[Talk given to the inaugural session of the Oregon Scenic Bikeways Committee, at Travel Oregon HQ, on January 21]

The Willamette Valley Scenic Bikeway has only been around since 2005 and the concept of a bikeway might seem pretty new.

But in fact, Oregon has had people working on scenic bikeways since at least 1896, more than a century ago.

In Oregon’s sesquicentennial year, we should think about Oregon’s first Golden Age of cycling.

To understand bicycling between about 1890 and 1910, you have to understand something about road conditions. Pavement was exceedingly rare. Gravel wasn’t even that common. Mud prevailed, especially in winter. The mud was thick, gloppy, and fertilized by livestock droppings. It was stinky, and sometimes 12 or even 18 inches deep. When the Oregon Highway Commission was established in 1913, its first motto was “Get Oregon out of the Mud!”

Long before 1913, however, bicyclists led the efforts to improve road surfaces. In 1891 the League of American Wheelmen published The Gospel of Good Roads. They sold over a million copies, which was at the time an impressive number. In 1895 bicyclists led the effort to build the nation’s first “cycle path,” a dedicated bicycle & pedestrian road on Coney Island. ARTBA, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, was formed in 1902 by a former president of the League of American Wheelmen.

This first iteration of the “good roads” movement was a mixed success, and local wheelmen turned from roads to dedicated “cycle paths.” Oregon’s first one might have been along Macadam Avenue. In 1896 it was also known as Riverside Drive or the White House Road. This White House didn’t have an oval office, but it did have an oval track! It was located south of Portland, just across from Milwaukie, and below the hillside neighborhood of Dunthorpe. Bicyclists sometimes raced on the track, but more often horses raced there. The 1896 bicycle map of the Portland district contains several references to the cycle path out to the White House.

It’s not clear whether the path was completed, and the following year, bicyclists realized they needed to band together to accomplish more. In May 1897, leading citizens of Portland, representing the League of American Wheelmen, the Mazamas, the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club, the Oregon Road Club, and the Zig-Zag Club created the United Wheelmen’s Association. It started to lobby for city and state efforts.

That same year the League of American Wheelmen published the Road Book of Oregon. It contained 60 routes throughout the state, arranged in tabular form. It had mileage, road conditions, directions, landmarks and bike-friendly businesses. In the back was a State map with routes marked in red.

Some bicyclists were especially interested in a route to Mt. Hood. Col. L. L. Hawkins promoted this route in 1897 and 1898. Even today there are dormant plans to extend the Springwater corridor out to Mt. Hood! We remember Hawkins as a leader in Portland parks and the chauffer for the 1903 Olmsted report.

Governor Geer was almost certainly the most important figure in Oregon cycling. His purchase of a wheel was headline news in 1898. During the session he commuted 8 miles each way from his farm to the state Capitol! In May 1900, he rode from Salem to Champoeg to locate the site of the 1843 Territorial meeting for the Oregon Historical Society. Today a white obelisk marks the spot.

On February 18, 1899 he also signed the first Cycle Path legislation that funded and built more of the cycle paths. Paths were envisioned in Yamhill county, all through wine country; in Clatsop county from Astoria to Seaside; in Marion county through French Prarie and out to the rural farming communities like Aurora, Silverton, Mehama, and Jefferson. As you might imagine, Multnomah county had the largest network, connecting Vancouver to Oregon City, Gresham to downtown Portland.

Though we think of the auto as killing the bike, bicycling remained popular, and the rise of the auto was slower than you’d think. The first auto came to Portland in 1899, to Salem in 1903, and to the small rural community of Pratum in 1912. Auto ownership didn’t equal bicycle ownership until 1916 or 1919. In 1909 Ray Francisco and Vic McDaniel rode bikes from Santa Rosa, California to Seattle for the Alaska-Yukon exposition and fair. In 1910, the Salem Brewery could advertise with an anagram on vehicular choice:

Some people ride the bicycle,

And some in autos course.

Life is full of mixed desire.

Elect then what you most desire.

My choice remains the horse.

But when in source of pure delight,

Effervescent clear and bright,

Everyone can read the cheer

Right in these printed verses here.

