 much for deciding to spend some time with us here this afternoon. My name is Corinne Cooper. I'm the president of the Berlin Historical Society. We're very pleased that Orca Media is here recording, which will allow many others to view the program. We appreciate UVM Extension for sharing this excellent classroom space with us today. For years, the UVM Extension was located up on Comstock Road. They moved into this new building in 2015. And to dig back a little bit in history in 1949, the same year that the drive-in, Twin City Drive-In opened up at what is now Big Lots. Here on this site, Twin Snack Bar was built by Bernard and Leonard Brough. They were twins, juniors in high school, and trying to raise some money to attend college. And so the snack bar specialized in pepper steaks and Mexican red hut dogs and was quite successful. And in 1950, both Bernard and Leonard enrolled at Norwich University. The boys had three brothers and so all five of them were able to go to college with money raised from their snack bar and the family dairy stand next door. In 1956, the twins' parents purchased the A&W franchise and expanded the building and changed its appearance and it became twins A&W snack bar. The display board at the back of the room has some more information and photographs including one of the original building with its knotty pine exterior and also a picture of Bernard and Leonard when they graduated from Norwich University and had accepted positions at General Electric, in Schenectady, New York, and Rome Air Development Center at Griffith Air Force Base in Rome, New York. So there were lots of wonderful memories made at this site when twins A&W was here and that, therefore, is why there's A&W group here and with the refreshments. Y'all know I don't use this. If you didn't notice on your way in, there was a restroom over by the door you came in and hopefully you did get a chance to check out the displays, photos and maps from mid to late 1800s and early 1900s, binders for you to Peruse and feel free to linger afterwards. I'm in no rush to leave to take a closer look. So the Berlin Historical Society is pleased to host UVM professor Louise Mivanke, a cultural anthropologist who will be presenting of Wheelmen, The New Woman, and Good Roads, Bicycling in Vermont, 1880 to 1920. This presentation is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities through its speakers bureau program. In addition to providing public talks, the Vermont Humanities sponsors book discussion programs, a wide variety of literacy programs and other humanities events statewide. They seek to engage all Vermonters in the world of ideas, foster a culture of thoughtfulness and inspire a lifelong love of reading and learning. Vermont Humanities would very much appreciate you filling out a brief survey, wondering how you heard about the program and what you thought of it. I hope you'll take the time to do so as we certainly appreciate what they offer us here in Vermont. If you haven't yet signed in, I hope you will take a moment to before you leave. Putting a star by your name, if you want to be added to the Berlin Historical Society email list, if you're not already on it, for some occasional information on programs, meetings, history events, as well as links to some Vermont history programs to watch at home. Also, if your email address is on the side and that's how I can send you the link for the survey for Vermont Humanities, but I did bring a few paper copies if you guys would prefer that. The Berlin Historical Society is always interested in your ideas for programs to hold. Maybe it's even you that has some history to share. If you're not aware, I think most of you are, that Berlin Historical Society has an office up at the Burlington offices, 108 Shed Road. Richard Turner and or myself are always happy to make ourselves available if you have questions or would like to do research in the office, whether it's during the day, evenings, weekends, it's all possibility. Sometimes even the same day can work. There's also the Historical Society has a web page on the on the Berlin VT.gov website under the community tab. And this page includes some helpful resources. There's the Berlin Vermont Memories group on Facebook. We'd love to have more people join the Historical Society. Members are the ones who can vote on various matters and membership fees help us in preserving and sharing the history and story of Berlin. We could also use assistance on some projects. Help is scarce. We need some help scanning some items going through materials that need to be organized and filed, working on some of the theme binders and scrapbooks, planning programs and more. But you're all here today for a program on bicycles. And I know you will be delighted as I am that Professor Vivanco has joined us today to share the fascinating history of bicycles here in Vermont. I'll let the professor tell you more about research he's done, which includes time spent in Costa Rica and Mexico. He's authored and co-authored several books, including textbooks along with many journal articles on topics including cultural anthropology, democracy and environmentalism, Central American transitions and bicycle culture. Professor Vivanco has been traveling around Vermont giving this particular lecture and I am so excited that we're spending the afternoon hearing about it. Thank you, Corinne. Thank you all. I'm so pleased to see you all here on a rainy Saturday and we can think of sunny days on bicycles as we sit inside and avoid the nasty weather out there. Well, I'm so pleased to see all of this. I was my comment to Corinne when I walked in was I've been to a lot of historical societies around this state and I've never seen a spread like this. So there's lots of great information. I love Corinne's enthusiasm to learn more because we've been going back and forth for a couple of weeks with just stories and newspaper reports and so on. So let's get started. So as Corinne says I am a professor of cultural anthropology. My specialty is in environmentalist social movements. I've been working in that field for about 25 years and about 12 years ago I got a question out of the blue from someone up on campus at UVM who worked in our transportation research center. I'm a cyclist and he comes to me he says you know we have this research center are you interested in doing transportation bicycle research and I was like what is that like I don't know what you mean by that. I've been riding bicycles obsessively for years and working on them in lots of ways but what does it mean to do bicycle research and so I was just you know my brain was spinning on that for several weeks and I thought oh someone's probably already done this and no one had it turns out. So I decided to write a book called reconsidering the bicycle and anthropological perspective on a new old thing and in this book I kind of lay out what it means to think of the bicycle as a cultural object is a political object you know the big question I had in my mind is why is it that cities all of a sudden not just in the United States but in Europe and Latin America are delivering the bicycle to the center of traffic and saying this is how we're going to address our urban sustainability problems right so you know the the idea of the bicycle is a green object a vehicle for a small planet these were all on my mind as I was writing this book and I was doing ethnographic fieldwork long-term immersive you know it involves riding bicycles which I enjoy and talking and listening to people and I've been doing fieldwork in Bogota Columbia I've been doing fieldwork in Denmark a little bit and then in Burlington Vermont and my idea was to do fieldwork in places where bicycles are increasingly being taken seriously or have been taken seriously for a while as part of the transportation mix. Well in this book I have a section on Burlington and in that section I wanted to tell some of the background to the bicycle story in Burlington because in the back of my head I knew that there was a bicycle boom that happened in the 1890s and the early 1900s that took America and Europe by storm it was a huge phenomenon and I wondered what did what happened in Burlington you know and I wanted to tell that story well what I did was I threw myself into our special collections and found a very willing partner in there who's a bike obsessive who's a librarian and we uncovered all kinds of stuff that was so rich and only a small piece of that went into my book so I developed this talk and then a bicycle history bike tour of Burlington which you can request if you want we ride around nine miles through Burlington and I show you places where bike history played out in that city and there was just so much and I started expanding my perspective around the state and now for about five years I've been doing Vermont wide research on the history of the bicycle in this time and it's a fascinating thing and so it you don't have to be a bicycle obsessive like me to enjoy this right as a cultural anthropologist I'm really interested in using the bicycle as a lens into social changes and transformations and the ways in which people used it to promote certain kinds of political or social agendas so the bicycle is in some ways a means to an end but I love bicycles too right so you know you can really dive deep into all the details of this but you don't have to I want to tell I want to give you a narrative that shows that the the bicycle played in a very interesting and important role in a period of Vermont history that was full of big changes to begin with and the bike was an interesting protagonist in a lot of those changes but before we get there you have in your hands this little guide and in this this talk well that's yours to keep that's your souvenir for the day but there's a little field guide to 19th century bicycles in there and I think it's important