movers compared to proposed alternatives, and as a result the railways had considerable technological momentum. And as we have seen, horse railways were profitable. Any new technology had to beat the horse on economy, efficiency, reliability, flexibility, and costs.32
The only power source that competed successfully with horses was electricity, and its advent trumped cable and, to a lesser extent, steam power. Electric motors had been around for several decades, but it was not until 1888 that Frank Sprague, a former naval officer and employee of Thomas Edison, devised a workable solution to the problems of electric traction and of conveying current to moving streetcars. Sprague demonstrated the success of his innovation by successfully electrifying an entire railway in Richmond, Virginia.
Electricity, like cable, was not just a substitute for horse power; it required an entirely different way of organizing the generation, transmission, and application of power and the distance over which it could operate. The initial cost of electrification was high, but the operating costs per mile were quite a bit lower than for horse power. The Panic of 1893 and the resulting depression forced many smaller railways out of business. The result was the consolidation of streetcar railways into more centrally owned and managed systems. Electricity succeeded as motive power because it replicated the decentralization of the horse-based system while employing a powerful,
centralized power source. In 1890, 70–90 percent of street railway miles used animal power alone or in combination with steam and cable. By 1902, 97 percent were electrically powered, and the miles operated by horses dropped from over 4,000 to less than 200.33 Even after making the transition to electricity, railways did not get rid of horses entirely, but maintained numbers of them for construction work, repair crews, and providing extra traction at hills and crossings. As one writer stated in 1892, “There is room, place and convenience for every system of transportation ever yet devised . . . so, too, horses have still a niche in the methods of transportation.”
Horses still powered feeder lines and omnibuses connecting with streetcar lines. The West Chicago Railway kept 250 horses for its wrecking or emergency-assistance service. The Chicago City Railway divided its system into seven wreck-wagon districts, kept two shifts of horses harnessed and ready each day, and claimed that the wreck wagon had a response time of eight minutes to any wreck within a radius of two miles. As with steam railroads, electricity could be applied only to vehicles that operated over prescribed routes and remained connected to a central power source. And it powered only mass transit; attempts to include freight transport with streetcar service were not successful, because horses were still needed at each end of the streetcar line. For self-propelled traction, horses had no serious technical competition as the century ended.34
The development of the industrial city was inseparable from the industrialization of agriculture in the Gilded Age. Urban growth accompanied the rising productivity of commercial agriculture. Even as urban life became increasingly differentiated from rural life, cities and hinterlands became ever more economically interdependent. Both depended on horse power. For example, the Great Epizootic was not only an urban story. Its impact on the hinterland was less visibly dramatic, but no less serious. The Nation described horses as “wheels in our great social machine, the stoppage of which means widespread injury to all classes and conditions of persons, injury to commerce, to agriculture, to trade, to social life.”35
Mechanization had brought horses into agricultural production during the 1830s and 1840s. It is commonly assumed that horses were always used in agriculture, but before the invention and availability of mechanical agricultural implements in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, most farm work was performed by humans using hand labor and few horses. After mid century, the widening use of agricultural machines that applied horse power to more aspects of farm work increased the number of horses used.
This agricultural revolution followed the transportation revolution that increased farmers’ access to new factory-produced machines and new markets. Each stage of agricultural production can become a bottleneck for lack of labor or energy, but mechanization relieved one bottleneck after another in northern agriculture by applying horse power to agriculture. Both the transportation revolution and the agricultural revolution increased reliance on horses as prime movers.
Though often described as “labor-saving,” mechanization does not so much reduce labor as relocate it. As the superintendent of the 1860 census noted, “It is now established, as general principle, that machines facilitating labor increase the amount of labor required.”36 Mechanization—replicating the motion of the human hand with a mechanical device that can be driven with a source of power other than human muscle—transfers labor from one worker to another, relocates labor within the process of production, or replaces one kind of job with another.
