Horse-and-Buggy Days

I

UNTIL the very turn of the century, owing to the inadequacy of urban and interurban means of communication, a horse was a necessity — a greater necessity, in fact, than a car is to-day. Consequently, families of even very modest means usually had a ‘rig’ of some sort. Men drove to their places of business; farmers drove to market; many artisans drove to work; women drove downtown to shop; doctors made their rounds by buggy; horses hauled the streetcars and fire apparatus; on Sunday morning the horse was hitched to the extension-top surrey to take the family to church. It was the Equine Age.

Livery stables, of which there were several in even the smallest communities, had on hire turnouts of every sort: fourhorse coaches known as tallyhos for excursions and picnics; hacks with liveried drivers for weddings and funerals; the buckboards used by drummers who ‘sold’ the rural districts; and, for amorous couples, buggies with extra-narrow seats, the horses guaranteed to stand without hitching and to know the difference between a smack and a cluck.

The number and types of vehicles in the carriage room depended, of course, upon the owner’s means and tastes. Oldfashioned families like mine, to whom any suggestion of ostentation was abhorrent, kept an extension-top surrey — the most ungraceful carriage of the period — which was used for shopping, calling, and going to church; a hard-riding vehicle witli platform springs known as a democrat; a couple of buggies; and, perhaps, a brougham of ancient vintage or a cumbersome barouche with a folding top. Moderately well-to-do families who wanted to be ‘in style’ but had to consider the cost got along with two conveyances: a one-horse runabout and a twohorse vehicle, red-wheeled and very high, called a trap. The latter, though considered very stylish, was the acme of inconvenience and discomfort, the back seat being a sort of coop to which access could be had only by raising one of those in front. The carriage room of a family of fashion and wealth usually contained a brougham, a victoria, a phaeton, and perhaps a high two-wheeled cart, but such elegant turnouts required liveries for the servants.

In those comparatively rare cases — rare upstate at least — where two servants, a coachman and a footman, were carried ‘on the box,’ they wore silk hats, white piqué cravats, blue, bottle-green, or maroon silver-buttoned coats, breeches of white doeskin, and boots with brown or pink tops. The coachmen of less ostentatious establishments wore liveries of gray or tan whipcord and derby hats. Carriage servants were nearly all English or Irish imports. When on the box they sat as stiffly erect as West Point cadets, chins and heels drawn in, the footman’s arms folded and held rigidly out from his chest. Though I suppose they were rather ridiculous figures, looking for all the world like jumping jacks, they lent to an equipage an air of dignity and impressiveness which chauffeurs lack.

A grizzled old Scotsman, Alexander Henderson (he pronounced it with a burr like a thistle), was our leading veterinary. He was a big, burly, harsh-tongued man, but beneath his gruff exterior beat a tender and generous heart. As Scotch as the bagpipes and the kilt, he was one of the founders of the local branch of the Caledonian Society and knew Bobbie Burns by heart. But, being Scotch, he had an eye out for business, and though on Saint Andrew’s Day he wore a sprig of heather in his coat, on Saint George’s Day he wore a rose and on Saint Patrick’s Day a shamrock.

I suppose ‘Doc’ Henderson presided at more equine and bovine accouchements than any three other veterinarians in upstate New York. What he did n’t know about horses and cattle was hardly worth knowing; he could reel off pedigrees or trotting and milk records by the yard. He was also a recognized authority on dogs. He always maintained that a terrier’s tail, instead of being amputated with a knife, should be bitten off. His theory was, I believe, that this crushed the vertebræ and gave what was left of the victim’s appendage a flattened-out and sportier look.

And one of our winter sports was cutter racing, the favorite course being on West Genesee Street, which had a milelong straightaway. This sport recognized no social distinctions, and anyone who owned a bit of blood was welcome to take part in the brushes: Frank Matty, the saloonkeeper who was Syracuse’s Democratic boss; Doc Henderson, our vet; Charlie Alvord, the tailor favored by the sporting set; Jack Feek, a noted horseman and a grand sport; Sim Dunfee and Anse Alvord, both of whom had made fortunes by combining contracting and politics; Charlie Bresee, the proprietor of our largest steam laundry; the aristocratic H. K. White, and his son, Horace White, later governor of New York.