just so that we're all on the same page because we're gonna talk about these things that we're all on the same page about what were these objects and so very quick very quick story in eight you've heard of the year without summer 1815 the 1816 sorry and in that year including in Vermont you know Harvest failed and in Germany there was a nobleman named Carl von Dres who was worried about the horses that were dying and he had long-held dreams of creating a horseless carriage and he invented and then introduced the very next year a thing called a drazin also called a velocipede and it was a running machine or a Lauff machine he called it as well and you would get on it and it was had wagon wheels and it was this big sort of cumbersome piece of carved wood and you would sort of run and then when you got going fast you would kick your feet up and rest them on a on these little foot rests the steering was super primitive so good luck getting out of the rut that you were on because the roads were terrible but they were they were quite popular in Paris and in London even in New York for the next decade or so and they were associated with dandies you know these young fashionable men and so they were also known as dandy chargers so those things though they're they're they're they're very small scale kind of excitement associated with them and then in the 1860s a broken down drazin shows up in a Paris wagon wheel shop and an enterprising tinkerer there by the name of Pierre Lallement decides to put a crank on and pedals on the front wheel right so it's no longer a running machine it's not something that has a peddling cranks he tried it out he liked it other people liked it and so he basically in his wagon wheel shop along with some his colleagues create what is known as the velocipede is also known as the bone shaker because these things were 150 pounds they were super rigid and you the roads and cobblestones would shake your bones as you were hiding these things around and this object has serious limits first of all they get banned in places like Central Park immediately people are really concerned about these things but they become circus acts they're involved in circus acts and so on but people who take up these things are excited for them and they want to go faster and so the way you go faster on a direct drive vehicle is you grow that front wheel and so this is the transition to the so-called high wheeler or the ordinary or penny-firing there's lots of names for those particular bicycles but this is a moment of great technological innovation because to you move from wagon wheels to spoked wheels that are being held in tension and that lightens them up tremendously and then you're starting to get used steel tubing and the tubing is being bent and so it involves different manufacturing processes so there's a huge explosion of excitement around this particular bicycle but here's the secret not so secret they're super dangerous and they're super hard to ride and it takes a lot of practice and what they called sportiness which is athleticism to be able to master these things and and the term header in fact comes from this you know the idea that you fly over the head of your your bicycle when you hit a bump and so these were not super widespread they were very expensive as well and so the inventor of this design actually then in the 1880s creates this design which is called the safety bicycle and that's a common expression you will hear today as we get into the story here in Vermont there there were lots of safety bicycles here and you know it's we're very familiar with that same design because it's more or less what we have today and they were pretty bumpy until 1888 when the pneumatic tire was invented by Dr. John Dunlop who was a Irish doctor whose son loved bicycles but was sickly as they said and he didn't like the bumps and so he invented the pneumatic tire for his son so that's the technology we're gonna we're gonna hear about three of these here in Vermont as we go so in the late 1860s and by the way this is a new part of my talk thanks to Corinne and the invitation here I haven't paid much attention to the story of the velocipede but the there I had seen reports of a velocipede craze in Montpelier in 1869 and in St. Albans I knew this for a while there was a velocipede riding school of course no one knew how to ride these things and so they would take over skating rinks and they would ride around in them in St. Albans there are reports of parades on the streets of St. Albans on velocipedes they were really quite popular there so they took a guy took over the Darrow concert hall and turned it into a velocipede riding school in 1869 so these were circus vehicles for the most Americans who maybe even heard of these because most people hadn't but we had them here in Vermont pretty much immediately now mind you the velocipede is invented in in basically 1866 or so and three years later they're showing up in Vermont and they're being built here this is the interesting thing right so there they were being built here in what was then Berlin now Montpelier after 1899 at the Montpelier carriage company the origins of that story are actually in Waterbury there was a company called Colby and Brothers that got established in the 1850s to create children's carriages and they started producing this this three-wheeled velocipede in 1869 they sold their children's carriage division and the velocipede division to the Montpelier carriage company which eventually became Montpelier manufacturing company and so by 1874 about ten thousand of these boys velocipedes had been made here in this area and mostly sent to Boston and New York where they were there were agents who were you know dealing these things and they were very well known and quite popular but there's an interesting story about the patents and this this is like one of those historical flash in the pans that is really changes history in important ways and it happened right here and is associated with the Montpelier manufacturing company so the story in super brief is that that there were sort of two patents put on the velocipede the first in the 1860s in 1862 there was a guy named Philip McKenzie who created this sort of hobby horse thing and it could be mounted and there was sort of a peddling mechanism where a child could sort of you know push their way along initially just push their way along and then it became offset right and these things were being produced by a guy named Smith in New York City he and so Smith held the patent for a long time he says this guy Smith sells the patent to the Montpelier manufacturing company somehow Montpelier shows up and says we want to take that velocipede that we're making and we want to own the patent so we don't get sued by you and your heirs when you die and you know so because we're we're using the same technology as this McKenzie thing so they buy it and they don't do much with it until about 1877 turns out there's a company in Ohio that's producing these things children's velocipedes and so they sue and they win it's a patent violation so Montpelier starts receiving royalties from this Ohio company so that's half the story here the other half the story though is that guy Pierre Lalamant who invented the bone shaker he also took out a patent he came to Connecticut in 1866 and he took out a US patent on his design so we have two basically steering steerable vehicles that are powered by the feet right they both have patents on them and one of the funny things about our patent system back then is that companies would sort of look at what their competitors were doing and then they could change their patent description so suddenly the Lalamant patent patent description and the McKenzie patent description are changing and they're starting to look like the exact same thing they're all referring to a steerable vehicle powered by the feet but the Lalamant patent is owned by a Boston company so what happens Montpelier and Boston create a cartel where any velocipede made in the United States has to pay royalties to this cartel so it's really interesting right Vermont is the home of the first bicycle cartel right so this lasts a few years but for the most part the velocipede craze didn't go too too long it was a children the children were still doing it but no one was really producing velocipede by the mid 1870s and then in 1876 in Philadelphia is the world's exposition and it's the same year base or we're not long after these bikes these high-wheel bikes are being made and they show up in Philadelphia and people are super excited for them and a guy named Colonel Albert Pope who was a Brevet Colonel in the Civil War from Boston goes there and he's really blown away at the potential industrial commercial possibilities of this new bicycle so he buys them from the English like literally from the English exhibit exhibit at the World Exhibition he's like I want those so he buys them and he skedaddles to Hartford Connecticut where there's sewing machine factories and sewing machine factories can do precision manufacturing and he's he goes to one and he says I want you to make this exact thing so they do and they start selling and they start selling like hotcakes this is around 1877 1878 but here's the thing the cartel is saying guess what Pope you're you're using our patented design a steerable vehicle powered by the feet and so Pope is literal by 1879 he's literally paying 2750 per bike to Vermont and to Boston and so Pope was had visions of a monopoly he wanted the monopoly so he sent his father to Montpelier and put him up in a hotel and the father made many visits to Montpelier manufacturing company to sort of entice them to sell the patent and eventually Montpelier did they they gave in their business model was beginning to shift they were not interested in velocities they weren't planning to build more and so then Richardson