Climate Change Anxiety Strikes 1890 Amesbury Sleigh Makers
The Portland Cutter sleigh manufactured by S.R. Bailey of Amesbury.
Who would have thought climate change would be a topic on Amesbury businessmen’s minds 130 years ago? But it stands to reason for anyone making sleighs, which needed winter snowfall to be useful transportation. And many of Amesbury’s carriage-making companies of that time also made sleighs. A mild winter could hurt sleigh sales, company profits, and Amesbury prosperity.
S. R. Bailey sleigh advertisement in the January 1890 Amesbury Vehicle.
The January 1890 edition of The Amesbury Vehicle described the concern. (The Vehicle was a monthly magazine published in Amesbury and read by those in the carriage industry.) In an article titled “The Beautiful Snow,” the editor reported that “Certain weather prophets had begun to predict that the New England climate had changed. The long-continued mild winters seemed to strengthen their assertions.” As a result of a mild winter, said the article, a sleigh “has been as useless as a parlor stove in equatorial Africa, or fans at the North Pole.”
The Whitman Pung available from Amesbury’s T. W. Lane.
So worry was justified, especially since the general economy was slowing at the time and several manufacturers noticed how carriage sales were lagging. But as winter continued that year, luck was in the sleigh-makers’ favor. The snowfall returned to its normal “old fashioned winter” level just in time.
As history would show, however, climate would be the least of the Amesbury manufacturers’ worries. The business downturn that started around 1890 due to the Baring Crisis (a panic originating in Argentina and affecting most of the world) continued to worsen in the following years. In fact, 1890 turned out to be the peak of Amesbury’s carriage industry as measured by the number of Amesbury companies associated with carriage-making. After that, business was in a downhill slide for a decade. Prosperity finally returned to Amesbury when its auto body business started growing in the early 1900s.
Many thanks to Joyann Reynolds and others on the ACM Collections Committee for digitizing old editions of The Amesbury Vehicle, making them more readily accessible. Thanks also to ACM Industrial Survey Team members Mike Harrold and Susan Koso for their earlier reports on Amesbury business statistics and Amesbury-made sleighs.