In northern agriculture, mechanization shifted labor from humans to horses, developing machines that horses could push, pull, or drive with their legs and feet by using the motion of walking or trotting. When humans perform agricultural tasks or any other physical work, they apply muscle power to tools through prehensile hands attached to arms that are not needed for support and locomotion. Since horses don’t have prehensile hooves and haven’t a leg to spare, the only way to transfer labor to them is to convert their linear motion into the kind of power needed for the machine.
Plowing was one of the most energy-intensive tasks in farming, accounting for over half of the power used to raise a crop. It often took several people as well as draft animals, and was so brutal that people often used oxen instead of horses. For plowing, mechanization involved solving the problem of draft in mass-produced plows.
Easing the bottleneck of plowing encouraged the invention and production of other agricultural implements. The most important and famous of these was the reaper for harvesting wheat and other small grains. These crops were easy to grow and found ready markets, and were often the first crop of market-oriented farmers in newly settled areas. But few tasks required as much labor as harvesting.
If farmers could plant only as much as they could plow, it was equally true that they could plant only as much as they could harvest, and harvesting was tied to the amount of labor they could count on when it was time to bring in the crop. To harvest ten acres of small grain took approximately fifteen laborers—five to scythe the grain and ten to rake, gather, and bind it. As with plowing, the window of opportunity was narrow: when the crop was ready, it had to be brought in quickly to avoid rot and other damage. The president of the Pennsylvania Agricultural Society said, “Nothing is more wanted than the application of animal power in the cutting of grain. It is the business on the farm which requires the most expenditure, and it is always the most expensive labor.” The reaper was “the Holy Grail of farm technology.”38
Obed Hussey in 1833 and Cyrus McCormick in 1834 developed the first workable reapers. The first challenge was to replicate the action of the scythe. Hussey and McCormick circumvented this by using a sawing device to cut the grain. Another problem was draft. Reapers operated on power from the wheels, which was transmitted to the gears of the machine. This entire mechanism had draft. The exterior frame of the reaper was a wheeled vehicle, subject to all the draft problems of any horse-drawn vehicle. The manufacturers of reapers and other farm equipment would address these problems of draft continually as they designed and marketed their equipment.
Hallenback’s “improved” mowing machine was configured to make “the line of draft counteract the resistance of the grass to the sickle,” producing steadier motion and “no side draught.” In 1866 Joseph A. Saxton took over a patent on a grass harvester, modified “to diminish its pressure on the ground and obviate side draft and friction.” The Patent Office reissued Samuel S.Allen’s patent for the cutting gear on harvesters in 1870, which established better “center draft” and thus prevented the tendency, “found in other harvesters,” to swing around against the horse’s shoulder.40
Testimonials from farmers about how machines eased the labor for horses were a popular advertising device. A McCormick circular from 1859 quoted farmer John H. Talcott: “I find no difficulty in using the McCormick machines with one span of horses.” Solomon and Jacob Call attested that they cut sixteen to twenty acres a day with four horses, and William W. Williams said he had cut seventy acres of grain and grass with a two-horse machine with no change of horses required. Manufacturers also listened to feedback from farmers. As the users of reaper technology, farmers often made their own adjustments to the machines, and they wrote to McCormick and other companies to describe their improvements and offer suggestions. B. F. Northcott wrote the McCormick Company that he had Threshing with horse sweep power, ca. 1900.