McKee down in Boston was like well what's the point of being a cartel if your partner in the cartel isn't in it anymore so they sell it all to Pope and Pope locks down the bicycle industry and be and this is the bike industry loved patents and he enforced a very aggressively introduces a whole new era of patent patenting the silliest little changes the you know and enforcing those patents is very aggressively so Pope basically who founded the Columbia Bicycle Company some of you might have had Columbia bicycles is he begins the American bicycle industry basically on the basis of acquiring these patents so that's the Montpelier's you'll hear more about Montpelier Berlin Barry as we go but that's the the interesting sort of setting for a lot of this so by the 1880s oops sorry wheeling as they call it in Vermont is is becoming known and this is CG or Nellie Ross from Rutland he was a very typical 1880s wheelmen they called themselves they wore uniforms they wrote in military formations they had buglers and they had captains and they had sergeants and they would parade a lot and they were riding around on these high wheels which were very expensive about six months wages for the typical worker so these were elite men and they like Nellie Ross here his father was the the manager the president of the Lincoln Ironworks in Rutland and he eventually assumed that position himself so these bicycles were rare they were but they created a big spectacle and it was wealthy men who were riding them by the 1890s in the period we now call the bicycle craze bicycles become much more accessible the safety bicycle is now the prominent design and women are taking to the bicycle and with enthusiasm the roads are getting much much better because of the pressures and advocacy of the wheelmen's groups and the the excitement around the bicycle just explodes all over and families are getting in on it and men and women are going on bicycle parties as that those from Lindenville and Bellows Falls that's what they were called so the bicycle really explodes in that period and just a small piece or indication of that is that in Burlington in the 1890s there were ten bicycle shops if you can imagine this is a city with double the population now and we have like five bicycles you know dealers but there were ten in that decade and everyone was getting in on the bicycle business you could go to Hager's hardware where you could pick up your harnesses and trimmings for your horses but also you could pick up a bicycle you could go to Lane's bicycle livery where you could not just buy a bike you as a visitor could rent a bike for a few days or just a day and then you could go to the electrical supply store and in the back they had their bicycle department and one of my favorites is the jeweler on church street lm march was selling diamonds watches clocks jewelry and optical goods and bicycles right so bicycles were very very big in that decade so big they called it a bicycle mania the latest disease bicycle mania we all have it that's a comic from 1897 and what i love about this particular comic is it captures the ways in which the bicycles so infiltrated people's imaginations that they were renaming things along the lines of the bicycle so you know bike cures bicyclist diseases you know there was a whole you'll you'll hear more about this there were a whole category of diseases that were thought to be caused by bicycling bicycle liniments drink bicycle soda bicycle tonics sprocket hall eat bicycle food right there and there's a really interesting way in which the the slang language of everyday life was being repurposed in ways that used bicycle terms right so so when you would say oh i need a pump up that was what people would say i need a pump up that was obviously pumping up your tire but it meant that you were tired and hungry right so the bicycle was this suddenly this huge craze and people are really grappling with it this is not just a fad right this is the part of the interesting story about the bicycle is that you know 10 years after this comic is made the bicycle is no longer in the place of mean maniacal position in society people aren't paying as much attention to the bicycle there's some good reasons for that the car is beginning to emerge and so on but it wasn't just this sort of one-off fad it was the bicycle craze was involved in some really durable and consequential changes in our society that we take for granted today one of those is probably something you experienced on the way here which was effortless speed right the idea that you can get in a vehicle and it will take you somewhere fast without you know putting much effort into it the bicycle was the first experience that people had of that they had horses obviously but horses get tired you have to feed them they break down right they had trains of course but trains had a reputation of swallowing you up you didn't have control you were just seating yourself to their schedule and so on but the bicycle is sort of this object that allows people to really test their bodies in new ways and to push themselves and so there was a real fascination in particular with speed and the whole 1890s was obsessed with the experience of speed and so um so you know again these are things we take for granted today another element of this story is that you know I told you a little bit about the first beginnings of manufacturing well what pope and other manufacturers do by the 1890s is they create a cutting-edge American industry that is thought to be the the the highest expression of industrial creativity and production processes so in Hartford Connecticut pope had hired Thomas Edison to create a 24 7 assembly line electrified with lights and so on to do bicycle production in the mid 1890s and a young Henry Ford who was a bike mechanic went on a junket to Hartford paid for by Columbia bicycles to experience this it clearly made a difference in his imagination of how you might build a car someday right he did assembly line and he saw that for the first time in Hartford they were innovating technology techniques of bending steel the ball bearing was invented for the bicycle so the bicycle plays this really important role technologically in the rise of the automobile it the very first bicycle companies became automobile companies pope was a good you know Columbia started making automobiles by the 1890s and also legally and the bike paved the way for the automobile it they needed ordinances they needed traffic laws to manage the bicycles that were suddenly populating the streets and the bicycle industry sorry the automobile just sort of assumed a lot of those legal statuses that the bikes once had it it challenged gender relations we'll hear some of that today that women found the bicycle to be a tool for their own liberation and emancipation a challenge to the clothing that they had to wear to find no looser clothing so there was a gender politics and there's no better illustration of this than prominent suffragists were very pro bicycle right so there was that and then there was the last piece which is ideas about leisure were really changing in this time people are finally having opportunities for systematic leisure the weekend things like that and so bicycles become wrapped up in that and so we see the early beginnings of what we now call sort of landscape tourism as people from Boston and New York ride their bikes up to Vermont so they can see the beautiful landscapes they can take photographs they can sketch them and so on so the beginnings of a kind of tourism economy in Vermont have bicycles wrapped up in all of that so there's also a dark side to all this right bicycles were they caused all kinds of commotion in cities especially where the rules weren't clear about how they fit into the mix of of pedestrian and horse transportation um religious leaders were especially concerned about bicycles because on sunday morning people are starting to ride bicycles instead of going to church and there was a one prominent leader of the women's rescue league her name was charlotte smith who had heard about a bike ride on a sunday called a bicycle run for christ and so she wrote an editorial that was nationally circulated that said this should be called the bicycle run for satan right because this because satan is just behind the the the the women taking to the bicycle right and then there were all these diseases that that were playing out to people were really they had they were experiencing something that they didn't really ever experience which are certain kinds of aches and pains you know there there was a phenomenon called bicycle hands you know we even if you ride a bicycle you know it right your hands get numb and tingly and so on and then there were more interesting ones there was one called kyphosis bicyclistarum it was this literally categorized as a humpback situation that you would get from riding too much another one was bicycle face you can there's a whereas it's up here somewhere like figures bicycle oh yeah bicycle face cured right up in the center top bicycle face was this really funny kind of thing where the your face got stuck in a contorted position from trying to balance the bike or because you were going too fast on the bike and so and what's really interesting was this was targeted at women more women are taking to the bike and conservative male doctors are saying you know what it's going to make you ugly you shouldn't be out there on a bicycle right so there was a lot of controversy and so on so anyway what's this talk we haven't even gotten into the vermont talk right so the way this works is i've sort of organized this talk in three sections to give you a sense of how this is all playing out here the wheel men who were these men that were involved in bicycling how did they organize bicycling in themselves and so on the new woman because the ways in which the