I can see them yet, those keen-eyed, tight-lipped, red-faced men in their fur coats and visored caps, perched in spidery red racing cutters with sleek standardbred trotters between the shafts, as they tore down the long white course in a flurry of snow and ice. I can see the spectators, muffled to the ears against the cold, who lined the curb three deep. I can hear the muff led tattoo of hoofs, the creak of harness, the jingle of bells, the cracking of whips, the exhortations of the drivers: ‘Gid-ap, Ajax!’ . . . ‘Steady, Belle! Steady, girl!’ . . . ‘Get along, boy!' . . . ’Tch-h! Tch-h! Tch-h!’

II

Owing to the great numbers of Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians who were pouring into the country by the shipload, domestic help was plentiful and cheap. A fairly well-to-do family usually kept two servants, a cook and a second girl. A good cook received five dollars a week; from twelve to fifteen dollars a month was the customary wage for a second girl fresh from the Ould Sod. And some of them were pretty fresh and verdant at first. My mother attended a luncheon given by a friend for an out-oftown guest. The hostess announced that she had just acquired an Irish maid who, she felt certain, was going to be ‘a perfect treasure.’ When the first course was over she tinkled a little hand bell and the new girl appeared. ‘Stack yer dishes, leddies!’ she commanded. ‘Stack yer dishes!’

The help usually slept in small cubicles on the third floor. In winter smelly kerosene stoves slightly tempered the frigidity of these garrets. The girls performed their ablutions in washbowls and in cold water, for they seldom were permitted to use the one and only bath. That, no doubt, is why so many of them drenched themselves with cheap scent. Female servants, if young, were as carefully supervised as boarding-school misses. Their mistresses investigated the young men with whom they went out once a week, warned them against bad company and the danger of being seduced, and insisted that they be home by ten o’clock. Yet they were treated, as a rule, with great consideration and often remained for years with one family. The men were very stiff and selfconscious in their swallowtail coats (the dinner jacket had not been invented), bulging shirt fronts, white kid gloves (which often smelled of naphtha), and the enormously high ‘poke’ or ‘Piccadilly’ collars which made the evening hell for those with oversized Adam’s apples. Those who perspired profusely brought along a supply of extra collars. The girls in their wasp-waisted gowns of flowered satin looked like human bouquets, though one wondered by what miracle of dressmaking the daring décolletages were kept from revealing more than was intended. Pinned to their corsages were bunches of violets or longstemmed American Beauty roses; their sixteen-button gloves of white glacé kid or colored suède reached almost to the shoulder; and, in spite of handkerchiefs, dance programmes, bottles of smelling salts, and other paraphernalia, — which, however, did not include compacts or cigarette cases, — they handled their long trains with amazing grace and dexterity.

Our cook was with us for more than four decades. Had we lived in France the government would have awarded her a decoration for long and faithful service. Though her wages never exceeded thirty dollars a month, she saved her money, which my grandfather invested for her, and when she died it was found that she had left quite a comfortable estate. To each of my four cousins and myself she bequeathed several hundred dollars.

As I review in memory the families living on James Street Hill, West Genesee Street, and Fayette Park, I am struck by the almost total absence of any foreign element. They came, nearly without exception, from old American stock, and their names were Nordic enough to satisfy Herr Hitler himself. The Semitic element which has invaded and inundated so many of our cities since the turn of the century had made no impress on the Syracuse of which I write. Though there were a number of Jews who ran secondhand clothing stores, pawnbrokers shops, and the like, there were few if any of the Eastern European type that has now become so ubiquitous.