Wisconsin Historical Society, invented a sickle adjuster to “save time, horse flesh and wear and tear . . . [and to] reduce the draft fully one third.” Nor were innovations limited to the machines, but included ways of harnessing large teams of horses that would maximize their power and reduce draft and fatigue. Luther Traline informed the McCormick Company that he had applied for a patent on a “three horse draft equalizer especially adapted to binders and wide cut mowers.”41
McCormick’s patent applications showed that he recognized that horses were living machines and that good design was not just a matter of reduced draft. McCormick experimented with different designs, in one patent put ting the horses behind the reaper so they “McCormick Day” in Owosso, Michigan, ca. 1900. These events were sponsored by the company so that farmers could display newly purchased McCormick machines could push the machine and claiming that the “method of attaching the tongue, when behind, to the breast of the horse, enables him to guide the machine with accuracy.”42
Horses produced stationary power for threshing, corn shelling, grinding, baling, binding, and winnowing by means of the sweeps and treadmills similar to those used to power horse ferries. These devices went by a variety of names: horse whims, horse engines, horse gins, horse wheels, horse walks, and, most commonly, horse powers. A sweep or capstan device was an ancient method of processing farm and forest products in areas without water power. The sweep had a vertical gear mechanism in the center, with horizontal wooden poles extending to a twelve- to twenty-foot radius. The diameter of a sweep device had to be at least twenty-five feet so that the horses could work effectively. Horses were hitched singly or in pairs to the ends of the poles. As the horses walked, they drove the gears of a differential, spinning a vertical rod that ran down to a universal joint and bearing box on the ground. This transmitted power to a tumbling rod, which extended horizontally to outside the circumference of the horses’ path and turned on its longitudinal axis.
This rod transmitted power through another joint and box to another tumbling rod, which connected to a machine. Because the tumbling rod crossed the path of the horses, horses had to step over it as they went around. Horses that stepped on the rod damaged it, and often got seriously hurt as well.
Sweep manufacturers began to encase the rods and central gears, and some states even passed laws requiring such housings. A one-horse sweep could deliver almost two-thirds of a unit of horsepower (the output of an engine, defined as 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, 550 foot-pounds per second, or 746 watts). Attached to a thresher, a two-horse sweep could thresh 200 bushels a day and an eight-horse sweep 400 bushels or more. Some of the largest sweeps used fourteen horses hitched in pairs to the poles.43
The treadmill was also referred to as a railway horse power. A treadmill was a highly tooled, industrially produced mechanism. It resembled a horse stall with half-walls on the long sides and was elevated at one end. Between the side walls, a continuous belt made of woodenslats joined with metal or leather links and, supported by rails, moved across a row of friction wheels along each side and around a horizontal drum at each end. A horse was led into the treadmill and tethered.
When the brake was released, the weight of the horse set the belt in motion, forcing the horse to keep walking and turning the treadmill. Treadmills came in one-, two-, and three horse models and were mounted on wheels so that they could be moved around as needed and parked out of the way when not in use. Whereas work on a sweep resembled pulling a vehicle and, if it involved a lot of horses, used them more as a group of workers, work on a treadmill reduced a horse to nothing more than a machine used for its power.
As historian Joel Tarr has noted, sweeps and treadmills were “the only fractional horsepower motors available before oil engines in the 1890s and rural electrification half a century later.”44 One of their Horse-powered device (sweep design) for threshing grain. most important use was the processing of hay. Traditionally hay was transported and sold loose, not in bales. Hay is both heavy and bulky, and these factors limited its market range to the distance a farmer was willing to drive. Farmers drove loads of hay to towns and cities and sold it loose from their wagons. Urban hay markets developed where the farmers gathered, and the quality of hay was identified with individual farmers, groups of farmers, or localities. Until the 1830s the only way of making bales involved laboriously stuffing hay into boxes by hand and stamping it down. Most Union Army hay depots during the Civil War had huge mounds of loose hay (which was one reason the railroads disliked shipping hay for the army).
The advent of hay presses in the 1830s made it easier to compress hay into bales. Baled hay was easier to handle and transport, and more of it could be transported. In the 1850s the price of hay presses began to drop and became affordable by ordinary farmers. Some of these were hand-powered, but an increasing number were horse-powered. In 1857 Nourse, Mason & Company advertised “Dederick’s Patent Parallel Lever Hay Press,” with a horse-driven capstan that formed a bale in just five turns and promised to bale five to nine tons a day. The number of hay presses on the market proliferated, and included a two-horse hay press that baled eight to twelve tons a day. By the end of the century a sweep-powered hay press was advertised as baling twelve to eighteen tons a day with two horses. Hay baling was a task often done by hay-baling outfits that either moved from farm to farm or located their press in a central location where farmers could bring their hay.