bicycle was appropriated by new women of the 1890s and then good roads because the roads really were terrible but bicycle riders played a central critical role in making them better okay so we'll start with the wheel men this is the bicycle club of swanton in 1893 and at the time beginning in the 1880s when people started riding the high wheels and then even into the safety era the appropriate way to ride a bicycle was in a recreational setting with your peers and it was meant to be an orderly activity it was a very social activity and so the idea of just getting on your bike by yourself and riding off was not initially at least a very common theme so men organized themselves into wheelmen's clubs and vermont saw some of the very earliest wheelmen's clubs in the united states the first was founded in 1878 the boston bicycle club and in 1880 there was one founded in brattle borough and so it's considered to be the second that was founded in the united states even before the league of american wheelmen which was a national organization was founded so the vermont wheel club they changed their names they started as the brattle borough wheel club in 1880 but by 1885 they're the vermont wheel club this is a club of the elites of brattle borough the you didn't even have to have a bicycle to join you had to be an upstanding male citizen and it was a very wealthy club they built they had a building built for them that had very it was very very finely appointed in that kind of you know excessively rich victorian way and they would host visiting wheelmen they would host banquets they would they had their own design the winged wheel symbol that they put on everything on their silverware on their plates on their stationary and they were more than a wheel club as i say because they weren't just riding bicycles they had they sponsored a baseball team called the vermont wheel club baseball team and if you were anybody in vermont politics in that era of the 1880s and 90s you would make the trek every winter down to their winter ball because that was where there was serious wealth and there was seriously influential people because remember brattle borough is tied into the connecticut river valley industrial corridor so you know these are very influential business connections that they have they're also the corridor that people come up the wheelmen are coming up as they enter vermont and so for the most part and so their first stop is the vermont wheel club super influential and and quite elaborate now in burlington in the mid 1880s we see the burlington wheel club form and those the members of that that's that they're standing in front of the fletcher free library where it once was which you probably know it's where city hall is or bca is now these were burlington's elites they were the publisher of the burlington free press they were the you know doctors and lawyers and so on but what's so interesting is that you can see you know the wheel club was basically around 1886 that's when they formed and they didn't last long whereas the vermont wheel club lasted until 1924 it's like why why did that one last so long and this one was so short well in 1887 the lake champagne yacht club was founded and all these guys who were who were gaining status because these are very expensive vehicles and very hard to master you needed a lot of free time to master these things they just say like well forget about it i'm going to go buy a yacht and that's going to be my tool to status right so um so clearly these these early wheelmen were elite networks and they were exercising for the world their high status by taking to these bicycles they were thought to be very progressive here's an interesting example this is um joseph ald pretty prototypical wheelmen of the 1880s he was the publisher of the burlington free press and um he wrote a book called picturesque burlington in 1893 and it barely makes mention of bicycles but it very clearly is influenced by a bicyclist sensibilities because it's all about landscape appreciation it's the sort of the first tour guidebook to burlington but it's not about what's in downtown burlington it's like what's on the lakeside and where the go right out towards the mountains and get pretty views and so on and that's exactly what these wheelmen were doing is they were sort of another way to show their status was they were sort of early environmental thinkers right yeah these guys would go anywhere on the high wheels they would go anywhere from 10 miles to 50 miles they would push the hills and they were terrible roads as you'll see so it's quite a feat you know but that's not every single rider right and one of the things that burlington became famous for was people would bring their high wheels on trains to burlington and ride on what were known as the sandpapered streets of burlington because burlington had bought a stone crusher in 1873 and so they had macadamized streets macadam is just the road surface of rocks fine rocks with oil so the streets were really good for riding these high wheels so people would travel to burlington to ride um so um joseph all was also a tinkerer this is the other interesting thing about this early the early bike scene is like full of people who are messing with things you know they're so all gets a patent for a tricycle gearing system in 1883 um he never seemed to do anything with it um but you know people were always adding things trying new things um some i heard the word the name glenn ames come up earlier and glenn is a collector here in vermont of has a world-class collection of historic bicycles and he just looking at putting five bicycles together from the same era you'll see very different designs people were trying out lots of things um and uh and eventually they just started adding internal combustion engines and they started adding electric motors and you know next you know we have motorcycles and cars right so um so that's joseph all in ruttland uh they also were early adopters and of the bicycle they were founded in 1881 the ruttland bike bicycle club and there's a unique relationship between wheelman and skating rinks and wheelman loved skating rinks because they could have a nice soft surface year round to ride their bikes they could do tricks they love to do tricks and they could rent out the skating rink for concerts and things like that when they weren't using it and so um in where this played out they would usually just buy a skating rink right they're wealthy men they would just buy it well in ruttland they decided to build one and uh it opened on july 4th 1884 it cost fifteen thousand dollars which is roughly four hundred five hundred thousand dollars in our money today it had 1200 seats numerous gas chandeliers and it this is the this was for me this was like the big mystery of vermont bicycle history that only i cared about for the longest time i was like why did the next year the thing sold for two thousand three hundred and twenty five dollars right so they spent they put all this money into it and then the next year they sell it at auction for twenty three hundred bucks so it turns out that they had to get a loan they you know these were wealthy guys but they had to get a loan and um uh someone in the clerk's office in ruttland uh had screwed up the collateral that and the value of the collateral that they put up and word eventually got to one of the suppliers and the supplier immediately slapped a lien down on that on that property and so the the wheelman's club was like what are we going to do and so they put it up for auction uh and got hardly anything for it um and in fact uh after this last hurrah in 1885 they went down they rode down to springfield uh massachusetts they disbanded they're like screw it we're done with the bicycle we don't want to be part of this terrible thing but it was quite a specta spectacle this skating rink um down in bellows falls the mount killburn wheel club was a very prominent wheel club in the state uh they were their their president was a guy named hd writer and he was a prominent lawyer here in vermont and he loved to use the wheelman's club to hold mock court trials so the wheelman's club wasn't just go for bike rides they would have these evening entertainments where they would have more mock court trials in this case this is from 1894 it's announcing a trial of a of a a town's person uh one of our most respected citizens will be tried for the larceny of a plymouth rock rooster and uh they promised you know aside from the rare fun of the occasion uh the entertainment will be exceedingly interesting to ladies and others who have never attended a real trial so they did a lot they had comic operas and plays and things like that um whoop sorry and in the in the upper valley another you know intense center of wheeling activity um woodstock was kind of at the heart of that and they hosted a parade and i'll read you what's up here so you probably can't see it super well but there's a picture of the parade on the left in 1895 um and there were many many wheelman's clubs in the upper valley into new hampshire that would meet together and in this particular day they all met in woodstock and uh this is uh what the was reported in the newspaper a bicycle meet and parade under the auspices of the wabino cycle club was held at woodstock last friday afternoon and evening and was a brilliant and successful affair stores and residences were elaborately decorated and in the evening the entire village was beautifully illuminated by over 3 000 japanese lanterns you can actually see the lanterns in that picture the hartford and lebanon cycle clubs and cyclists from adjoining towns were present the woodstock railway company running a special tram about 200 wheels were in line and the parade was witnessed by several thousand people there was a fine display of fireworks in the evening woodstock corner band discourse music and