Automobiles, or horseless carriages, were invented and developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, in a time when horse-drawn carriages were central in American life. So central in fact that the mounting piles of manure in every city had caused a health and environmental crisis. By the 1920s automobiles had mostly replaced carriages, forever altering American’s ability to move easily and comfortably about the country, and eliminating the need to stable, feed, and manage the waste of hundreds of thousands of horses.

But there’s one unexpected twist to this story—the good quality, paved roads that made driving automobiles for personal use possible and “paved” the way for the widespread acceptance of automobiles, were actually made possible by the invention of the bicycle and the enthusiastic bike clubs who lobbied for better roads years before auto clubs like AAA did the same.

There were two wheeled, self-propelled vehicles as early as the 1860s, but it wasn’t until the invention of the Safety Bicycle in 1885, by John Starley in the United Kingdom, that bike riding became widespread. The safety bike which had most of the features of a modern bicycle including two wheels that were the same size, was indeed much safer to ride than previous experiments. The cost of these new vehicles (around $1,000 in today’s money) meant that they were mostly ridden by wealthy men and women—and these well-connected business people knew how to improve the roads that they wished to ride on.

Up until this point roads were barely maintained, dusty or muddy, deeply rutted tracks, meant for carriages. Federal and state government did not play a major role in developing and maintaining a widespread road system as became common after the 1930s and 40s. It was an adventure to ride a bicycle beyond the slightly better maintained roads of cities and towns.

The Good Roads movement changed all that. The movement was founded in Newport, RI in 1880 with the formation of the League of American Wheelmen, and spread rapidly across the U.S. and Europe. This group lobbied state governments successfully to improve and pave roads arguing that everyone benefited—from isolated communities needing mail delivery, to farmers and small businesses needing access to railroads.

By 1893 states and federal agencies had begun to put money into improvements. Cycling clubs celebrated with rallies and races across the country. And, without these newly improved roads, automobiles would not have been able to so quickly replace carriages as the vehicle of choice for personal travel.

While Amesbury played a well-known role in the carriage and automobile industries, the town’s role in the bicycle craze of the late 1800s-early 1900s is less well-known. We’ll talk about that an upcoming newsletter.