Old Cars – and Memories

Touring in 1910 Pierce Arrow To California Was Adventure 

(This article first appeared in the JCHS Journal in August 1976) 

Summer traditionally signals the start of vacation season, when thousands take to the highways for the great American road-trip. While today we complain about the state of the nation’s highways, one hundred years ago road-trippers endured privations hard for us to imagine. What follows is an article which first appeared in the JCHS Journal in August of 1976, describing cross-country “brass era” motoring.

This account of pre-superhighway auto travel in the early part of the century is written by Beatrice Morse Washburn, wife of a past Society president, Edward S. Washburn.

In “Old Cars – and Memories,” Mrs. Washburn recounts vividly the problems as well as the delights of travel in the luxury automobile models of 1910 to 1916 from Kansas City via Kansas mud and Colorado mountains and trips to the east coast.   

The account is dedicated to Mrs. Washburn’s “children and grandchildren.” 

By Beatrice Morse Washburn 

Early in 1910, my father’s twin brother, Asahel U. Morse, who lived in Kansas City, bought a Pierce Arrow.  He and Aunt Inez had long owned a horse and carriage and I was relieved at the change because the great “boulevard system” had been started in Kansas City, with paved streets; and on our afternoon drives (when we came to visit from St. Louis), the poor horse would slip on the paving and fall down two or three times, to my extreme childish consternation. 

The Pierce Arrow “touring car” was very elegant; folding canvas top, little half-doors into the back seat (no doors in front), running boards and acetylene lamps, and an authoritative bulb-squeeze horn.  Of course, it was hand-cranked, to turn over the motor for starting. 

The twin brothers, farm boys from central Illinois, still possessed much of the adventurous pioneer spirit, and they began to talk of a motor trip to California.  In preparation, my uncle went to the Pierce Arrow factory, to “take apart a car and put it together again” so that he would be fully cognizant in any emergency.  The car would make 40 miles per hour on a good level, but there was little grading on the roads which were mainly dirt, with a few stretches of gravel here and there through the towns.   

After much planning, the great trip was under way the summer of 1910.  My father and mother (Hiram B. and Olive Bell Morse), uncle and aunt, and her adopted nephew, Earl Rutt Morse, then about 12, comprised the party. 

(I was in Los Angeles, at my Bell grandparents – having been sent there for the winter after a long and serious bout with typhoid fever the previous summer.  And my little 3 ½ year old twin brothers, Lucius and Southwood, were left to follow on the train with the nurse.) 

The hardy tourists packed their $400 worth of equipment; tent, cots, cook-stove and provisions, and made the trip as far as Olathe (some 38 miles) the first day.  The camping routine proved a bit strenuous – pitching tent, finding firewood for the stove, begging water from a farmer, cooking, setting up cots – and then all the un-doing the next morning, not to mention having to throw out a forlorn stray kitten from each bed in turn! 

The next day it began to rain incessantly, and the Kansas dirt roads became mud, all but impassable.  More rain all night and the following day, now with mud up to the hubs.  So they turned and drove back to Kansas City, put themselves and the car on a train for Dodge City in western Kansas, and made a fresh start “out where the West begins.” 

By the Colorado line, the camping enthusiasm had waned, and they had decided to take their chances on any available accommodations en route, so at La Junta they packed up all the equipment and shipped it home. 

They followed approximately the Old Santa Fe Trail – the road never far from the railroad – through Trinidad, Colo.; over Raton Pass; through Santa Fe and Albuquerque, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Needles, Calif. 

The route was marked only with occasional red, white and blue stripes around telegraph poles; there were no road signs.  But the navigator sat next to the driver with a finger constantly on a page of the wonderful “Blue Book.”  These extraordinary volumes told you exactly how far to go and where to turn:  “4.6 miles to cross-road; take left turn … 20.5 miles to water tower; take right fork … 2.7 miles to red barn…” etc.  The navigator could not afford to nap! 

As garages were only in the scattered towns (there were no filing stations), they carried three large cans on one running-board; red for gas, white for water and blue for oil – two spare tires on the other, and several African waterbags hanging on the back. 