refreshments were served to all cyclists and visiting friends in the town hall but you know imagine that the excitement of a bicycle parade on just you know a random evening you know thousands of people turn out for this and several hundred people come from nearby towns to ride parade on their bikes downtown um and a parade could draw as many as 500 people in woodstock woodstock plays an interesting uh little bit role again this sort of sidebar kind of bike history fun story um this is a photo of a guy's a guy named james murdoch's house he was a pharmacist uh in woodstock and this photo is otherwise unremarkable until you notice what is in the background and that bicycle is a transition between that unsafe highwheeler and the safety bicycle and this bike was the bike to have between 1880 and 1884 so like if you wanted the very best bicycle that money could buy this was it it was kind of interesting because it was a treedle bicycle you can sort of see the crank system it's a treedle so it wasn't pedals circling it was treedles back and forth back and forth anyway the very first bicycle to uh go down mount washington was one of these if you can imagine that um but anyway what does this have to do with woodstock well um the uh hb smith machine company was the manufacturer of that bicycle it was called the star rider this by the way is john stout who is kind of the tiger woods of his era of bicycle tricks and he that's him riding down the michigan state capital steps on one of these to show how well how good he is but also how safe they are right anyway hb smith manufactured these things in uh smithville new jersey however hb smith was from woodstock vermont and he as a young man started a manufacturing company in woodstock where he created fine woodworking equipment and he was so successful that he bought a township in new jersey where he would expand his business and out of the blue one day an inventor shows up with this design of the star rider bicycle and says sir um you have the kind of equipment i think that can make this bicycle would you like to go into business with me an hb smith was like sure why not i like bicycles so they ended up working together and hb smith sold thousands of these things um he didn't stay in the bike business for too long because his real business was woodworking manufacturing uh equipment there were some bicycles that actually that were made in vermont um not many the bennington bicycle company had two models the tiffani special or the nelson special i once saw a nelson special on ebay for 400 bucks i should have bought it it was messed up i mean it was like you know it was a hundred and something years old um the coolage cycle company in rutland they had two models the rutland model or the vermont model um there were there was uh the how bicycle was made in rutland and then in st johnsbury there was a guy named george pain who was making bicycles they were not this was not a widespread industry the real heart of the bicycle industry was in connecticut until it moved out west to chicago now what about central vermont this is your story here in montpelier berry berlin there were wheelman's clubs here the capital cycle club was founded in 1893 the berry bicycle club was renowned for producing great racers and they hosted a lot of races and they in fact they were the home of a of a the home club of a guy who was known throughout new england as the vermont flyer his name was ed walsh um and i i just found this fun tidbit recently an extra they were holding a race the berry bicycle club an extra attraction of a balloon ascension and a parachute jump jump on a bicycle is advertised by the berry bicycle club at their annual tournament saturday next um and then uh and berry and montpelier and obviously berlin cyclists were coming together on a regular basis there was a parade that was held in montpelier in 1896 and this is a fun tidbit karen has it as well i found it a long time ago but it describes a parade with 226 riders in the in the parade uh and they and the the rider who is reporting this notes that there were about 100 people who everyone knew weren't there so he's projecting about 350 or so bicycles in the area um but he assessed the value of the bicycles in the parade and he said it was worth it would be about 32 500 of bicycles were in that parade and that's equivalent to about a million dollars today so you know a typical bicycle a good bicycle was 125 dollars or so at that time that's about three thousand dollars today so you know these were these were serious investments that people were making and and people marveled at the bike economy um you you probably would have gone to jj williams uh bicycle shop in montpelier if you were to buy a bicycle around here um he wasn't the only one but he was one of the real prominent dealers of the fine bicycles but there are limits to the enthusiasm or i should say who is allowed to ride a bicycle um this is a report from the montpelier evening argus in july 1898 called city charges on wheels it has been hinted that some of the city charges are riding bicycles overseer of poor george wheeler was asked if it was true that individuals assisted by the city had succumbed to the attractions of the wheel and he said that he had been informed that one or two women he had been helping had been seen riding bicycles but that the city had not furnished the money for the wheels one of the women when asked about it said that one of her neighbors had rented a wheel and permitted her to ride it the popper department has no objections to supplying the needy but draws the line on luxuries like bicycles there's obviously a class politics to this right you know bicycles are for middle class upper middle class upper crust kinds of people they're not for the poor right so this is still in that era where you know bicycles are a symbol of being a kind of elite in our society so what did wheelmen do they promoted orderly riding there was a they they would make lots of pronouncements about how you should ride always keep to the right always keep your wheel clean in passing another rider or vehicle keep to the right keep off crowded streets unless you have urgent business there don't forget that pedestrians have rights it often saves bitter thoughts the the the newspapers were full of these kinds of you know sage words for cyclists they consumed a lot of attention something that's rather interesting is that about 10 percent of the advertisements in bicycle sorry in newspapers in the 1890s were bicycle ads and 10 percent so that's a lot and one historian says that was just enough of a push that many newspapers shifted from subscriber driven funding model to an advertiser driven funding model so the bike industry was pretty prominent in the newspapers the other thing that was happening is that people had to figure out how to get along with these bicycles and wheelmen were right in the thick of all that and so here's an interesting article from the the united opinion in bradford in 1895 it's called cycling etiquette every sport has its rules of etiquette and a system of exchange of courtesies must be adapted to cycling conditions a question that is causing a great deal of agitation relates to the mode of greeting among wheelmen and wheel women shall a man take his hand from the handlebar at the risk of taking a header in order to tip his cap or shall he merely nod and nod his head and say howdy shall a lady make a sweeping courtesy or merely nod instances are cited wherein men have tried to do that which they have been taught from childhood and the result has been a hectic flush all over one side of their faces where the skin was caressed by the loving but somewhat callous hand of mother earth ladies who have bowed too profoundly have been picked up tenderly by helping hands after it was all over it is with reason therefore that cyclists are giving this matter serious consideration so so you wanted to be predictable right and uh uh the other thing that wheelmen did they love to do was race right they organized races um this is about a bicycle race uh here in Montpelier it was between Barry and Montpelier and the winner is this guy um uh Fred Sherburn so the bicycle raced in Montpelier in return last thursday attracted a large crowd at the start and finish William Holden Edward Clark Fred Sherburn George Wheeler William Reynolds and Frank Gurley were the starters and they returned in the following order Sherburn Gurley Clark Wheeler Holden and Reynolds the last named wears his leather medal with becoming modesty Sherburn covered that Sherburn covered the 12 miles in 63 minutes so that is averaging out to about 16 miles per hour now you know the hills around here you know that this is a single speed bicycle you know that there aren't gears right you know that they're they're these are not freewheel bicycles either was it in the valley from basically this is from Barry to Montpelier so so right was it over like the hill or was it in through the valley it doesn't describe the route right yeah so but what goes up must come down right so but this is actually this is not slow by any stretch what you see in a lot of race reports are averages of about 20 miles per hour and there's there's one in Burlington that goes down from Burlington's basically church street down to Winooski bridge and so if you know that that's a pretty substantial hill and the winner made it averaging averaging 20 miles per hour so people were really athletic and they were moving really fast on these bicycles Sherburn was a real champ Sherburn was a unique character in bicycle world he was from Barry and he had for a time he had he had a bicycle agency he sold bicycles in Barry for a time he owned a photograph photography studio as well and he sold photographic equipment and he's one of these interesting characters that brings these two worlds together both of these worlds photography