From ‘Colonel Albert Pope and His American Dream Machines’

Posted with Courtesy of
NORTHEAST MAGAZINE, THE HARTFORD COURANT

Published January 21, 2001

A fascinating article on early bicycling…….

Hartford could have been Detroit.  Henry Ford gets the credit for putting America on wheels, but the story of the automobile really began here on Capitol Avenue with visionary industrialist Albert Pope.  A Civil War veteran who believed that everybody should have a bicycle, that America’s roads should be paved and that mobility was a key to life, Colonel Pope thought big, dreamed big and employed thousands.  He made millions in his 20s, founded an empire and lived to see most of his businesses sold off or go bankrupt.

A decade ago, lawyer Stephen Goddard was writing a book on the decline of the railroad and the rise of the American highway when he discovered that Pope, whom he’d thought a footnote to the automobile story, came close to owning the franchise.  Pope understood Americans’ desire to be on the move, and he saw it early on.  He understood, too, that good products came from workers treated with respect.

Goddard’s new book profiles Pope, his Hartford empire and what, a century ago, Pope understood about the future. 

                                                — Anne Farrow, Northeast Magazine

POPE’S ARRIVAL IN HARTFORD

One spring day in 1878, Albert Pope packed his velocipede onto a railcar and rode from Boston to Hartford’s brownstone Union Station. He jumped astride the high-wheeled contraption and pedaled uphill along Hartford’s bumpy earthen streets to Weed’s plant [the Weed Sewing Machine Company], as gleeful boys and girls raced to keep up with the machine, so strange it might have come from Mars. Pope had come to Hartford to meet George Fairfield, president of Weed, a company which gained a reputation for skilled machinists and efficient production in a day when the routinized production line was yet a dream. Fairfield convinced his recalcitrant board of directors to let him sign a contract to manufacture fifty bicycles, which Pope would sell at September’s Framingham (Massachusetts) fair.

Sales at the fair went so successfully that Pope decided to order more from Weed. As the decade wore on, the Weed Sewing Machine Company would make fewer and fewer sewing machines and more and more bicycles.  In 1878, Pope imported nearly half of the ninety-two bicycles he sold.  But by 1880, he had turned out 12,000, with back orders of 2,500, and his workforce had grown to 350.  By the end of the decade, 4,000 workers would be in his employ, making him New England's largest employer.

“MY TRAVELING MAN”

D.J. Post seemed to spend his life on the train. Yesterday in Niagara Falls, today in Detroit, tomorrow in Chicago. His boss, Colonel Pope, called him proudly, "my traveling man." And his fellow travelers regarded him with respect, for D.J. sold a product that everyone yearned for.

D.J. could tell you the name of the latest model that had just come off the line at the Hartford factory. If he broke bread in the elegant dining car with a couple on vacation, he'd make the man's eyes light up with tales of how fast Columbia's Racing Safety bicycle could go, as the lurching train jostled the water in their crystal glasses, then romance the man's wife by telling her about the smooth ride of the new Ladies' Safety, with cushioned tires. And if he took a shine to you, D.J. might just be able to make you the first in your town to own a Century Columbia.  

Then D.J. might excuse himself, to return to his seat. For Hartford headquarters was voracious for news from the field. D.J.'s job was to set up franchises in new cities, a mission for a shrewd operator, one who could read people instantly and wouldn't be drawn in by a sharpie who later proved to be all sizzle, no steak.

D.J. now opened and unfolded a letter from George Pope, his boss and the Colonel's cousin and confidante. And as the train trundled on toward Niagara Falls, D.J. read about problems back home.

Across the Connecticut River from Hartford, the company had agreed to let a man named Joyce in South Manchester have a franchise, even though Cheney was selling Columbia bicycles out of his respected department store across town. But now word had it that Joyce was about to skip town with seven hundred dollars he owed the Pope company. Let's cut him out, advised George Pope, and let Cheney have the whole territory, so we don’t have agents undercutting each other.

In between reading George's latest missive and taking out his fountain pen to fire off a reply designed to please his boss, D.J. would read the daily newspapers that newsboys hawked through the railcar at every depot. At train stations, you could find more daily papers than flavors of ice cream, ranging all across the political spectrum. His hometown of Hartford, a small capital city, had four dailies and two weeklies.

Pope’s cousin, the Colonel, was approaching fifty now and abundant threads of gray streaked his full beard.  He stood firmly at the helm of Pope Manufacturing Company, which had bought out the Weed Sewing Company for fifteen dollars and sixty cents a share.  Debonair George Day, who had been president of Weed, characteristically deferred to his superior and receded, without complaint, to become vice president of the new outfit.  