The little group of better-class Jews had their own society, and it was very exclusive. You could not have found finer people or better citizens anywhere than the Elsners, the Leiters, the Marshalls, the Thalheimers, the Rosenblooms, the Faulkners, to name a few of those who constituted our local Jewry’s upper crust. They were men and women of the highest principles, broad-minded, unostentatious, philanthropic, always ready to contribute generously to any worthy cause, irrespective of creed or race.

The only one of the younger Jewish set whom I knew at all well was the son of a wealthy leather merchant. He was the best-dressed boy in high school and aroused the envy of the rest of us by wearing patent-leather shoes every day in the week. And this reminds me that for many years I had my shoes made by an old Jewish shoemaker named Marshall — no relation to the distinguished New York lawyer, Louis Marshall, also from Syracuse — who had a hole-in-thewall shop on Fayette Park. I never visited Syracuse in later years without dropping in to have a chat with the old man, and when I returned after the war he threw his arms about me and kissed me on both checks.

Our social season got into full swing about mid-November with the first of a series of subscription dances called ‘the Cobleighs’ after an old-time dancing master. They were very exclusive affairs, the invitation lists being scrutinized, debated, and ruthlessly pruned by the committee, which resulted in much heartburning among those who were not invited. The Cobleighs were held in the great dining room of the Empire House, and on the night of a dance the hotel guests were requested by the management to have supper early.

The suppers, honest-to-goodness meals with bouillon and oyster patties and sliced turkey and scalloped potatoes and finger biscuit and chicken salad and ice cream and angel-food cake and kisses and ladyfingers and coffee, were usually served by a caterer named Teall, imported from Rochester, though sometimes the committee patronized one of the local catering establishments, Rausch’s or Blodgett’s. The waiters were for the most part home-grown Ethiops, very friendly and informal, who often addressed us by our first names and occasionally embarrassed us by tactless but well-meant allusions to domestic matters.

Our most popular dancing man was Reuben Thurwachter, affectionately known as ‘Rube.’ He was nearly always chairman of the committee on arrangements and was welcome at every party, not only for his beautiful manners and invariable good nature, but because he was such a useful man to have around in case of an emergency. Rube never went to a dance without carrying in his coattail pockets needle and thread, a pair of scissors, a buttonhook (for the girls’ gloves and the men’s shoes), a few collar buttons, a couple of corset laces, a garter or two, a bottle of cleaning fluid and one of smelling salts, and, in case the crash should be torn, a hammer and tacks. If he did n’t carry a supply of powder, rouge, and lipstick it was because nice girls did n’t use cosmetics. He was a walking first-aid station for beauty in distress.

III

The doom of Dobbin was forecast as early as 1877 with the introduction from England of the high-wheel bicycle known as the ‘ordinary.’ The invention of the ‘safety’ in the middle ’80s marked the beginning of the end of the Horse-andBuggy Age.

But cycling was too tiring and hazardous a pastime to become really popular until the invention in 1884 of a machine with a ‘diamond frame’ and low wheels of the same size. This was originally known by its English trade name, the Rover, which for a long time was applied to all bicycles of the new style. But the name gradually lost its meaning as the designation of a type and was replaced by the more comprehensive term ‘safety,’ though it soon became unnecessary to distinguish between the two types, for after 1890 the ordinary was scarcely to be found except in junk yards and the shops of curio dealers.

In a score of ways this new means of transportation had a vast effect on contemporary life. Up to that time even the larger cities had had no traffic regulations to speak of, and traffic jams were of common occurrence, but with armies of bicyclists pouring along every city street and country road some sort of regulation became necessary. Common councils voted funds to organize squads of bicycle cops — curious-looking figures in their high gray helmets and long frock coats. Bicyclists were required to light their lamps at specified hours, and the city streets were rivers of bobbing lights after dark. So heavy was the bicycle traffic that municipalities, in order to bring down the number of accidents, built bicycle paths along the sides of the thoroughfares. Campaigns were carried on for the suppression of the ‘scorcher,’ the road hog of the period, who was a terror to peaceful riders and a nuisance generally as he pedaled furiously along, crouched low over his drop handlebars.