Two implements had already affected the labor-intensive process of hay harvesting. The horse-driven hay rake became common after the 1830s, replacing the hand labor of raking and turning the cut hay. The development of the reaper led to the development of the mower, a similar but slightly different machine. Mechanization transformed hay production to meet rising demand. Field implements made it possible to produce more hay, and processing implements made it possible to market more hay. Horse-driven machinery added sufficient value to hay production to cover the expense of using horse labor. Hay production rose from thirty-five million tons to ninety-seven million tons in the three decades after 1879. In the North, 20 to 25 percent of all cultivated acreage was used for hay.
With the number of horses employed in the cities and their hinterlands on the rise, the urban hay demand rose. Hay presses expanded the reach of the urban hay market so that more distant farmers could sell hay in the cities through hay dealers. Hay bales were not standard in size or weight, and as face-to-face transactions between producers and consumers declined, it was hard for consumers to know if they were getting fair weight and quality for their money. To bring order to the marketing of hay, urban authorities organized hay exchanges that regulated bale weights and established a grading system for hay quality, ending the identification of hay quality with specific producers and replacing it with impersonal market standards. The commodification of hay resulted from horse powered hay mowers, rakes, forks, and presses that increased production, sped up processing, and expanded markets.45
Steam power entered agriculture production gradually and, as elsewhere in the economy, as a complement to horse power. Steam engines produced stationary power for the tasks of processing. Steam engines had powered sugar mills and cotton gins since before the Civil War. In wheat-growing areas, steam-powered threshing machines appeared in the 1870s and 1880s, drawn by horses from farm to farm. Threshing outfits were like small factories, involving a steam thresher, several reapers, several wagons, large numbers of horses, and smaller numbers of humans.
Horse-drawn combines, or combined machines, which cut, gathered, and threshed, were manufactured in California in the 1850s and pulled by twenty to-forty-foot teams. They became a staple of West Coast and Great Plains agriculture. Once again, horses and steam engines worked together. Toward the end of the century, small portable steam engines that could be used like sweeps and treadmills to run threshers, fanners, shellers, and the like became more widely available. What remained problematic was combining steam power with self-propulsion.
It was one thing to invent a self-propelled steam engine, and another to invent one that worked under ac tual farm conditions, operating on soft, uneven ground without sinking in or tipping over. In other words, a self-propelled steam engine had to be like a horse. In agriculture, steam worked best for stationary devices until successful steam traction engines were developed at the end of the century. Horses remained the most reliable source of motive power in agriculture until the 1930s.46
The industrialization of horse-powered agriculture made gains in productivity and output. The number of people supported by each farm worker rose from four in 1840 to seven in 1900. In wheat production, the number of manhours per acre dropped from 35 in 1840 to 15 in 1900, and manhours per 100 bushels from 250–300 to less than 50. For corn, it dropped from 75–90 manhours per 100 bushels in 1850 to 40 in 1890. Using horse power, agricultural productivity doubled in the second half of the century as technological changes in agriculture reinforced each other.47
Horse-drawn agricultural machines cemented the relationship between the individual farmer and the economy of industrial capitalism. Manufacturing was only one step away from agriculture and depended on the rural and farm market. Farming “acted as a magnet drawing people, cap ital and natural resources into its productive processes.” The self-sufficient, idealized yeoman farmer had long disappeared. In the Northeast and Midwest, farmers were fully integrated into the economies of the urban hinterland, and horse powered machinery emblematized industrialized agriculture.48
Mechanization accelerated the change from oxen to horses that had begun during the antebellum period. Most new implements required the fast-paced horse to provide enough speed to drive the ground wheels that operated the internal mechanism and propelled the machine. Oxen were not fast enough, and they could not be made to go any faster. The changes in oxen demographics map the decline of the subsistence farmer and the expansion of industrialized, mechanized agriculture.