and bicycles were brand new and exciting for people and he brought them together and so anyway Sherburn we think that Sherburn Glennon Ames and I have many mysteries we try and solve together and we think that that Sherburn right there getting his photograph taken the other thing that Wheelman did was they loved to have feats of endurance and so this is about a ride in 1894 of two crack Woodstock Wheelman so they started Saturday Sunday morning this is in Woodstock at 2 30 a.m. and they rode to Littleton, New Hampshire a distance of 83 miles and their idea was they would stop there have dinner and then return to Woodstock they decided they arrived at 10 30 a.m. and then they wired their friends instead of returning they decided to keep riding into New Hampshire and St. John'sbury where they arrived 1 30 a.m. on Monday morning so they keep going and by the time they arrived back in Woodstock they'd ridden 158 miles in 23 hours they took a short rest and then they had ridden sorry so and then they'd rid another 52 miles home so this is what the newspapers were fascinated with people pushing their bodies in new ways with the bicycle this was newsworthy stuff but here's the problem there were certain men who were not really invited into the wheelman's clubs they were often working class men and or women because there were wheel there were women's clubs as well and they were known as scorchers and the scorcher was a menace to the ordered world of the of the wheelmen because the scorchers didn't ride in formation they would often ride through town riding fast and here's the story from Burlington and it it begins ominously another accident occurred Tuesday evening as a direct result of the ever-present bicycle scorcher and it just describes how a bike mechanic at this shop this is Lane site bicycle livery was scorching on Loomis Street presumably in front of the shop here and he runs over a boy of eight or nine Barney Buxton Barney Buxton gets knocked down he's locked knocked unconscious and they call Dr. Lyman and Barney wakes up eventually and can't remember what happened to him this is just a typical story of the day but it's the it's the tip of an iceberg of sorts of the the problem of a different riding style in the city I mean you know I live in Burlington college students on bikes zipping along wherever you you know wherever you turn you got to be careful right so this has been this was especially thought to be a problem all over Vermont whether it was a small town or a bigger city scorchers were considered to be a menace so wheelmen tried to get out ahead and they tried to make regulations and so by 1897 98 including here in both Barry and Montpelier bicycle ordinances were passed but before that there weren't bicycle ordinances you couldn't ride on sidewalks in many towns but no one enforced it so people did it but this is um this is from the bellows false times and this is about a proposal of the Mount Kilburn wheelmen for a regulation there has been considerable complaint of fast and reckless riding it is better that the wheelmen take the matter and hand themselves they didn't want to be regulated right so they thought well let's propose what we can live with we suggest all wheelmen carry lanterns and bells and keep to the right side of the street or on such bicycle paths as hereafter may be provided so these ordinances are they're very familiar to us today you need to have lights you got to stay off the sidewalks you have to have a bell right there's speed limits so they had speed limits on bicycles even back then so so in a way they did get out ahead of it they helped shape the kinds of you know ordinances that were created that just a side note on the bicycle paths so there was this whole vision there was this and for for bike advocates it's like this delicious moment in American history in the late 1800s when the plan just that was beginning to emerge all over this country was to connect towns by bike paths and they started constructing many many many bike paths not so much in Vermont there was only one that was constructed here between lindenville and st. John'sbury one was proposed here between Mount Piliar and berry and but it never it didn't happen here in Vermont because the state legislature was like we aren't interested in that but the vision was that that was going to be intertown transportation was going to be by bicycle so this is all of course before the automobile so wheelmen were involved in legal issues all the time they they uh they were especially concerned about bicycle thievery and in 1896 there was this fun little news item that says it is next to impossible to safely steal a bicycle in Vermont there was a two-year sentence in state prison if you were if you stole a bike so that that was it was thought that that would this was the wheelmen who got that law passed it didn't work by the way there were lots of reports of bicycle thievery happening in the 1890s and this is just describes how george ash a bicycle thief got a bike in white river junction he says it came from a college student so probably somebody from dartmouth because the bikes were big there uh and he sold it in chitin in county what's interesting is the bike was worth seven dollars in that era 1899 that'd be about 190 dollars today and he was thrown in to prison in rutland for three months he didn't get a full two-year sentence but think about the the preciousness of the bicycle a hundred and nine in our money today like 190 dollar bicycle gets you three months time right that just doesn't happen today right check out the new york times piece on burlington that's in today's paper it's about bike thieving in burlington right now it's totally out of control so moving on the new woman so the the bicycle was super exciting to women uh and and not just in in other states but especially here in vermont and this is a fun little tidbit from the london dairy sifter in 1897 he don't you think it rather risky to come so far alone on your wheel she hadn't thought of it but if you feel timid i'll see you home so women so the new woman is this sort of emblematic figure of the 1890s it's the woman who's independent who's physically active who is self-reliant and the kind of epitome of the reinvented american woman and has a certain kind of status in the community where people take her seriously as a contributor to society and so here in vermont we see a real assertion of the new woman and you see it in other arenas like a civic engagement in places like burlington where these same women who are involved with bicycles are asserting themselves in civic issues increasingly um but the the new woman was such an important figure for the suffragists and that relationship with the bicycle i have to read you a quotation from um one of the you know most important suffragists elizabeth katie stanton she says the bicycle will inspire women with more courage self-respect and self-reliance and will make the next the the next generation more vigorous of mind and body for feeble mothers do not produce great statesmen scientists and scholars so there was a lot of attention in the vermont papers about women and bicycles and columns there was a pretty steady column in the burlington free press called the woman in the wheel and this was tidbits from one particular column the coming woman will be the woman whose mother rode a bicycle and thereby made herself fit to be the mother of the coming woman said says ida trafford bell there are eight million bachelors in the united states watch the reduction in number as soon as the bicycle girl in bloomers is scattered over the land says the american woman um and it creates uh you know new new relationships that people had to work through in the same way they're working through etiquette on the streets they're also working through etiquette of how men and women are going to interact with each other in public ways or in commercial spaces and this is a really fun little piece from the free press that same year 1895 called selecting a cycle teacher most cycle depots will send up a man to teach any of their own customers and many ladies have learned in this fashion personally however it seems to me that if one must clutch any male thing wildly by the neck and fall into his arms 10 or 20 times in the course of an afternoon a relative or intimate friend is better than an unknown oily mechanic and i should therefore counsel the girl who contemplates learning the safety to select your teacher with these unavoidable contingencies in full view a lot of the emphasis around bicycles is what they did for women's bodies and they were seen as a an object that could help women become more physically active and have more control over their ability to exercise which was a key element of at least the way suffragists in vermont were framing their political claims now vermont was very slow in fact it didn't happen until the the amendment was passed in what 1920 that allowed women the right to vote so that it didn't land here in vermont the right to vote for women in ways that it did in new york or massachusetts part of the reason for that could be that by 19 sorry by 1872 women had limited suffrage they could vote in local elections school boards things like that they could even serve there was also a sense in vermont that women had their own independent source of power that was emerging and it was economic power because they were controlling the tourism industry the farm tourism industry people coming to farms staying there and they were paying the wife they were not paying the man so so women were had a sense that that they weren't quick to adopt suffragist politics however there they were quick to acknowledge that physical activity for women was critical so in 1892 there was a big conference in montpelier here on the rights of suffrage and the complete infranchisement of women and one of the central addresses