Still, the auto’s popularity was rising. It was convenient, fast, and thrilling. In 1913 the Cycle Path legislation was repealed and the State Highway Commission established. In 1916 the first portions of the Columbia River Highway were opened. And in 1919 Oregon passed the nation’s first gasoline tax, ensuring a stable base for road building and repair.

Finally, the slow decline began. What had been leading edge ground transportation technology became known as a kids’ toy, and a way to prepare them for the automobile. As a toy, it was second-class transportation, used by only those adults who couldn’t afford first-class transport. Bicycling’s popularity surged again a couple of times, during the Depression and World War II, and a third time in the late 60s and 70s.

Now we’re in the fourth bike boom. Hopefully this time it will stick!

Oregon Scenic Bikeways and the First Golden Age of Cycling by fortunaerota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at fortunaerota.wordpress.com.

(This is a largely speculative essay in draft form. I hope to refine its arguments – and lose a pinch of jargon! – as I find more evidence. I expect to update and revise it substantially after I think on it more. Hopefully readers will comment & critique!)

When the Statesman published a story about the League of American Bicyclists recognizing Salem as a “bicycle friendly community,” some online comments gave me pause and spurred me to visit a topic that I’m pretty sure is rarely discussed in bicycling circles: class. The vast middle is missing in talk about bikes and bicycling. Some see biking as the effete recreational activity of the leisure class; others see it as an activity for kids and immature adult losers who can’t manage the responsibilities of adulthood, which include car-driving. The middle ground, the image of adults who bike because it’s a reasonable transportation choice, is largely missing. Why is that?

The comment in question regarded photos of Salem Bicycle Club members on a ride. There were no cars in sight, and they were free to ride two abreast, enjoying the full lane.

Idiot bikers are in the middle of the road again,and not on the outside of the solid white line in the bike lane were they should be,someone please run them over .NONE OF THESE FOOLS ARE RIDEING TO WORK OR ANYWERE THEY NEED TO BE, THEY ONLY RIDE FOR ENTERTAINMENT AFTER WORK .just look at the clothes ,and no backpacks to hold a change of clothes.I dont believe these yuppies are going to sell anything at the office dressed like that,fools fools fools, come on guys ,squish them

Later, the same person wrote:

but the law does need to start paying attention to all these yuppies on bikes not obeying the laws of the road when they put on their pink spandex outfits and big bobble hats and try to play power trip with a 3000 pond vehicle that can squish them like a bug

The writer’s focus on apparel, on recreation & leisure time, on yuppies & professional status, and on power reminded me that the greatest concentration of bicycles in the city is at the Union Gospel Mission. Using a bike is for many people the sign of “not having made it,” and is one reason why people ditch bikes soon after they are able to afford a car. Another commenter called bicyclists immature, and mapped implicitly a narrative of increasing status and maturity:

Silly people,bikes are for kids,most of us grow up and out of the bike stage by age 15

The message is clear: Bikes are for kids or for adults who refuse to take on appropriate adult responsibilities.

In my research, I hoped to find resources that suggested this was a recent phenomenon, or at least a relic of the auto age, and therefore something historical and contingent. Something that could be changed. But what I see is that bicycling has from the very beginning been caught up in arguments, implicit or explicit, about class, status, and power. I wish the bike was a more neutral technology!

The high wheeler, or penny farthing, was an expensive toy of the leisure class. Young men were attracted to it as a 19th century version of our extreme sports. Though the club riders and six-day racers got press, there weren’t in fact very many of them. Demographically bicyclists became significant only after the invention of the safety bicycle in the mid-1880s.

During the run on banks and the resulting depression we call the panic of 1893, expensive bicycles actually increased in sales. This counterintuitive result seems to me to have cemented the relation between bicycles and class. Throughout the 1890s sales increased each year. By 1897, when employment levels returned to normal and the depression lifted, prices for new bicycles began to decline. Sales were the highest in 1899.

Nationally, the bike boom went bust just afterwards. Among other factors, the Spanish-American war siphoned off numbers of young men, the main purchasers of new “wheels,” and left the market with a temporary glut of second-hand wheels. That same year, to combat the decline the major bicycle manufacturers combined in a bicycle trust called the American Bicycle Company. By 1902 it was in receivership.