The Gilded Age was the age of steam and steel, big business and heavy industry, urban growth and immigration, a railroad network flung across the continent and bridges across the biggest rivers. However, the horse was far from its way to quaint oblivion. There were more horses employed more widely than ever. The majority of horses resided east of the Mississippi, in the most industrialized, populated portion of the country, the cities and hinterlands of the Northeast and Midwest. Horses supplied a majority of the power consumed in the United States.49
Horses powered the expansion of industrial capitalism through urban growth and agricultural development, which in turn expanded the use of horses. Whether in city or hinterland, urban street or farm field, horses were indispensable and irreplaceable as industrial workers. As consumers they provided an enormous market for the products of farms and factories. Horses were not a marginal segment of the industrial economy; horses defined the economy. Dependency on the horse peaked in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Notes
1. Details drawn from Waddell F. Smith, The Story of the Pony Express (San Francisco: Hesperian House, 1960); Alvin Harlow, Old Post Bags (New York: D. Appleton, 1928).
2. Donald Worster, “Cowboy Ecology,” in Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 35–36.
3. Joel A. Tarr and Clay McShane, “The Centrality of the Horse in the Nineteenth Century American City,” in The Making of Urban America, ed.Raymond A. Mohl (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1997), p. 107.
4. Philadelphia Inquirer, 24 October 1872, p. 2.
5. Boston Daily Advertiser, 24 October 1872, p. 1.
6. Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence, Hoofbeats and Society: Studies of Human-Horse Interactions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 157–159; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), p. 288.
7. John H. White Jr., “Steam in the Streets: The Grice and Long Dummy,” Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 106–109.
8. “Broad Street, Looking East,” ca. 1907, Print Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia.
9. Phil M. Teigen, “Counting Urban Horses in the United States,” Argos (Utrecht) 26 (2002): 273.
10. Clay McShane, “Gelded Age Boston,” New En gland Quarterly 74 (2001): 295–297.
11. Ernest Hexamer, Barnes’ Map of the Whole Incorporated City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: R. L. Barnes, 1864).
12. McShane, “Gelded Age Boston,” pp. 283–285.
13. Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 48–52; George Waring Jr., Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, Part 1 (1880; reprint, New York: Arno, 1970).
14. Abbot, Downing & Company, “Chart A: Catalogue and Price List,” (ca. 1871; reprint, Lexington: Carriage Association of America, 1984), Abbot-Downing Collection, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord; F. M. L. Thompson, “Nineteenth Century Horse Sense,” Economic History Review 29 (1976): 78.
15. Tarr and McShane, “Centrality of the Horse,” pp. 107, 119.
16. Strawbridge Wagon, ca. 1900; Knickerbocker Ice, ca. 1900; Castelli wagon, ca. 1910, Print Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia; McAllister pony team, ca. 1895, Davis Collection, ibid.
17. As described in Louis C. Hunter, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, vol. 3 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991); Joel A. Tarr, “A Note on the Horse as an Urban Power Source,” Journal of Urban History 25 (1999): 434–448; Donna Rilling, Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 92, 105, and 168; Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 18, 23; Street Railway Review 10 (1900): 724.
18. For example, Annual Report of the Board of Health, 1890 (Philadelphia, 1891); ibid., 1893 (Philadelphia, 1894); Waring, Report on Social Statistics of Cities.
19. Brian J. Cudahy, Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990); Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 54.