They all wore “dusters” (long linen coats), the men wore caps and the women hats with crepe de chine veils tied under their chins.  While the men were attending to the car in the mornings at the town garage, the women were busy in the hotel room making sandwiches and lemonade, for they were never sure of finding a place to eat at noon and picnics were the order of the day. 

Another problem with the lack of gas stations was the “comfort stop.”  Wooded areas were fine, but prairies and deserts afforded little privacy, so when a stop was made, the word went out, “Gentlemen to the fore; ladies to the rear.”   

Whenever they came to a city on the Santa Fe Railroad which boasted a Harvey House, they whooped for joy, for these famous western hostels were clean, well run, and the food served by the “Harvey Girls” was excellent.  However, air-conditioning was undreamed of in 1910, and even the best establishment could not guarantee comfort to its guests on a summer night in Needles, Calif.  It was well over 100 degrees, and to make the night endurable they wrung out towels in cold water to spread over their bodies.  And after days crossing the desert, their lips were dry and parched by all the dust. 

After a visit in Los Angeles and San Francisco they set out along a northern route for home through Lake Tahoe (near Reno, Nev.), Salt Lake City, Utah, and south through Colorado.  The roads here, as everywhere, were atrocious – full of chuckholes, dusty when dry and slippery ooze when wet. 

In wooded areas they often bumped for miles over “corduroy” roads, with logs or sometimes old railroad ties laid crosswise; or in desert areas drove over the arroyas on tracks of plank troughs, a rather nerve shattering business. 

But with these, at least, you knew where the road was!  It faded out one day in northwest Nevada, between Smoke Creek Desert and Black Rock Desert – the tracks in the sand becoming fainter and fainter, with no reassuring hands painted on these northern telegraph poles.  Suddenly, the car slowed mysteriously, and the men jumped out to find the front wheels sunk to the hubs – quicksand!  They all piled out, threw gunny-sacks under the back wheels and backed for a mile before they dared turn around.  They then retraced their way to the last town they had passed, Gerlach, Nev., a full 40 miles back, to ask their way. 

The word “motel,” much less the reality, had not come into being, and the best accommodations outside the cities were little western small-town hotels, primitive at best, with many outdoor privies. 

But an all-time low was hit at Sulphur, Nev., where the proprietor had gone away for a week, leaving a young boy, his only employee, in charge.  Dinner proved to be “slumgullion” (a kind of slippery oats and wheat cereal) and “sow-belly” – which greeted them also for breakfast!  The sheets had obviously been used by former guests, so they slept in their clothes, and spread their handkerchiefs over the pillows. 

The Colorado mountains were challenging.  The day going over Tennessee Pass it rained, and the one-track mountain road was treacherous.  No one spoke for hours, and Aunt Inez wept the entire way.  When they finally got down to Leadville, and old-timer remarked, “You come over thet pass today?  Yore plumb lucky!  Thar ben eleven autymobiles go over the’ edge this year.” 

And we think we have adventures! 

Subsequently, in 1913, we children were taken on a couple of trips in the Pierce Arrow, between St. Louis and Kansas City, about 260 miles.  We took pictures in front of the car which was blazoned with banners, “St. Louis to Kansas City or BUST!”  The worst part of the road, I remember , was in the rocky, hilly section near Minneola; it gave the feeling of the car bumping down stone steps as it was eased from ledge to ledge of rock.   

It took us a day and a half to make the trip (which we now make in four hours on Interstate 70).  Going east we would stay at Jonesburg, in a country hotel directly on the railroad tracks, where the little twin boys would beg for the front room so they could see the choo-choos and invariably sleep through all of them; and going west we would cut our first day a bit short in order to stay at the luxurious Hotel Frederick at Boonville. 

The first car my own family had was a Detroit Electric, bought in 1913.  It had big batteries fore and aft, solid rubber tires, and windows all around so that you felt as though you were on display like the treasures in the little gold cabinet in the living room. 