given there was about the importance of women having control over their own bodies right and so the bicycle was wrapped up in that and it was seen as a critical element of women being able to do that but again their their enthusiasm here in vermont was fairly you know complex this little tidbit from the orleans county monitor in 1895 miss may june do you believe in women's suffrage miss jan feb well or i haven't quite come to that yet but i ride a bicycle so they separated it right it's okay to ride a bicycle but you don't necessarily have to have suffrage politics um but you know prominent women these are the wells sisters in um burlington on the right uh she they um general william wells the hero of gettysburg this this was his wife and his niece they would ride around burlington on bicycles and daisy styles hager there on the left another prominent burlington family they were not known for their suffrage politics but they were very clearly promoting civic engagement sorry civic engagement and uh riding bicycles where women and cycling intersected for in the popular imagination was mostly around health debates uh remember bicycle face right bicycle face was seen as this thing that could make women ugly so so there was a lot of attention on women's bodies and trying to dissuade women from riding bikes because of the health impacts um but anyway some there was two sides in this one side said you know the best rx is a ride take it instead of going to the druggist um bicycling hygiene it was called hygiene hygiene was sort of sanitary living opens up the pores which should be treated with ablutions of water you should know how to breathe breathing through the mouth can cause heart troubles don't uh be sure your mouth doesn't get parched it can affect digestion drink milk with a few drops of rum in it before a ride so that was on the positive side on the negative side you have this kind of language this is a very remarkable article that describes a lecture by dr heinie marx from uh saint lewis he was the superintendent of a hospital there and he's denouncing bicycle riding first you have a kind of paralysis of the hands and contraction of the chest this causes congestion of the lungs and leads to consumption now just pause there consumption we all know that's tuberculosis right so you know there's some grandiose claims here furthermore with men rupture varicoseal hydroseal follow and worst of all it destroys virility with women riding promotes amorous desires married women are especially liable to very serious mishaps if the world is not depopulated by the rapidly increasing membership of the suicide club the human race will die out by reason of lack of manhood and an inability to propagate it was interesting actually uh a a doctor of nervous um um ailments at uvm medical school back then did bicycle research interestingly enough um i guess a predecessor of mine on the faculty in the 1890s his name was graham hammond and he uh he wrote an article basically saying no this is really good for women women should be riding bicycles that you know don't take these threats seriously they're really good for all kinds of purposes and in a woman's life um uh so the medical establishment though is really deeply divided and a lot of this was really um largely about dissuading women from riding bicycles now what about the roads this is our last part um the roads as you can see really were terrible um the way we did roads in vermont um uh up until this era of you know the 1890s 1880s was the towns were in charge of their roads and one way you paid your taxes was you would go labor on the road uh and the the the legislature only set general guidelines for like keep stones out of the road that literally that was one of the guidelines like keep stones out of the road but they didn't talk about anything like how wide a road needed to be what materials to use whatever so the roads were really inconsistent and they were terrible you know they were muddy they were stony they were and and largely if it weren't that if it wasn't the taxpayers doing labor it was the the owner of the farm proximal to that road who dealt with it and that often meant as they're preparing fields just throwing rocks there that would get pounded down over time and so on so now imagine yourself as a 1880s 1890s willman you're wealthy you're entitled and these roads suck and so you're like what am i going to do about that right so willman got out really early in front of the road problem and began advocating for a whole different approach to how we deal with roads um one of the things they did is organize among themselves to share intelligence about what roads were good and what roads were bad so if you can imagine you know we have the AAA triptics you know like you want to go from point of view well they had their own version of that there was a book called the vermont road book that had curated rides and so on but this is a really interesting example or illustration of that this is called ten thousand miles on a bicycle and it was written it's a 900 page book it's written by a guy named carl crone uh that was his pen name his real name was lineman bag lineman hotchkiss bag um but anyway he rode around the northeast into canada into the upper midwest and he rode here in vermont and what he would do is he would talk to the local willman and ride with them and he would write down what are the roads like what are the routes and then he would get subscribers and so every willman he met he'd say give me five dollars and i will send you the book when i'm done so that you know where's a good place to ride and then at the back of the book he lists all of his subscribers which is becomes this who-who of willman uh and then the willman advocate group started using those names to build their case for better roads so um anyway this is about this is a short description of a ride that he took here in vermont he has multiple descriptions but this one's especially fun so you can win at vermont trivial pursuit if anyone ever asks you when was the first century ride in vermont we have the answer right here it's in 1883 uh two rutland boys w eggleston and ns marshall rode a hundred and a half miles on july 9 1883 so just imagine 1883 you're on a high wheel bicycle you ride a hundred and a half miles can you even begin to imagine what that experience might have been like how long it would have taken you what mountains you would have to get up and over how often you'd have to carry your bicycle um so in 1880 in um providence road island that guy albert kernel pope of columbia and a bunch of other willmen including vermonters show up and they're having a meet so that they can ride together and they can talk about you know the roads and they create at that moment the league of american willmen which still exists today it's called the league of american bicyclists it's the the prominent bike advocacy group in our country so they create that in the same moment they create the league of good roads and these two sister organizations work hand in glove to promote bicycles and to promote good roads and who bankrolls this the columbia bicycle company is kernel albert pope and he would travel the country giving addresses about the importance of good roads um here's one from 1889 an eminent writer says the road is that physical signer symbol by which you will best understand any age or people if they have no roads they are savages for the road is the creation of man and the type of civilized society and then over here on the right he he he did this quite often this was an essay contest uh directed at high school and college students and if they wrote an essay about why good roads would make our lives better in this country they could win a bicycle from columbia so a real important movement is building and in vermont it's really quite influential riders go on protest rides they try and draw attention to this this is a ride just on the other side of lake champlain to osable chasm and i i love this this frog like he's got a good roads message on his chest there and so the whole idea of a protest ride was being invented by these individuals who are trying to draw attention to their cause they also start aligning themselves with agricultural interests and persuading you know farmers organizations to join this cause um farmers were harder sell farmers thought these were just elitists on bicycles and they they could move their supplies largely by train and so farmers took a while to come around here in vermont but farmers organizations were pretty much on board quickly and um uh the wheelman helped write legislation they would offer friendly legislation to the legislature and language things like that and um wheelman organized um uh an organization called the vermont league of good roads uh so it was started by wheelman and they brought in military leaders and other prominent officials and they proposed legislation to totally change how we do roads and they were one of the very we vermont was one of the very first states in the country to change how we do roads it centralizes control basically gives the state power over the roads new property taxes are being collected to and redistributed as state aid and we get a state highway commission and in 1892 when this is signed Levi Fuller was governor he signed it and he was from brattle borough and his brother-in-law was a prominent figure in the vermont wheel club so wheelman were actively pressuring politicians to change how we do roads by 1900 we see uh the bicycle is beginning to lose its luster because there's a new vehicle in the mix the automobile so this is in 1902 there's a the typical fourth of july parade in burlington has military automobile bicycle horribles trade parades right so we're at so suddenly there's a new mix you all know what horribles are by the way horribles are a great new england tradition they're like clowns