Here in Oregon the decline was not so precipitous. It took a couple of years for the east coast decline to make it to Oregon. Nevertheless, the biggest bike dealer in Portland, Fred Merrill, noted that in 1903, prostitutes using bicycles had made bicycling no longer fashionable, and the society ladies that had been riding bicycles stopped using them. Henry Wemme had got the first automobile in Portland in 1899, and by 1905 the smart set had turned from bicycles to autos. The numbers of these early autoists are small, just a couple hundred, dwarfed by the many thousands of bicycle riders, but they were the political and fashion leaders in society.

I do not have accurate figures for Oregon bicycle sales around 1905 – 1910. Though the press shifts focus from bicycles to autos, I do not believe the actual numbers of bicyclists decreased in proportion to the decrease in press coverage. We must remember that nationally auto sales didn’t equal bike sales until 1913, and that in Oregon auto ownership didn’t equal bike ownership until 1916 or 1917. The change was gradual. The first auto came to Salem in 1903, and to the rural community of Pratum in 1912. But because all the accounts of 1900 to 1910 stress the tidal wave change from bike to car, even though the actual numbers do not support this, we have the seeds of the inversion we see today: bikes are toys.

In that decade increasing streetcar service, and not the auto, was the primary competition for bicyclists. Those seeking recreation and leisure activity had turned to the auto, and the new primary use of bicycling was utility transport.

In his book Bicycle: The History , David Herlihy notes the curious divergence of Europe and the United States. By 1909 he observes that in Britain, continental Europe, and in Asia, bicycling had become a widespread form of utility transportation. He focuses on differences between prevailing technology in Europe and in the US. And he suggests that better and less-expensive lighter-weight bicycles, with gearing for hills, made the utility market possible. What he does not discuss is land-use and development patterns. Europeans already lived in compact cities that made bicycling easy. Americans lived in new cities, whose outward development the streetcar lines and automobiles accelerated. We saw in Portland how developers of suburbs outside the city limits worked to have bicycle paths and streetcar lines built to funnel workers to and from the central city.

In September of 1920, a three hour count on the Salem-Portland highway yielded only 230 trips cars. The numbers on interurban rail vastly exceeded this. There weren’t that many cars. Even so, the year before, the Oregonian could editorialize on the fate of the bicycle: “The love of ease and speed and cushions speaks for the motor-driven vehicle. With muscles of gasoline, strong as the thews of a genii, the modern citizen prefers to conquer his mileage.” Even though the numbers of autoists remained a small proportion of the population, the image of the car was fixed. In America, unlike in Europe, bicycling was not a reasonable choice available to anyone of any class; instead, it was a cost imposed on people because of economic hardship.

It wasn’t just individuals who exemplified this correlation. Bicyling’s popularity peaks in times of economic crisis. It wasn’t until the Depression that bicycles became popular again. This continued through the war. After world war II, bicycles’ popularity declined, and it became the kids toy of the 50s. In 1956 the US started a massive auto subsidy in the Interstate Highway system. The oil crisis of 1973 created another bike boom.

Will the panic of 2008 cause a third bike boom? In the summer this year we saw how $4/gallon gas spurred people to try bicycle commuting as an alternative to costly auto driving.

Safety is usually cited as the number one barrier to bicycling. On the “bicycle friendly” story, another commentator said:

as long as morterised vihicles use the bike lanes as turning,passing on the right,and temperary parking lanes, Its safer going against traffec, Or ridding on the sidewalk.This is wrong,but safer

In Oregon it is not legal to ride in bike lanes against traffic. But riders commonly do so. Though I have not done surveys, all available anecdotal information suggests these are overwhelmingly men who do not wear helmets. The image popularly is of the “can guy,” a homeless or underemployed man who collects cans and bottles and redeems them for the nickel deposit. As the affluence in America’s middle class is increasingly anxious and insecure, the image of the “can guy” looms as a sign of what could be. On this view, bicycling represents failure, whose proximity appears all too near and possible.

I have often wondered about the semiotics of spandex. How important is it for bicylists not to be confused with a can guy? If the can guy’s uniform of jeans, levi jacket and hoodie, and no helmet, is a visible reminder of economic failure, then the leisure bicyclists uniform of spandex, brightly colored jersey, and helmet is a sign of distinction: “I am not a failure,” it says. If the “can guy” is the downstream image, the effete yuppie in spandex, who has leisure to bike, is the upstream image.

