|
|
|
Reviews
| The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. By Thomas A. Kinney. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004. xi+381 pp., tables, refs., illus., glossary, bibl. essay, index. $49.95 hb (ISBN 0-8018-7946-9).
|
Thomas Kinney has taken on a daunting task—writing the history of a significant national industry that virtually disappeared some 80 years ago with the coming of the automobile. A serious study of this largely ignored industry is long overdue. The book lays out the major features of the carriage industry from the 18th century to its ignominious death in the mid-1920s. Kinney focuses on the evolving methods used to make carriages, from handicraft production of a few carriages in small shops to heavily mechanized manufacturing on a very large scale in substantial factories. He examines the changes in work and workers brought by mechanization and the factory system. The changing products of the carriage industry also are considered in some depth, along with the size, location, and structure of the industry. Kenney offers outline histories of the industry's trade associations and trade publications, providing additional insight. Finally, this study looks at the failed efforts of the carriage industry to respond to the automobile.
|
1
|
Horse-drawn vehicle manufacturing in the United States remained a craft-based industry until the Civil War. The industry had a typical system whereby apprentices learned carriage maker's skills while in the service of a master carriage builder. The apprentices completed their service at age 21 and became journeymen ("jour") who were free to work anywhere. Apprentices became "masters" only when they established their own businesses and hired others to build carriages under their supervision. Kinney shows that apprentices and journeymen specialized in only one of the four major areas of carriage making: woodworking, ironworking, trimming, or painting. He effectively uses the diaries and reminiscences of several apprentices who served before the Civil War to illustrate the work ways of this craft. Kinney also explains how a carriage was made in a shop during this period, describing step-by-step the entire set of processes from creating drawings to the final finishing work.
|
2
|
Starting in the 1860s, mechanical advances, including the steam engine, fostered the movement of carriage production into factories. New machines took over much of the work of a carriage factory: the cutting, grinding, drilling, and sanding of wood. Production jumped, and an increased division of labor emerged, even in areas not subject to mechanization such as painting, varnishing, and striping. In the craft era, a good-sized carriage manufacturer might produce a few hundred units a year. By the mid-1890s, the Alliance Carriage Company of Cincinnati made more than 10,000 carriages a year, and it was only a mid-sized producer compared to the giant Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company. Large-scale production was accomplished without an assembly line.
|
3
|
A separate industry emerged in the 1870s that manufactured carriage components previously made in-house: ball sockets, iron hardware, and paints and varnishes, to name a few. By 1900, there were 600 of these firms supplying the carriage industry. The ready-made parts industry helped the large manufacturers become assemblers but also helped the smaller shops remain competitive and survive. The combination of specialized machinery and ready-made parts turned most skilled craftsmen into machine tenders and assemblers by the end of the 19th century. Workers operating general-purpose machines retained skills, but the coming of special-purpose and self-acting machines turned most workers into machine tenders who started the machine but did not actually fabricate the part or component. With the aid of ready-made parts, small shops employing as few as 20 survived by serving niche markets.
|
4
|
Kinney presents the contrasting histories of two carriage companies to illustrate the variety of manufacturers in terms of products, scale, and organization. The first was really a collection of companies that produced the high-quality Brewster carriage continuously from 1809 into the early-20th century. Brewster & Company manufactured custom automobile bodies in 1910, and the failed Brewster automobile in 1917. In the 1860s, the sons of founder James Brewster established competing firms to make the Brewster carriage and fought in court over the use of the name.
|
5
|
The contrasting carriage maker was the Studebaker Manufacturing Company, which first became successful by supplying the Union Army with wagons during the Civil War. Studebaker achieved quantity production at its South Bend, Indiana, factory complex, making more than 10,000 vehicles in 1873, roughly 30,000 a decade later, and approximately 100,000 in 1900. It was one of the few carriage manufacturers to make the transition to automobiles. Studebaker began with an electric automobile in 1902 and then made gasoline-powered cars starting in 1904. The company stopped horse-drawn carriage manufacturing in 1920 but made automobiles into the early 1960s.
|
6
|
The final chapter of this remarkable book examines the carriage industry's response to the automobile. Some within the industry thought that the automobile was a passing fad and that the horse-drawn carriage would be a fixture forever on American roads and streets. They were wrong. The number of firms making horse-drawn vehicles dropped from nearly 5,000 in 1904 to only 88 by 1929. The Carriage Builders National Association, founded in 1872, was essentially defunct by 1922. Few carriage makers besides Brewster and Studebaker made the transition to automobiles, and only Studebaker was successful.
|
7
|
| Kinney's single serious failure in this book is his omission of the carriage and wagon industry of Flint, Michigan. Known as the "vehicle city" long before automobiles came, Flint was second only to Cincinnati in horse-drawn vehicle production in 1906. That year, the Durant-Dort Carriage Company alone produced 56,000 vehicles in Flint. The stockholders of the Flint Wagon Works bought the Buick Motor Company in 1903, moved the firm from Detroit to Flint, and started making Buicks. More important, they convinced William C. Durant to leave his carriage company to manage Buick. Five years later, Durant used Buick as the foundation for General Motors. With the exception of this single failure, Kinney has completed an outstanding history of the American carriage industry. This volume belongs on the bookshelf of any serious student of 19th-century industry, technology, and labor. |
8
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|