who would dress up as prominent political figures at parades and mock them we need that you know we need more of that here in vermont now um but yeah it was they were like clowns um and uh in any case you see vehicles now you know automobiles now getting the fetish excitement quality that bicycles once had you know car drives up mount washington in 1899 the vermont motor company is established in 1902 the ratio nelson jackson from burlington is the first to drive a car across the united states on a bet did you do you know that story that's an interesting one so haratio nelson jackson was a physician he was the um son-in-law william wells that hero of gettysburg and he was searching for a new purpose in life than being a physician and he was out in san francisco drinking with his friends and he made a bet one evening in 1903 that he could drive he could go out the next day and buy an automobile and drive it to new york and they were like oh that's funny haratio you can never pull that off and he's like just watch and so they bet 50 bucks and uh he did it he bought a car and he had a dog and they drove across the u.s. and it was quite an ordeal as you can imagine because there weren't good roads um the then the what were once wheelmen's clubs become automobile clubs right the same individuals who were early wheelmen are the first to get automobiles and they create clubs and beginning around 1910 the bicycle is just sort of a background solitary object in street scene photographs it's no longer where the real excitement is for people they're using them they're just not using them that much um and the story of the bike becomes this the newspapers are full of the bikes versus cars you know collisions and one of these articles starts with like the typical saturday night crash occurred on williston road between a bicyclist and an automobile um so that narrative of bikes versus cars gets established here very very early and then bicycles become much more of kids toys right it's about a tool for kids to have fun and be liberated and that's that yeah i heard that ken burns did a piece on him now i haven't confirmed that yet i want to look it up is that you know about that i don't know about the ken burns piece but in the smithsonian they have a permanent exhibit with the car and pictures of her ratio and all that i'm very surprised because you would think that we all would have heard about anything ken burns did and maybe and that seemed very uh narrow for him but anyway i'm going to look it up i will tell you what it's worth you can appreciate that yeah public television did they do that show on it i'll take it up show i'll take it up somebody well i'm always looking for old photos if you have any karen is already hooked me up with all kinds of new stuff but i appreciate your your time and happy to answer any questions or you know field comments or i actually have a question but it's for karen because i know you're you you've really dug a lot of this up but when you when um there was discussion around um berlin and where the manufacturing was being done in berlin and then it became part of my pillier where specifically was that do you do you know where was what where was the manufacturing when it was being part of berlin when you're standing at the mont pillier shaw's yep and looking across the river that's where mouth pillier manufacturing was there's like these photos here is is that where the the cellar hole and the the old garage door no no it's across the street there's some real good maps of it up here that was the gas station right very cool gosh that's neat i have a question about the the mount washington thing yeah so there's the road that goes up there yeah that road exists when the first bicycle came down or when the first car went up it wouldn't have been a road it would have i mean there were i want to say there was a hotel up there right um it would have been a carriage yeah really literally it would have been a carriage road yeah exactly so i would think so yeah i would think so um i mean you you know you have to wonder about the braking system right um and oftentimes the braking system on those those old bikes was literally just a spoon that would depress down on the wheel so the whole idea like we have today of two pressure points coming that wasn't the typical it was just a spoon that would push down on the wheel so the wheel would get really really hot yeah and it was rubber and it could melt really thick shoes yeah at this time these safety bicycles yeah they still direct drive when does a coaster come in oh that's a good question um i think it took i think there was experimentation enough in that era that you could find coaster bicycles but they weren't that common probably not until children are getting into bicycling and they're making children's bicycles but you know there are interestingly enough there are some high wheels that do have a chain and direct drive so that they wanted to make them bigger and bigger and as you get them bigger like your it's just the limit is now leg length so what they would do is they would have a gear here and and a chain and a gear up here with the pedals so that you could just keep going really really fast right they were creating and gearing systems for those bikes so there was a lot of experimentation so i wouldn't be surprised glenn ames would know this super quickly but i wouldn't be surprised if back then that you could find models that were more coasters and coaster brakes but also um you know free wheels things like that i read unicycles and oh there you go direct from yeah right the tall ones with the chains yeah and that's the way you break is to try to basically pedal backwards right yeah yeah speaking of mr ames you said that he had a historical bicycle collection this is just how do you see his collection does he display it or he so he uh used to own the old spokes home in burlington and he held he had a lot of the collection there he sold it it's went to his garage in the old north end and then at the sheldon museum in middlebury he had an exhibit which was amazing he brought out all of his greatest hits and since this was like three years ago and since then he's been looking for a home and there are a bunch of us who are kind of advocating that he keep that collection together and he's approached like the smithsonian and he's approached all kinds of places we would love to keep it in bramon we can't imagine why the shelber wouldn't well and they were going to have a show at the shelber museum um and that fell apart because of the pandemic so and then they have new leadership there i didn't have a question have you ever ridden you yourself ridden a pine wheeler i have yeah what's that like um it does yeah it's harrowing at first um you know it's hard you have to figure out how to get up right and there's always a little step and then you kind of throw yourself up and hope that at that transition point you don't just go like this so you have to roll right you get it rolling and then step up and go so um yeah i mean it takes practice i'll put it that way yeah that's a good question what you know what were the issues with pneumatic tires well first of all they popped a lot and so you know when we think of like this is another way in which the bicycle laid down a lot of the groundwork for the automobile is that there were repair shops that you could go to uh kind of all over the place it might be just someone's garage or something but they would fix pneumatic tires and uh so cyclists could rely pretty well on having access to fixing pneumatic tires if they went on rides because they popped pretty pretty regularly they didn't have tubes they were tubeless the tube came later so they you know you had to have glues and things like that but patching they figured out patching very quickly but yeah you know it would the safety design was historians will say it was not quite enough to get a lot of people interested in bikes it had to be that extra step of the pneumatic to make it less bouncy and jumpy and more comfortable that was a key out moment for bike history otherwise it could have just been another kind of flash in the pan and not gone very far but the pneumatic tire is thought to be one of the key pieces that just explodes it for a lot of people yeah no it didn't you know there were there reports of a velodrome and sx junction i've never really found out exactly where where people would ride is horse racing tracks and here especially here in vermont there was a trotting track in berry and that's where people would race here and uh but yeah velodromes never really took off here in vermont they did elsewhere and one of the one of the big spectacles of the era was the so-called six-day race where cyclists would ride in a velodrome for six days and you know they were they were eventually because they were so horrific you know people dropping dead literally you know they were so horrific that they eventually started changing it so that you could have an hour rest in a day kind of a thing but in endurance events were huge in that era and the six day race was typically a small-scale affair in terms of the audience for the first four days and then around day five people started showing up because they knew that's when the real fireworks started because people bodies would be flying all over the place and so i have not found any six day races in vermont i'd like to look at your swanton slide again to bring that up yeah there's yeah their names there where you do you have swanton ties yeah it could be that time too but there's no names there well if any of you have any bicycle mysteries and and and relatives that you wonder if they had bicycles or they were involved just send me an email because i can dig it up pretty facile with ancestry.com and with newspaper.com and all that thank you very much thank you all for being here i appreciate it