Nothing points out how far we’ve come in our automobiles than to recall the first U.S. road race held in Chicago in 1895.
Held on a snowy Thanksgiving, that initial race covered 50 miles—from Downtown Chicago to Evanston and back. While over 80 entries had been filed, only six showed up at the starting line due to the heavy snow.
The winner—in 10 hours and 23 minutes—was the Duryea Motor Wagon driven by Frank Duryea who, with his brother Charles, made auto history with the win (along with $2,000 in prize money).
Like the Wright brothers in Ohio, the Duryea brothers, both raised in central Illinois, launched their inventive ideas from a bicycle shop but, unlike Orville and Wilbur, the Duryeas didn’t walk in lockstep.
The 1890s was a tumultuous decade when it came to transportation. The bicycle craze was on and both men and women took to the road in self-propelled bliss.
Susan B. Anthony declared that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than “any one thing in the world.” Charles Duryea had something to do with that. While working at a bicycle shop in St. Louis in 1885, Duryea had developed a safety bicycle that could be ridden “generally accepted as the first step towards cycles for the women of the ‘Gay Nineties,’” noted George May in his book, Charles E. Duryea, Automaker.
When Duryea’s bicycle know-how took him to Washington, D.C. to work for the city’s foremost cycle maker, he also developed an enthusiasm for patents after numerous visits to the U.S. Patent Office.
He organized the Duryea Manufacturing Co. in 1888 to produce the Sylph bicycle through a company in Peoria. When the cycle’s manufacture was transferred to the Ames Manufacturing Co. in Chicopee, just outside of Springfield, Mass, Duryea moved there with his younger brother Frank.
While in Chicopee, the Duryeas got involved with gas engines and began work on developing a car together. When Charles and his family left Massachusetts to return to Peoria where he was a partner in the Rouse-Duryea bicycle company, Frank rebuilt the machine. As May’s book relates, on Sept. 16, 1893, the Springfield Evening Union reported on “a new motor carriage, which, if the preliminary tests prove successful, as is expected, will revolutionize the mode of travel on the highway, and do away with the horse as a means of transportation.”
The test proved successful. “History was made that night—Springfield was the place. And, as Bellamy Partridge (author of Fill‘er Up, a light-hearted automotive history) says: ‘Charles Duryea, from whose idea it had sprung, was not there to see it go,” wrote May.
Shortly before the Chicago race, the Duryea Motor Wagon Co. was formed in 1895, the first auto company in the country—another first. However, few vehicles were produced. Capital was in short supply when one deal after another to acquire funding fell through.
The Duryea’s’ head start in this new industry was melting away. “Time and opportunity were flying, for already in 1897 Henry Ford, Alexander Winton and others were getting started,” wrote May. In 1900, there were 30 U.S. companies in the field that produced 4,100 cars.
Now, over a century later, it’s easy to start America’s automotive history with Ford and the Model T but the Duryea brothers were dealing with public opinion that was divided over motor cars. It was a time when it was still unclear if the automobile would replace the horse as the predominant form of transportation. An editorial cartoon in a 1900 edition of Judge magazine used automobiles as a symbol of progress and prosperity under Republican rule while the horse trough of William Jennings Bryan represented the Democratic Party hanging on to the concept of traveling by horse.
Things accelerated quickly in the 20th century. By 1905, auto production in the United States topped 20,000.
In Kokomo, Ind., you had Elwood Haynes, starting in the 1890s, making cars along with Edgar and Elmer Apperson. Another Indiana firm, Auburn Automotive, operated out of Auburn, Ind. from 1900 to 1937. Winton’s car company was in Cleveland while the Elmore Manufacturing Co., a brass and bicycle firm founded in 1893 that later built cars, became a division of General Motors in 1908.
These were just a few of the many companies that sought to make a name for themselves in the fledgling auto industry.
Unable to secure the funding they needed, the Duryea brothers dissolved the Duryea Motor Wagon Co. and went their separate ways—Charles, the planner, to his bicycle business in Peoria while Frank, the mechanic, settled into business in Chicopee Falls with the Stevens-Duryea model, a limo that sold into the 1920s.
Charles was still determined to produce a motorcar in Peoria. Monroe Seiberling who left a grand home in Kokomo, Ind. to move to Peoria to start the Peoria Rubber and Manufacturing Co., worked with Duryea to get auto production started. But differences between the two men resulted in Duryea leaving town in 1900. Years later, Duryea recalled meeting Seiberling at a Chicago auto show. “What have you new, Duryea?” he related in a letter, responding “Not a thing, Mr. Seiberling. Am using the same drawings and patterns I offered you at Peoria.” Seiberling reportedly said in response, “If we could have seen what you tried to show us we could have had the biggest auto plant in the land today.”
Lest Seiberling’s lament be viewed as simply consolation, know that his nephew, Frank Seiberling, started a little tire company called Goodyear in 1898.
Duryea, meanwhile, tried making cars in Waterloo, Iowa and Reading, Pa. but both businesses failed along with Duryea’s dream of producing a cheap car for the masses, a concept that Ford perfected with the Model T he launched in 1908.
After the family relocated to Saginaw, Mich. in 1911, Duryea organized the Duryea Motor Co. with plans to offer three models: the Electra, the Buggyaut (first developed in Reading), and the Runabout but few cars were made as problems arose over the corporate partnership.
The Duryeas moved on to Philadelphia where he worked with the Cresson-Morris Co. to offer the “Duryea Light Car” but the arrival of World War I shut down any chance for funding.
Duryea’s final automotive attempt came in 1917 with the Duryea Gem, produced in a factory in Wilmington, Del. Despite a low purchase price ($250 to $400) and great mileage (65 miles per gallon), only a dozen vehicles were built.
Duryea, who died in 1938, never gave up on coming up with an automotive breakthrough. In a letter written shortly before his death, he offered details on a new car design: “The car I am working on will have the throttle on the steering wheel. On the floor are only the clutch and brakes—no accelerator.” Duryea also called for a lighter car to save gas.
As for the greatest achievement of the brothers who couldn’t get along? The Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Mich. offered this: “While other automotive pioneers were still tinkering with single vehicles, the Duryea brothers were launching an industry.”