NEW YORK PUBLISHED BY CURRIER & IVES 152 NASSAU STREET
The “carriage parade” was a daily event in every major American city and New York’s vehicles thronged over the ten miles of fine carriage roads in and around Central Park. Every afternoon between the hours of four and five, fashionable society of New York “took the air.” East Drive from the Mall south to Fifth Avenue and 59th Street was lined with spectators, and in their polished carriages, attended by their immaculate servants, the élite drove back and forth, passing and re-passing each other. It is said that the first time they met each other, they bowed ceremoniously, the second time they smiled, and the third time they looked away. When warm weather came, society moved out of the city en masse, and their carriages went along too. The summer carriage parade at Newport, Rhode Island was reputed to be even finer and more glittering than the New York “promenade on wheels.”
In the United States, it was not only the people of wealth and fashion who owned carriages, and herein lies one of the great differences in our attitude and that of the countries abroad. We developed the rockaway, surrey, buggy and buckboard; vehicles that could be produced inexpensively; vehicles that were light and practical with a stripped-down functional look, yet for all their air of fragility, possessed of great strength. We fashioned them so that a servant was not required either to drive them or to maintain them; we built them in such numbers and so well that the treatise on Coachbuilding published in London in 1881 by J. W. Burgess noted:
“The carriages of America are so different from our own and from those of Europe that they require special attention. It is quite possible that in the future their style may greatly influence carriages in all parts. The first noticeable trait in them is lightness.... Americans have adopted some of the shapes of Europe and the European mode on constructing the under-carriages, retaining their own method of making the pole and splinters, as giving greater freedom to the horses.
“The cheapness (of their vehicles) is attained by making large numbers to the same pattern, by the use of (machinery) and by the educated dexterity of the American workman, always ready to adopt any improvement.”
Horse-drawn vehicles have played a vital part in the lives of civilized peoples, and that period cannot pass for long without demanding the attention of research scholars whose basic interest is to record activities of the past for the benefit of the future.
Mr. and Mrs. J. Watson Webb, founders of the Shelburne Museum, have assembled this collection of vehicles and placed it on display in the hopes that it will play a part toward preserving for posterity the examples of the coachbuilder’s art during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Lilian Baker Carlisle
Shelburne, Vermont.
April 1, 1956