It is my belief that a significant and essentially tacit barrier to bicycling is the excluded middle. The Scylla of the can guy and the Charibdis of the yuppie fail to offer a middle way. The can guy enjoys a lawless freedom, the yuppie enjoys a leisured freedom. The middle looks at the freedom and asks, where is this freedom for me? I have a long commute, I have children, my spouse and myself both must work to service our mortgage and our lifestyle. I can’t afford the time to bike. That the bicyclist represents a freedom seemingly distant can only exacerbate animosity towards bicyclists. This in my opinion accounts for why bicyclists rolling stop signs attracts much greater ire than autoists rolling stop signs. Bicyclists are in fact more free, and the autoist is jealous. The animosity is not irrational; on the contrary, it is rooted in fact.

That there isn’t a prevailing middle image of bicycling as a choice for everyone is an interesting failure of globalism. Many images travel from culture to culture, market to market. But the European model of bicycling as a choice for everyone fails spectacularly in the US. This failure has its roots in the divergence in bicycle markets and bicycle usage that occurred between 1900 and 1910. It’s much less accidental than I wish.

I am encouraged by recent stories that manufacturers are finally really looking at the utility & commuter cycling markets. The hipster of a fixie, rooted in images of the bicycle messenger and outlaw biker, is not a middle way. The middle way needs to be practical and a little boring. But it will also probably have to be paired with changing development patterns. Essentially goods and services, core retail, will need to be deployed closer to where people live. The mid-century model of suburbia won’t support demographically significant bicycling increases.

Biking, Class, and the Panic of 2008 by fortunaerota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at fortunaerota.wordpress.com.

A little over a year ago, Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC) called the bicycle a “19^th century solution” for “21^st century problems.” He thought of it as antiquated and essentially a toy. He might not have known that a little over a century ago, before the auto’s ascendance, the bicycle was leading edge technology, more like an iPhone than a Schwinn Sting-Ray. Many leaders in government enjoyed bicycling for transportation and for recreation. Residents of Salem and Marion county enjoyed a lively bicycle culture, and the Oregon Legislature even passed a law to create a state-wide network of bicycle paths. Today no one remembers the law or the paths.

The Bike Craze in Salem

Bikes were hugely popular in the 1890s and it might surprise you who biked and where they biked. These early bicyclists were remarkable. Many were or became pillars in the community. Traces of them are all around downtown.

Ben Taylor was likely the first owner of a bicycle in Salem. He liked speed. Reflecting on his life in 1934, he observed that in 1880 he was working at Grey’s Iron Works, where he helped make the first bicycle in Salem. His “penny farthing” was iron and heavy, and had a 48 inch front wheel. He rode “over the dusty, rutty roads out to the Waldo Hills.” In 1887 he became one of the first letter carriers in Salem and delivered mail on bike. (Here’s another photo.) He also brought to Salem the first modern bike with equal-sized wheels, the first motorcycle, and in 1909 and 1910 built the first airplanes in Salem.

Children also biked – and sometimes saw what they shouldn’t see! Daniel J. Fry, Jr., lived on Gaiety Hill at 606 High street in one of Salem’s oldest houses, built in 1859. Towards the end of his life he talked about watching prostitutes on Ferry street from his bicycle. He added that prostitution “was a legal profession at that time”!

Of course, it wasn’t just kids or prostitutes who biked. Many early bicyclists were or became leaders and government officials. Often they owned bicycle shops.

The artist and photo-secessionist Myra Albert Wiggins was a member of an important family cluster of bicyclists. Her brother Joseph Albert, and husband Fred Wiggins, were members of the Salem Cycle Association. Her mother was a Holman, a member of the family whose downtown building had hosted the Oregon Legislature before the first capitol was built. Her father was an important Salem banker. Her husband Fred owned an early department store, and sold bicycles in addition to heavy farm equipment. Myra and Fred met because of bicycling!

Winfield Taylor Ridgon was also a member of the Salem Cycle Association. Before he was in the mortuary business, he had been a State Legislator for Jefferson. He founded his mortuary in 1891 and was on the Salem City Council in 1894.

