| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. By Thomas A. Kinney. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv, 381 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-7946-9.)
Contrary to popular perception, it was not the low-cost Model T Ford, but the low-cost horse-drawn vehicle that introduced Americans to personal transportation. Customers were buying over 900,000 carriages and wagons a year by 1900 (p. 21). The industry that supplied these inexpensive vehicles lived a short but intense life, generally from the Civil War to World War I. This widely ignored success story has, in Thomas A. Kinney, a superb chronicler to provide redress.	1
Prices of carriages and wagons collapsed as producers vied for urban and rural markets. The $150 buggy of 1860 became the better equipped, lightweight $20 buggy of 1900 (p. 21). The number of vehicle makers grew from 3,800 in 1879 to a peak of 6,200 in 1899 (p. 34). The number of workers more than quadrupled from 14,000 in 1849 to 60,000 in 1904 (p. 34).	2
The skilled crafts (blacksmithing, woodworking, trimming, and painting) and small businesses of preindustrial industry are secure in Kinney's narrative. They evolved, of course, but industrialization transformed rather than afflicted them. Craftsmen grew into fitters, assuring that machine-made parts worked together. The industrialized trade called on skilled workers to use general-purpose tools, which required even more talent than using tools specific to their crafts.	. . .

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