The two men were firmly ensconced in the top echelons of local business leaders, together with the heads of Aetna and Travelers insurance companies.  Hartford was upbeat as the 1890s dawned, as John Philip Sousa’s marches blared out of phonographs in downtown windows, and young people at open-air dance halls did the two-step to Victor Herbert waltzes.  Behind the plume of cigar smoke billowing from the carriage clip-clopping along Main Street might just be Mark Twain, attired in his trademark white suit.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, now beyond her prime, wandered aimlessly in her garden, from which, if the wind was right, she could hear the clanging of machinery at the Pope factory.

THE BENEVOLENT INDUSTRIALIST

Pope’s benefactions extended to his employees as well.  Considered revolutionary innovations at the time, Pope added a well-stocked library, company lunchrooms with hot meals for seven cents, a bike garage, and hot- and cold-water washrooms with lockers.  He underwrote the expenses of a 25-member military band, composed of his employees, which marched in local parades under the Pope banner.  His customary Christmas present to employees was money, together with a note:  “Dear Schofield:  I enclose fifty dollars and you can buy your own present.  You know what you need most.”

MARK TWAIN LEARNS TO RIDE

A speculator ever intrigued by novelties, Twain had ambled the half mile [from his Farmington Avenue home] to Pope’s factory in 1886, plunked down the princely sum of $142.50, and bought himself a Columbia Expert [high-wheeler] bicycle, together with twelve hours of riding lessons.  Twain wrote about the harrowing experience of learning to ride on a street near his Hartford home.

“We got up a handsome speed,” he wrote of his first lesson, “and presently traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on the instructor’s back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun.  It was well it came down on us, for that broke the fall, and it was not injured.”

Twain was learning along with thousands of fellow Americans that the strange metal skeleton seemed to obey its own laws rather than those of nature.

“I perceived how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the lifelong education of my body and members.  For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down.  The law required the opposite thing; the big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are falling.”

Mounting the velocipede proved no easier:

“You hop along behind it on your right foot, resting the other on the mounting leg, and grasping the tiller with your hands.  At the word, you rise on the peg, stiffen your left leg, hang your other one around in the air in a general and indefinite way, lean your stomach against the rear of the saddle, and then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off.  You get up and do it again; and once more; and then several times…”

After taking eight lessons and numerous pratfalls, Twain exhorted his readers:  “Get a bicycle.  You will not regret it, if you live.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

By:  Anne Farrow, Northeast Magazine

Lawyer Stephen Goddard is a former journalist who writes about history as a hobby.  "Writing is my golf," says Goddard, whose earlier book was about the railroad in America.

For a guy who, to use his phrase, has been in Hartford since the earth was cooling, Steve Goddard gets around.  He practices law full time, teaches history at Trinity College and writes history books on the side, books that are, basically, about Americans in motion – via railroad, bicycle and automobile.

Goddard’s senior economics thesis at Bates College in 1963 was on the demise of the New Haven Railroad and the dawning of interstate highways, and his brand-new book is about Albert Pope, a pioneering Hartford industrialist who thought everybody should have a bicycle.

The intervening years have seen service in the Marine Corps, work as a reporter and editor at The Hartford Times and a busy general practice in law.  But history, and that senior thesis on the decline of rail and the rise of the highway, remained an interest.

In 1994, HarperCollins published Goddard’s book “Getting There, The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century,” and it was the research for that book that led him to Albert Pope.

“[Pope] helped individualize transportation by bringing the bicycle to America…but he was realistic, and knew the future of the bicycle was limited because America, at the end of the 19^th century, was largely unpaved,” Goddard says.  Colonel Pope, who for the rest of his life insisted on the use of his Civil War honorific, laid the groundwork for a new national movement toward better roads and was prominent in the development of the automobile.  (A century later, the electric car, which Pope championed, is back on the road in the form of hybrid electric-gasoline cars.)

“Pope’s notions about transportation and the doors it opens for people at all levels of society mirror Goddard’s own.  In an interview with the Connecticut Center for the Book last spring, he said that one of his guiding principles is “inclusivity.”

“A half-century ago,” he said, “American cities offered abundant public transportation, which meant that job-wise, people didn’t have to be outside looking in just because they didn’t have a car.”

A founding member of All-Aboard!, a Greater Hartford advocacy group whose goal is to establish a regional public transit system, Goddard is contemplating, for his next project, a history for young people on transportation.  Then, too, the 100^th anniversary of the historic flight at Kitty Hawk will be in 2003.  “I’m tempted to do something on air travel,” he says. 

"Colonel Pope and his American Dream Machines," published by McFarland & Co., is available from Amazon.com for $39.95, or from the author for $31.75 (25% off, plus shipping) or $33.50 if sent to an address in Connecticut (6% CT sales tax).

Please go to Order "Colonel Pope and the American Dream Machine" fill out and submit the information as requested  -- keep a copy for your records and send confirming copy with your check to:  Stephen B. Goddard, 330 Main Street, Hartford, CT  06106.  

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