One of the guests at the Albert-Wiggins wedding was Otto Wilson. In 1920 Otto J. Wilson, Sr., was Mayor of Salem. Long before he was selling Buicks, and even before he brought the first auto to Salem, Wilson was selling bicycles. His shop was at 447 Court Street NE, where the Christian Science reading room is today. A decade later he built the building that Santiam Bicycle currently occupies, at 388 Commercial Street NE for his auto business.

Just around the corner from the site of Wilson’s old shop is the Arthur H. Moore building, at 241-245 High street, right across from the transit mall. The history is tricky and tangled, but it appears that Frank J. Moore started a bike shop around 1900 and about a decade later moved to the spot that Wilson had vacated when he started selling cars (the current site of Santiam Bicycle today). About 1912, Moore sold his business to Arthur H. Moore, son of the Oregon Supreme Court Justice, Frank A. Moore (but no relation to Frank J. Moore). In 1923 Moore build the building on High and moved his business around the corner. Moore became a City Councilman in the 1940s. Ranch Records just moved into the Moore building.

A recent Willamette grad in 1902, and a prominent bicycle racer, Watt Shipp joined Paul Hauser in another bike shop. Hauser was City Treasurer from 1936-1954. Shipp & Hauser sold bicycles and by a series of incremental ownership changes, the business eventually became Andersons Sporting Goods.

In addition to founding the bike shop that carries his name, Harry W. Scott sat on the Salem School Board and then the State Board of Education. It’s almost certain that more people in Salem have bought their bikes from Scott’s than from any other bike shop. Founded in 1914 at 147 Commercial Street SE, Scott’s Cycle is the oldest continuously operating bike shop in Salem.

Down the block at 120 Commercial Street NE is Alessandro’s Ristorante and Galleria. Long before Roger Yost purchased the building and updated it so nicely, the building housed Buren & Hamilton House Furnishers, where Max Buren sold bicycles. The Bike Peddler is just down the Street today.

Salem bicyclists regularly rode to Portland, and Portland cyclists to Salem. In May 1897, the Oregonian noted that “Sunday was a perfect day for the ambitious rider, and about 50 pulled out for Aurora and Salem at all hours of the morning.”

Bicycling even touched the Capitol building. To the west of the Capitol, in Willson Park, larger then than it is today, bicyclists built a track, and raced frequently in the 1890s, especially on the 4^th of July.

Salem’s most distinguished bicyclist must surely be Governor Thurston T. Geer. His family had come to Oregon in the 1840s, and the Geercrest farm on Sunnyview is still operated today by family members. In 1877 he purchased a farm on State street in the hills above Maccleay. In 1898 when, as Governor-elect, he purchased his first bicycle, the event was headline news: “Geer Has a Wheel.” He learned to ride in two sessions, and proclaimed he “intends, for six months in a year, to make the trips to and from the state capitol awheel.” Today the only visible trace of his own farm is a large outbuilding on the south side of the road at about the 10000 block of State street. Geer used his bike for longer trips, too. In May 1900, Geer biked from Salem to Champoeg for the new Oregon Historical Society to locate the site of the 1843 meeting where the very first pioneers decided to form a territorial government.

Good Roads & Bad Roads

Geer had made the trip to Champoeg in the spring with good weather. Writing about it he said:

It was a perfect day, with a firm north breeze, not a cloud in the sky; the roads were in good condition, the crops were growing splendidly, birds were singing everywhere, seemingly to be in harmony with Nature’s glad mood – it was, in short, just that sort of day which is known in all its wealth of joy, beauty, and inspiration only in the Willamette valley in the spring and summer months.

But he was all too familiar with awful roads.

Drivers and bicyclists today are conditioned to pavement, and it’s easy to forget that for much of the first half of the twentieth century many roads weren’t paved. In the earliest days of bicycling, as long as the “penny farthing” was the main style of bicycle, bicycling was a sport for young men, more like today’s extreme sports than road touring or bicycle commuting.

Recalling an early bicycle ride to Mt. Hood with Otto J. Wilson, Sr., Max Buren used the popular slogan – the roads “were almost impassable – some of them were scarcely jackassable.” In winter and spring, roads were deep in thick, gooey mud, and had “degenerated into a series of chuckholes, broken corduroy and trails,” often fertilized with livestock droppings.

