Horses, autos go toe-to-toe for roads

When Bangor’s first automobile came to town in 1900, a droll reporter wrote, “all the horses are twitching their tails in envy.”

That “first automobile” reported by the Bangor Daily News, it turned out, was just an advertising gimmick, hired for a month by a real estate agency. Soon after, however, local druggist Martin Robinson bought a Stanley Steamer, making him the first owner of an auto in Bangor.

A half-dozen years later, horses still outnumbered autos many times over, but their envy had been reduced considerably. Now they were terrified by the speed and noise exhibited by the mechanical monsters taking over the primitive roads of the day. That year, 1906, there were 48 autos and seven motorcycles owned by Bangoreans, including 16 Cadillacs and an assortment of Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Stanley Steamers and other makes – such as Locomobiles – that have passed out of common parlance.

“Bangor has been rather slow in grasping the usefulness, pleasure and fascination of the motor car,” declared a progressive newspaper writer. But cars were no longer considered a passing fad, he said. Even so, it still wasn’t clear in the minds of many who would win the battle between horses and horsepower. Horseless carriages were irritating a lot more people than horses.

“Autos Go Too Fast,” a headline in the NEWS had declared a couple of years before, on Aug. 6, 1904, the first year motor vehicles started to appear on city streets in appreciable numbers.

“Formerly Mt. Hope Avenue was very quiet and was used largely on pleasant afternoons by ladies driving [horses] for pleasure, but since the auto has become a fad, many ladies have given up their drives … On Main Street, a large auto driven at about fifteen miles an hour barely escaped running down a small party Friday afternoon. There should be a speed limit for the business section to say the least,” the reporter said.

No one was supposed to go over 5 mph in built-up areas or 15 mph in the country under state “laws of the road,” but Bangor seemed to have no speed limits of its own. And the police had no way to identify drivers or to chase them. State registration and license plates were still a year away, and it would be some time before police car sirens would be heard.

Auto etiquette around horses, however, remained the biggest issue involving the new motor cars for the time being. Skittish horses and their riders were inevitably the losers when

a noisy auto, sometimes clanging a warning bell that the law dictated could be heard for 300 feet, drove by.

This growing conflict had attracted the ire of farmers, then a powerful political group. The autos of Bangor at this early date could go anywhere from 18 to 60 mph, and many did travel at this speed, even over the primitive roads that existed then. One driver, Charles D. Gibson, however, stated he had never put his four-cylinder Columbia touring car, reportedly the most powerful auto in Bangor, in fourth gear because he couldn’t find a stretch of road that would handle the high speed.

The situation was so contentious that the NEWS wrote an editorial titled “The Automobile Versus the Farmer” on July 22, 1904. The word auto was still so strange it appeared in quotation marks. At least one area farmer called them “devil carts.”

“The chief argument against the ‘autos’ is that they frighten the horses and thus endanger the lives of those who are still forced to use horse-power for locomotion,” declared the editorial writer.

“A sensible and well-to-do Holden farmer” had written a letter to the paper that said, “At the request of those who ride bicycles we have removed the stones from our highways and fitted the roads in fine shape … Then, at a time when we are getting ready to enjoy the fruits of our labor, along come these ‘devil carts’ and scare our horses so badly that we do not dare to take them out.”

It was no use talking about getting horses accustomed to autos, he argued, “any more than you can get a woman used to a mouse. So long as the steam and gasoline and electric machines insist on seeking out the country highways, the farmers and country people must keep their horses in the barn.”

Because farmers were too poor to buy automobiles, he fumed, this was nothing less than “class distinction.” And asking a motorist to stop or slow down was a waste of time because “those chaps are heartless as well as hogs, and when we ask them to hold up, they laugh at us and disappear in a cloud of dust.”

At the end of this epistle, the anonymous farmer revealed that he was motivated to write by a particular “Bangor machine” that was cruising the roads of Holden making “a noise like a mowing machine.” He complained, “This affair has been the terror of the neighborhood for nearly a month.”

After giving the farmer due space, the editorial writer concluded both horses and autos would have to learn to use the roads together, so the sooner someone sued one of these reckless “automobilists” for damages the better to send a message.

Another editorial on Nov. 26, 1904, announced a movement was underway to get laws passed establishing harsher penalties for irresponsible motorists, although the idea of banishing autos from the roads seemed a bit farfetched. The writer defended most automobilists, saying just because a man can afford “a machine” is no reason to presume he is “a boor and a coward.”

The battle for the roads was just getting underway in Maine and across the nation as more and more autos appeared. In 1904, J. B. Dill, “the celebrated motorist,” was in the state mapping a route for a New York auto club that was planning a trip to Quebec and back through Maine via Jackman and Portland.

Four years later, two men traveled in an Oldsmobile in January from Portland to Bangor in just five hours and 45 minutes, which was considered a feat given the time of year and heavy rain between Pittsfield and Bangor.

There would be no stopping the motor vehicle anymore than the tourists coming to Bar Harbor – although that town banned cars for a time. In 1905, about 730 automobiles reportedly were registered by Mainers with the state. By 1913, there were 10, 676 passenger cars and 391 trucks.

Horse-auto collisions had become a serious problem. Had our forefathers also known about gridlock and global warming, they might have regulated things differently in the years to come.

Richard R. Shaw shared several useful sources including an important one in the Bangor Semi-Weekly on July 10, 1906 on the city’s auto registrations and the history of the first auto. Another useful source of early automobile lore was Will Anderson’s entertaining book “You Auto See Maine.” Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.