20. John H. White Jr., Horsecars, Cable Cars, and Omnibuses (New York: Dover, 1974).
21. Alexander Easton, A Practical Treatise on Street or Horsepower Railways . . . (Philadelphia: Crissy and Markley, 1859), pp. 5, 8–12; Street Railway Review 1 (1891): 587; Frederic W. Speirs, The Street Railway System of Philadelphia: Its History and Present Condition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1897), p. 11; Louis P. Hager, ed., History of the West End Street Railway (Boston: n.p., 1892), pp. 59–60.
22. U.S. Census Office, Eleventh Census, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), pp. 704–720, 728–729; John H. White Jr., “Horse Power,” American Heritage of Invention and Technology 8 (1992): 41–51; Hager, History of West End Street Railway, pp. 59, 119; Waring, Report on Social Statistics of Cities, p. 564.
23. Easton, Practical Treatise on Street Railways, p. 96.
24. Speirs, Street Railway System of Philadelphia, pp. 30–32.
25. Street Railway Review 1 (1891): 33, 560; ibid., 2 (1892): 615; ibid., 7 (1897); McShane, “Gelded Age Boston,” pp. 293–294.
26. Tarr and McShane, “Centrality of the Horse,” p. 111; Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); Peter Schmidt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).
27. Addresses and Remonstrances against Fifth and Sixth Street Railways (Philadelphia, 1857), p. 3.
28. Easton, Practical Treatise on Street Railways, p. 5; Street Railway Review 5 (1895): 418; Munsey’s Magazine 20 (1898–99).
29. Citizens’ Municipal Reform Association, Passenger Railways (Philadelphia, 1874), p. 1.
30. Street Railway Review 2 (1892): 407; National Cable Car Company, System of Traction Railways for Cities and Towns (New York, 1883), pp. 6, 12, 15.
31. Street Railway Review 1 (1891): 33.
32. Spirit of the Times 87 (1874): 35.
33. U.S. Census Office, Eleventh Census, pp. 704–720, 728–729; U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C., 1902), pp. 387–395.
34. Street Railway Review 2 (1892): 561; ibid., 4 (1894): 339; ibid., 10 (1900): 199–200.
35. “The Position of the Horse in Modern Society,” The Nation 15 (31 October 1872): 278.
36. U.S. Census Office, Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1864), pp. xii, clxiv.
37. Country Gentleman 1 (1853): 21, 117; Leo Rogin, The Introduction of Farm Machinery in Its Relationship to the Productivity of Labor in the Agriculture of the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1931); American Agriculturist 30 (1871): 166.
38. American Farmer, quoted in Clarence Danhof, Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 218, 228.
39. “McCormick’s Patent Reaping and Mowing Machine!,” circular, January 1853, folder 5X-1, McCormick Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison (hereafter McCormick Collection).
40. Country Gentleman 2 (1853): 117; Patent Reissues, 1861–1870, folder 5X-1, McCormick Collection.
41. Northcott to McCormick Co., 16 April 1888; Traline to McCormick Co, 7 March 1888, folder 2x, McCormick Collection.
42. Application for reissue of original McCormick patent of 21 June 1864, United States Patent Office no. 1270, 27 October 1870, folder 5X-1, McCormick Collection.
43. J. Sanford Rikoon, Threshing in the Midwest, 1820–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
44. Tarr, “Note on Horse as Urban Power Source,” p. 435; Hunter, History of Industrial Power, p. 38.
45. McShane and Tarr, The Horse in the City, chap. 6.
46. Reynold M. Wik, Steam Power on the American Farm (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953).
47. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 498, 499, 512; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Resource Service, “A History of American Agriculture, 1776–1990,” http://www.usda.gov.
48. Jeremy Atack and Fred Bateman, To Their Own Soil: Agriculture in the Antebellum North (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1987), pp. 3, 6.
49. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part 1, pp. 8, 105–106; ibid., Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 818.
By Ann Norton Greene in the book 'Horses at Work- (Harnessing Power in Industrial America), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, U.S.A and London, 2008, p.179-214 (and notes). Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comments...