Geer’s inaugural address of 1899 addressed this condition:

Few questions demand more serious consideration at your hands than the enactment of some system that will give our people better roads….Our present road laws… amount to a mere travesty on the object for which they were intended.

Sadly, Geer was not able to unify the rural-urban split to enact a reliable funding mechanism for roads. This had to wait until 1919.

In the meantime, in 1899 Oregonians tried an experiment. They passed legislation the Woodburn Independent happily noted was for “paths along county roads for the accommodation of cyclists and pedestrians.” Bicyclists hoped to enjoy the best roadways in the state.

The Cycle Path Legislation & Planning

In February 1899, Geer signed the “cycle path” legislation. Between 1899 and 1900 Marion County selected ten different routes for improved bicycle paths and imposed a $1.25 tax on each bicycle, with a license tag affixed to the bike as proof of payment. The bicycle paths would be better than most roads, and because they would be so attractive, the law needed provisions to prohibit carts, buggies, and wagons from driving on the paths.

Nevertheless there was controversy, much in the outer county. In March the Woodburn Independent feared that “we now have such cities as Salem already scheming to hog all the money…it is not to be expected that the rest of Marion county will remain in placid humor while such antics are being played.” Citizens of Silverton submitted a petition asking that any construction start from Silverton rather than from Salem. They wanted taxes collected in Silverton to benefit Silverton riders first.

The tax amount was not trivial. New bikes generally cost between $30 and $50, and used bikes between $5 and $10. A men’s suit could be had for $10 or $15, and a year’s worth of tuition at Willamette University was $45 in 1899. $1.25 was around a half-day’s wages for an average laborer.

Bicycle clubs often selected the routes. The United Association of Cycle Clubs of Marion County, with representatives from Salem, Chemawa, Marion, Enger (an old name for Pratum), Silverton, and Jefferson, as well as the Salem Cycle Association helped with planning.

The County gave great care to the effort. County Surveyor, Byron B. Herrick, Jr., executed surveys for the paths with the same care he gave to roads and property lines. The final selection of routes shows the importance of these outer farm communities. The paths would run between:

Salem and Aurora

Salem and Turner

Jefferson and Turner

Salem and Silverton

North Salem and the Wheatland Ferry along Matheny Road

I.O.O.F (Pioneer) Cemetery and the Liberty Store along Commercial & Liberty

the Fair Grounds and the Howell Prairie Post Office

Pratum and Silverton Road

Brooks and Silverton

The Butte Creek Bridge at Monitor and Woodburn.

To make connections within city limits, in May of 1899 the Salem Cycle Association designated Winter street as part of the main north-south bicycle route in Salem. It was to connect two of the cycle paths, one to Aurora, the other to Jefferson. Winter Street remains an important route today, highlighted on the 2006 Salem-Keizer Bicycle Map.

Building the Paths – Family Connections

I believe the first path built was the Salem to Mehama route. It followed the course of Old Mehama Road. Historian Roy L. Stout called Mehama’s hotel a “popular resort for vacationers” from Salem, and in the mid-1890s travel ads for Mehama ran under ads for Newport in the Statesman and Capital Journal.

Towards the end of June in 1899, Road Supervisor John W. Irvine had completed work on the Stayton-Mehama portion of the Mehama path. The Mehama route appears to have benefited from family connections. Irvine was the son-in-law of County Judge Grover P. Terrell. Terrell’s wife, Emma Smith, was the daughter of Mehama Smith, who with her husband, James X. Smith, had founded Mehama, originally known as Smiths’ Ferry, in 1876. They operated the ferry across the Santiam river as well as the Smith hotel. Terrell operated the store in Mehama. The hotel and store are visible in this early photograph. One can’t help but wonder if speeding vacation traffic to the hotel and store guided the construction!

Throughout the summer of 1899 work continued on the other paths. (In the future I hope to have a more detailed essay on path-by-path progress.)

After Optimism, Suspicion

There were no statewide road standards, and some criticized the quality of the paths. In the fall of 1899, the Woodburn Independent claimed, “the county court has taken the Marion county wheelmen’s tax money and given the latter mighty poor excuse for bicycle paths.” Unlike in Multnomah county, for example, the paths in Marion county were often not graded and graveled, and the dirt paths were subject to the same mud as the roads.

