Transportation

In 1800 a trip from New York to Boston took several days by stagecoach over rough roads. By 1900 it took a few hours by train. Within a few more decades people were making it by car and by air. No other change in American life happened so fast or reached so far.

The stagecoach is where this collection begins. The best-known American coach was the Concord, built by the Abbot-Downing Company in Concord, New Hampshire. Its body hung on thick leather straps instead of steel springs, which gave it a swinging, rocking ride that passengers either got used to or did not. Concord coaches carried mail and passengers across the West for companies like Wells Fargo, and they became a symbol of the frontier long after the railroad replaced them.

Wagons were the real workhorses. Farm wagons, freight wagons, delivery wagons and the covered wagons of the emigrant trails all appear in the pictures. Canals came next in the story. The Erie Canal, finished in 1825, connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River and turned New York into the country's leading port.

In the cities, horse-drawn omnibuses gave way to horse-drawn streetcars on rails, and then in the late 1880s and 1890s to electric trolleys. The automobile arrived around 1900 as a toy for the wealthy. Henry Ford's Model T, introduced in 1908 and built on a moving assembly line from 1913, made it something a farmer or factory worker could own. Airplanes followed, first as a stunt and then as a business.

The thing worth noticing is the overlap. For a few years around 1910 a single street photograph can hold a horse and wagon, a trolley, a bicycle and an automobile all at once, each moving at its own speed. Look too at the roads. Paved roads were rare outside the cities until well into the 20th century, and many photographs show early cars stuck in mud that a wagon would have handled better.