(A Mrs. Ver Steeg had her electric painted a bright peacock blue, and she had a “duvetyn” suit made to match, so that the whole town recognized her as she glided about.) 

There was a cut-glass vase attached to the inside, and Mother always kept a rose in it.  The steering bar was long, and was manipulated with the right hand; the power bar was short and managed by the left.  This, of course, became automatic, but required much thought in the learning stage.  On one of my early trips, attempting a left turn, I mistakenly pushed the power bar instead of the steering one, and, full speed ahead, ran into a lamppost, bending the front axle. 

The electric would go as long as the “juice” held out – the farthest point we ever made, on our Sunday afternoon drives, being Gumbo, a little town on the Missouri River, some 25 miles from our house.  When we crept home, there was so little electricity left in the batteries that we’d all have to get out and push the car up the driveway.  We had a charging set in our own garage, which was considered rather plush, so that each day we could start out with a lot of pep. 

One night a short circuit developed in the set, and suddenly flames were leaping out of the garage.  As firemen saved the garage but not the electric, Mother sat at my back bedroom window sobbing, “The comfort of my life is gone!”  Daddy got out of the streetcar on his way to the office next morning and bought her a new one. 

By 1916 my father had purchased a Stanely Steamer. 

“It has only 17 moving parts,” he said. “Therefore it stands to reason that it will be much simpler to keep in repair than an internal combustion machine (a gasoline car) which has nearly 1700 moving parts.  And as for speed – with steam, the sky is the limit!”  Besides, it burned “coal oil” (kerosene) which was much less costly than gasoline. 

So, with all five of us aboard, we started for the East Coast that summer.  As long as the 17 moving parts moved, all was well, and we reached Maine, where my gourmet mother’s build-up of the gustatory delights of lobsters and steamed clams made converts of her three children. 

But, alas! – In Damarisotta, a little seacoast town with a team of oxen drawing the loads of logs to the sawmill, one of the 17 parts balked, and no one for miles had ever seen a Stanley Steamer.  There we sat for five days waiting for a mechanic from Boston to repair our car. 

Fortunately the tiny resort hotel served unbelievably good fricasseed chicken which was more to my father’s taste than seafood. 

New England was fun, because every little village square had a stone water trough in the center for the horses.  This meant for us no hunting for a clear stream, no requests for water from a farmer’s well.  All we had to do was drive up to the trough, drop our suction hose and suck up water for our boiler, to the utter amazement of the villagers. 

At Boston, news of the dreadful first epidemic of “infantile paralysis” (polio) in New York convinced our parents that they should not take us three children into the area.  So they decided to ship us and the car by boat from Boston to Norfolk, Virginia.  (I shall always remember the boatload of watermelons with little Negro boys sitting on top, in the Norfolk harbor.) 

Now, Virginia posed another problem.  In those days, I am convinced, there was nary a culvert in the city.  Any stream that wasn’t really a river was not bridged, but forded.  And the water would invariably splash up and put out the Steamer’s pilot light which activated the burners.  In a mile or so we’d be as unequivocally stopped dead as is a modern car out of gas.  But no walking to the next service station (had there been one!).  Father would crawl under the car and relight the pilot.  Mother would sit tensely wringing her hands and murmuring, “It’ll blind him!” because once the burners had flashed on and singed his eyebrows. 

One harrowing experience on the way home was on the slippery, rain-soaked, black dirt road leading to Forsyth, Ill., near Decatur, the site of my father’s boyhood farm.  The road was high crowned for drainage.  We skidded and landed in a deep ditch, unharmed but shaken.  During the sickening slide, my mother kept exclaiming, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” 

Back on the road (with the aid of a farmer’s team), I reproved her, “Mother you were swearing!  Aren’t you ashamed?”  Mother eyed me coldly, “Swearing?!  My child, I was PRAYING!” 

Did you know that you can set up monthly donations to JCHS via our website? Sign up today!

Comments? Article Contributions? The JCHS Publications Committee would love to hear from you. Email us at journal@jchs.org