In Salem feelings ran similarly. The Statesman noted in early 1900, “last year Marion county wheelmen paid the tax quite readily, but the manner of cycle path construction was quite unsatisfactory, which resulted in a refusal this year on the part of the great majority of the wheelmen to pay the tax.” Many bicyclists resented the tax. Marion County bicyclists registered only a third of the bicycles that they registered in 1899, despite a significant increase in cycling. The New York Times had reported in 1898 that League of American Wheelmen president Isaac B. Potter “considered it just as sensible as to tax boots and shoes for wearing the sidewalks, and he called it a tax on the only kind of vehicle that does no injury whatever to the roads.” A Multnomah county bicyclist felt similarly and filed suit. The courts found the law unconstitutional.

While the suit was pending, in May 1900 the County Commissioners ordered Sheriff Frank W. Durbin to stop collecting funds. The Woodburn paper also made insinuations about Durbin, remarking on skimming, graft, buying votes, and “boodle purposes.”

I haven’t been able yet to determine whether Durbin was crooked. His obituaries don’t say much about his time as Sheriff, and give several different dates, all of which are wrong. The election of 1900 was highly contested, with his opponents accusing him of misusing tax monies in several different ways. Durbin won a plurality by only 76 votes (2686 to 2610) according to returns printed in the papers. On the surface it looks like it was a time best not asked too closely about. He lived in the Court-Chemeketa Historic District, and his house still stands today. (This too I hope will be a forthcoming essay.)

In 1901 the Oregon legislature passed a new law to remedy the old, but while other counties continued to work on the cycle paths, Marion County refunded money, and appears to have stopped building paths. Again, the contrast with Multnomah county is interesting: Around Portland they continued to build, but around Salem the county lost interest.

Bicycling is for Kids

Statewide it had been a grand experiment, though more of a noble failure perhaps in Marion county than elsewhere.

Nationally automobile sales didn’t equal bicycle sales until 1913, and the growth of the auto was slower than people often think. It took about 20 years for auto ownership rates to equal the bicycle ownership rate in 1900.

Photos in the early 19-teens show a jumble of vehicles in the streets, and the Salem Brewery Association could advertise with an anagram on vehicular choice:

Some people ride the bicycle,

And some in autos course.

Life is full of mixed desire.

Elect then what you most desire.

My choice remains the horse.

But when in source of pure delight,

Effervescent clear and bright,

Everyone can read the cheer

Right in these printed verses here.

The numbers confirm this picture of different options. For Oregon, in 1911 there were 6,428 autos registered, growing to 66,826 in 1918. By comparison, in 1900 the total population of Oregon was 413,536, and about 40,000 bicycles. In 1920, Oregon’s population was 783,389.

In 1919 the Legislature passed the nation’s first gasoline tax. This provided the first stable funding source for roads. At the same time the story of the bicycle was being rewritten as a story for kids, a way to prepare them for the driver’s license, or a story of second-class transportation for those who could not afford the first-class pleasures of the auto.

This work by http://fortunaerota.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/expanded-piece-on-salem-marion-county/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at fortunaerota.wordpress.com.

From DIY to Public Funding: Financing Portland’s First Bicycle Paths, 1896 – 1899

I’d like to thank Timo Forsberg and the Portland Office of Transportation for the invitation and opportunity to speak today.

Introduction

In the summer of 1899 a bicyclist wrote a letter to the editor summarizing the case for cycle paths and the bicycle tax:

First, it is necessary outside of town to have a place where the wheelman can be safe from the road hog; second, outside of the town the county roads are generally unfit for a bicycle; third, it is fair that all should pay for what all enjoy; and finally I take no stock in the wheelman who says that neither he nor his family has any use for a bicycle path. One Sunday spent in watching that little three-mile path to Vancouver is sufficient to meet that objection.

Even in the late 1890s sharing the road wasn’t always easy. Carts, buggies, and livestock could crowd the roads. Deep, gloppy and manure-fertilized mud in the winter, and dust in the summer, made many roads difficult and unpleasant to use. Reports on road conditions and information on grades, road surface, and waysides were especially welcome to bicyclists.

