The Amesbury Carriage Industry – A Deep-Dive into the Historical Data

A review by
Ron Klodenski, ACM Industrial Survey Team member
and
John Mayer, ACM executive director

Some Amesbury carriage building complexes during the carriage-making heyday of the late 1800s, with production levels and numbers of employees.

If you’ve ever had a question about the carriage industry in Amesbury, you’ll probably find the answer in Mike Harrold’s latest research paper, The Amesbury Vehicle: The Carriage Making Industry of Amesbury. Since Mike is one of the Amesbury Carriage Museum’s most productive volunteer researchers, museum followers will remember seeing his work featured on the ACM website in the past.

For countless hours over the past few months, Mike scoured old newspapers, trade journals, census reports, Amesbury and carriage industry histories, insurance maps and other sources. Then he applied his analytical skills to interpret the data and explain the nature of carriage making in Amesbury. Mike explored many aspects of the industry including changes in carriage design, production volumes, selling prices, labor and production costs, and the impact of historical events.

Mike’s analysis provided new insights into how the industry developed in Merrimac and Amesbury, and then eventually propelled Amesbury into its place among the top five carriage-making cities in America. Locally, the trade created great wealth for some, general prosperity others, and then suddenly declined as automobiles, bicycles, larger Midwest producers and economic downturns took their toll.

John Mayer, ACM’s executive director, has recognized The Amesbury Vehicle as a valuable addition to knowledge of Amesbury’s carriage industry. John said, “Mike’s paper is a unique, thorough analysis of Amesbury’s carriage building businesses and an important piece of work for our community.” In fact, he believes it important enough to consider publishing it in a more conventional book format.

For now, though, the paper is available only on the ACM website. The 71-page report covers an astounding variety of topics related to Amesbury’s vehicle-making history. Its title playfully exploits the double-meaning of “vehicle,” both a means of transport and a medium of expression. As the author confesses on page 1, he adopted the title from an Amesbury trade newspaper, The Amesbury Vehicle, published for several years in the late 1800s by The Amesbury Daily News.

Mike’s introduction of The Amesbury Vehicle is an intriguing preview of its wide range of content:

The emphasis here is on overall operation of the business and how it fit into the nationwide carriage industry that in 1890 comprised over 10,000 shops and factories making wagons and carriages. Discussion of business functions explores the working environment and the flavor of what Amesbury carriage makers both did and did not do over their life cycle, including their geographic distribution, size, methods, production, products and pricing.

Jacob R. Huntington (1829-1908), called the father of Amesbury’s carriage industry, started building carriages in Amesbury in 1853. (Courtesy State Library of Massachusetts, archives.lib.state.ma.us.)

Business school case study?

The overview of the local carriage industry on page 3 of The Amesbury Vehicle is worthy of a case study at any business school. Shortly after Jacob Huntington brought the first carriage building shop to Amesbury from Merrimac in 1853, the town’s early entrepreneurs adopted a business model based on four concepts:

1. Build carriages with simple and popular styles.

2. Duplicate and standardize parts by using drawings, templates and patterns.

3. Employ specialized workers at stations in an early form of an assembly line.

4. Sell to wholesalers instead of tying up money in retail inventory.

The paper goes on to characterize Amesbury carriage-making businesses as simple, low-capital, small-scale shops, most often without expensive, powered machinery. The advantage of this business model, the author explains, is that the process could be easily replicated at other shops around town. Makers could also thrive in the market as builders of fine, hand-built carriages. But on the downside, these small businesses could be disrupted by competition from larger industrialized companies and they would find it difficult to recover from economic downturns.

Overall, the data presented on later pages creates a picture of the maturing carriage industry as “a cooperative group of mostly smaller and mid-sized shops that collectively constituted a major segment of the American carriage industry.”

Cooperation, not competition

The great fire of 1888 devastated carriage factories around Chestnut, Oakland and Morrill streets. Chestnut Street is in the center, rising up the hill toward Oakland and Elm streets. Surviving businesses cooperated to help the destroyed companies continue production, and no employee lost his job. (Courtesy Salisbury Point Railroad Historical Society.)

Readers of The Amesbury Vehicle will probably come away understanding that “cooperative group” is an important characteristic of the Amesbury carriage building community. Nowhere is the cooperative nature of the carriage makers more evident than in the aftermath of the great fire of 1888. This fire destroyed almost all the factories and carriage inventories on carriage hill, an area that includes today’s Chestnut, Oakland and Morrill streets.

The Amesbury Vehicle describes how carriage makers in parts of town unaffected by the fire took in companies and workers to minimize business disruption for their fellow manufacturers. A trade magazine article of the time reported, “Not one single factory closed down and no employee lost his job.” The successful carriage entrepreneurs in Amesbury had “a strong sense of business and civic responsibility” that also led to the creation of banks, the town’s first water distribution system and an early electric power plant.

This cooperative spirit was made possible, of course, by the strong market for Amesbury’s carriages, which created a “run of uninterrupted prosperity” between 1880 and 1893. During this time, Amesbury carriage builders could easily sell all the carriages they could make. There was little to be gained by competing with neighbors and much more to be gained by cooperation.

Browsing or careful study

The Amesbury Vehicle lends itself to casual browsing or careful reading by the more intellectually curious. Each of its myriad topics is a bite-size vignette presented on a single page. Here are a few:

Concord carriage probably similar in style to those produced by Huntington’s shop in Amesbury. It was a simple and popular design using standardized parts and assembled with specialized labor. (ACM collection.)

• Year-by-year numbers of carriage and auto body businesses.

• How tastes in carriages shifted from the two-wheeled, one-horse chaise toward four-wheeled carriages that could carry a family and some cargo, similar to today’s growing demand for sport utility vehicles (SUVs).

• The new ideas of labor specialization, part standardization and assembly lines.

• Adapting to Midwest competition by moving to higher quality carriages.

• High wage levels of carriage workers.

You’re invited to read The Amesbury Vehicle: The Carriage Making Industry of Amesbury for yourself on the ACM website. (Click here to view.) Its wealth of topics makes it difficult to imagine what might have been left out.