The Bicycle and the Good Roads Movement
Albert Pope, together with the League of American Wheelmen, led a populist movement to establish federal and state agencies dedicated to improving public highways for bicycle use.
No sooner had Pope begun to sell his first ordinary bicycles than the young men who bought them began to organize themselves into wheel clubs so as to socialize with fellow cycling enthusiasts. In Connecticut, clubs of ordinary-bicycle owners were established early on in Hartford (1879), New Haven (1880), Bridgeport (1880), and Waterbury (1881). By the mid-1880s, ten additional ordinary-bicycle clubs had been formed in towns large and small around the state, including Stamford, Cheshire, and New London.17
In May 1880, realizing that promoting the culture of cycling was a surefire way to increase sales, Albert Pope helped to organize the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), comprised of thirty-one cycling clubs from around Southern New England. The LAW was established as a national organization of cycling enthusiasts with chapters in each state; its aim was to promote the general interests of cycling, to protect the rights of wheelmen, and to facilitate touring. Membership in the LAW increased steadily over the decades, especially after the introduction of the safety bicycle in 1888, and peaked at more than 100,000 in 1898.18
An important recruitment event for the LAW was the annual state gathering at which races, tours, and other events were organized and where proposed cycling legislation was debated. One such gathering—the Third Annual Cycling Tournament sponsored by the Hartford Wheel Club—was held in that city’s Charter Oak Park on September 2–3, 1889. The weekend program included a four-mile bicycle race to the state prison in Wethersfield, a tour of the prison facilities, and in the evening, an open-air concert with music by the Weed Company Military Band.19
As stated in its charter, one of the group’s main activities during the 1880s was the promotion of long-distance touring, which had captured the imagination of many adventurous cyclists. One of the most noteworthy touring cyclists of the time was former Yale student Karl Kron, who undertook numerous forays throughout New England riding his Columbia no. 273, one of the early ordinary bicycles manufactured by the Weed Company. Kron wrote of his cycling adventures in detail in a book titled Ten Thousand Miles on a Bicycle, which included several jaunts around and through Connecticut at speeds averaging five or six miles per hour. The following quote describes a portion of one such trip that originated in Boston in the summer of 1883 and during which Kron traveled the shoreline Post Road through Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut to New Haven—the same route traveled on horseback by Madam Sarah Kemble Knight in 1704. The quote is memorable, to be sure, for the effort that it documents but also for its snapshot of existing transportation modes in Connecticut—from turnpike and steamboat to railroad, electric street railway, and roads paved with oyster shells—that Kron’s description inadvertently captures. The distances mentioned were measured using a Pope-made odometer that Kron had attached to his Columbia ordinary bicycle (m. = miles, h. = hours):
I had an extremely pleasant ride to New Haven, the following forenoon (27 m. in 5 h.), through the clear, bracing air and bright sunshine, on roads quite free from dust and mud. From the corner in Clinton to the flagpole in Madison (4m.), I kept mostly on the sidewalks, and I was 1 h. in wheeling thence to the green in Guilford (5 m.), where I decided to leave the turnpike in favor of the shore road, and so followed the telegraph line out from the s. w. corner of the green and turned l. with the poles at the first fork. The road across the marshes supplied goodish riding, though it is overflowed when the tides are very high. On a hill on Leete’s Island (3 m.), I stopped before a little gravestone at the left of the road to copy the inscription: “Simeon Leete, shot here by the Enemy, 18 June 1781, age. 29,” and then I hastened on to the station at Stony Creek (2 m.), whence to the green in Branford (4 m.) I found the riding almost continuously good, in spite of the hills. From there I went without stop to the summit of the big hill (2 m.), and again without stop to the watering trough near Tomlinson’s bridge (3.5 m.), by which I entered New Haven. The dock of the New York steamboats is just beside this bridge; and I rode from it without dismount to the city hall on Church St., facing the green,—my route being alongside the car tracks to Wooster St., through that, l., and its prolongation, over the railway bridge, then a few rods l., to the head of Crown St., which soon crosses Church St. at right angles. All three of these streets, and many others in the city are macadamized; and, as a very large number of the New Haven sidewalks are without abrupt curbs at the crossings, long rides may be taken continuously on their bricks or flagstones. Oyster-shells [from the thriving oyster fishery in nearby Fairhaven] supply a smooth surface for several of the suburban roads.20
As an extension of the touring activities of its members, the LAW published a cyclist’s travel guide to Connecticut, a pocketsize, leather-bound volume titled The Cyclist’s Road-Book of Connecticut. The guidebook included seventeen long-distance road trips—including one from New York to Boston via the upper Post Road through New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield—mapped out on eight county road maps of Connecticut. The routing for each tour was highlighted in red, and each section of the route was rated (from one to five) by its gradient (from level to mountainous) and by the quality of its surface (from first class to very poor). The road book also included a list of hotels along each route where cyclists could spend the night, some of which advertised reduced rates for LAW members.21 With books such as these, the LAW provided useful touring information for its members and also helped to publicize the surface condition of many Connecticut roadways. Indeed, in 1891, the Connecticut division of the LAW offered prizes for “the best collection of photographs showing the need for improved roads.”22
As a logical extension of his work with the LAW, in 1889 Pope began an unrelenting advocacy on behalf of good roads with a speech before the Carriage Builders’ National Convention in Syracuse, New York, where Pope, ever the businessman, equated good roads with good business, in particular the sale of carriages, wagons, and bicycles. Pope continued to preach the gospel of good roads in subsequent speeches and in print, calling for a national commission to deal with the matter. The “good roads” movement, as it came to be called, peaked in 1893 as Pope delivered to Washington, D.C., a massive petition that listed the support of 150,000 individuals and organizations, including seventeen governors, for an ongoing nationwide program of road improvements. In response to the activism of Pope and other good-road advocates, Congress that year established an Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) within the federal Department of Agriculture.23
Pope’s Good Roads petition of 1893 to Congress is stored in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Courtesy of the National Archives
As the name implied, the main role of the ORI was educational, and it fulfilled its mission in two ways: by collecting and disseminating information on how to build good roads to towns and cities across the nation, and by building short segments of “object lesson” roads in select cities, including Pope’s hometown of Boston, to demonstrate what a good road could be like and thereby whet local appetites for the construction of additional good-road mileage. While the ORI had no funds to build a continuous network of good roads (that degree of federal support would have to wait two more decades), the ORI did become a permanent institutional presence within the federal government and as such soon replaced the LAW as the nation’s most vocal advocate for road improvement.
As might be expected, the good roads movement led by Pope, the LAW, and other advocates had its impact on state governments, first in New Jersey and Massachusetts, where the nation’s first two state highway commissions were established in 1891 and 1893, respectively, to address the ongoing issue of improved roadbuilding. In Connecticut, the momentum for good roads legislation peaked in the winter of 1894–95, as farmers from the state’s 122 Grange chapters at their annual