The bicycle, like the motorcar, had its critics and detractors. Clergymen complained that it was emptying their pews, that their parishioners went wheeling when they should be in church. Certain enterprising clerics, however, fought the devil with his own weapons by donning knickerbockers and leading their congregations into the country, where they held alfresco services. Farmers complained that bicyclists pilfered their orchards. Nervous folk complained that their health was being shattered by the constant ringing of bicycle bells.

Physicians gave warning that the American physique was being ruined by the ‘bicycle stoop’ and that if something was n’t done about it the whole population would develop curvature of the spine. When women took to bicycling, the reformers reared up on their hind legs and gave the sport a verbal castigation, denouncing it as conducive to immorality and a peril to the purity of American girlhood.

The bicycle revolutionized women’s fashions. Most women cyclists wore divided skirts — opaque versions of the trousers worn by Turkish concubines. The rest of the costume consisted of a shirtwaist, a man’s necktie and collar, a short jacket with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, and, in summer, a straw ‘sailor’ draped with a green veil. But a few of the more daring braved public opinion by appearing in the hideous garment which bore the name of its inventor, Mrs. Bloomer.

The conservative considered bloomers as little short of indecent, for they revealed the wearer’s legs halfway to the knee. ‘What is America coming to,’ one clergyman demanded, ‘when our young girls brazenly appear in garments which make such shocking revelations?’

The bicycle was employed for every conceivable purpose— for going to work, to market, to school, to church, to the theatre, to parties. There were even bicycle dinners, the soup served at one house, the fish at a second, the meat at a third, and so on, the guests mounting their wheels after each course and pedaling to the next one. And occasionally we read of bicycle weddings, at which the entire party, including the clergyman, wore bicycle costume and the happy couple pedaled off on their honeymoon on a tandem.

IV

Saratoga is almost the only one of the old-time summer resorts which has retained any semblance of its original character, and only during the racing season at that. Save for that brief period its atmosphere is characterized by vulgarity and shoddiness; its streets are lined with cheap eating houses and curio shops; its summer population consists mainly of race-track hangers-on.

But half a century ago Saratoga ranked with Carlsbad, Marienbad, and Homburg as one of the world’s great watering places. Beneath its stately elms promenaded the wealth and fashion of America. Its broad thoroughfares were crowded with dogcarts, tandems, phaetons, victorias, spidery racing buggies, drawn by the finest horses in the country. On the spacious piazzas or in the vast marble lobbies of the Grand Union and the United States gathered our social, financial, and political leaders. Here were to be seen such nationally known figures as James G. Blaine, Samuel J. Tilden, Roscoe Conkling, William C. Whitney, Jay Gould, James Gordon Bennett, Foxhall Keene, Boss Tweed, John L. Sullivan, Ward McAllister, Stanford White, Lillian Russell, the Mrs. Astor, the Mrs. Vanderbilt — the noted and the notorious, the famous and the infamous, the great and the near-great, statesmen and politicians, social leaders and social climbers, members of the haut monde and the demimonde, sportsmen and sports. Nowhere else could be seen such a fascinating cross section of our national life. Saratoga was the first and most characteristically American of our great summer resorts — and the last. For it has gone, along with the horse and buggy, the bustle, and the white plug hat. We shall never see its like.

Gone forever, like that era in our national life of which they were characteristic, are the homely upstate scenes I have attempted to re-create on paper. Gone are the women in their absurd bustles and ridiculous little bonnets, the men in their broadcloth Prince Alberts and white plug hats and amazing whiskers. Gone, all gone, are the side-bar buggies, the jangling horsecars, the cast-iron menageries on the front lawn, the plush photograph albums in the parlor, the nickeled stoves with the armored knight on top, the black-walnut whatnots, the horsehair sofas, the alabaster vases with the peacock feathers, the Turkish corners. Gone, too, are the beautiful manners, the old-fashioned gallantry and courtliness which lent elegance to the life of the period. To the present generation the people and dress and customs of the time doubtless seem fantastic, comic. But we who had the good fortune to live in those days often recall them with longing and regret.