To this end the Multnomah county bicyclists published the Bicyclists Road Map, Portland District in the spring of 1896. It graded major thoroughfares as “good,” “fair,” or “poor.” The following season, in 1897, the League of American Wheelmen, Oregon Division, published a book of 60 city-to-city routes in Oregon, The Road Book of Oregon. Clearly bicyclists needed information for “how to get there.”

Almost hidden in the 1896 map are two references to a “proposed cinder path” to the White House Tavern and track. As best as I can tell, this was the first bicycle path in Portland. The White House was a popular resort located on the Willamette River, just below Dunthorpe and directly across from Milwaukie. We know the road to it as Macadam, but it was also known as Riverplace Drive and The White House Road.

About one mile out of six total was built of the White House bicycle path. I want to talk about this path, the reasons it was not finished, about a few other paths built the following two years, and finally about the paths built with the funds provided by the 1899 Bicycle Tax.

In general, we see a shift from paths devoted to serving recreational sites to paths serving residential sites. The most successful paths were those that were part of the transportation infrastructure connecting home and work, suburb and central city. We also see increasingly sophisticated kinds of financing, culminating of course in the state-administered Bicycle Tax.

The Context

Most roads in Portland were dirt at this time. An 1894 Paving Map shows very few roads that were macadam, stone, or asphalt (brick red, green, and brown, respectively). The highest quality surface in widespread use was generally gravel (pinkish red). The inner east side required a substantial amount of bridge (blue) because the swampy lowlands hadn’t yet been drained and filled. Outside the central city areas, the best was plank road (yellow with red hatches), but more common was graded dirt (yellow). Elsewhere it was just dirt.

The roads were bumpy – they didn’t call some bicycles “boneshakers” for nothing! – and muddy. If you didn’t want to get stuck or dirty, planning a route to minimize poor road conditions was helpful.

The bikes most people rode were no longer “high wheelers” or “penny farthings.” In the 1880s bike manufacturers had introduced the “safety bicycle,” with two equal-sized wheels and the diamond frame geometry we know today, and by the 1890s this model had taken command of the market. These bikes were fixies, bicycles with a single fixed gear that did not coast, however, and also lacked external brakes. They could be dangerous. Broken chains on hill descents are fairly common in the reports of crashes, and death or serious trauma appears in crash reports frequently (though it’s not clear what was the overall crash rate).

Even with these hazards, biking grew more popular every year. It’s difficult to estimate the number of riders each summer, but the newspaper accounts anecdotally suggest dramatic season-over-season increases. Tax records permit me to know the number of bicycles owned in 1899 pretty closely. Out of a total Multnomah county population of a little over 103,000 about 10,000 owned bicycles. This percentage, of just under 10%, is consistent in Marion and Yamhill counties. I expected greater variation, but have not found it. Backing into numbers for previous years, we get a curve something like this. 2000 in 1896, 4000 in 1897, 6000 in 1898, and 10,000 in 1899.

By comparison, automobiles were much rarer. The first auto came to Portland in the fall of 1899. There are two published counts for 1905 and 1906. The first suggests that there were 40 in Portland and 218 statewide; the other suggests 40 members of the Portland Auto Club and 242 autos in the entire city. In any case, we can estimate that around 1905, .2% of Portlanders used the auto, and 10% used bicycles. So for that year bicycle riding would be 50 times more popular that auto driving.

Of course the main roadway users were still buggies, carts, horses, oxen, and other livestock.

This chart from the I-80 (Mt. Hood Freeway) Draft Environmental Impact Study wildly underestimates the amount of bicycle riding in the city!

In the late 1890s there were also multiple parks and amusement sites for bicycling. Irvington Track was between NE Brazee and Klickitat, 7th and 14th. It was primarily a horse-racing site, but occasionally bicycle races would be held there. Portland Field, associated with the Portland Amateur Athletic Club, was between NE 12th & Davis. Cycle Park was in Sullivan’s Gulch between NE 18th, 23rd, and south of Halsey. On the west side was Multnomah Field (the site of PGE Park), associated with the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club (today’s MAC), and the White House track.

1896 – The White House and its Path

In 1942 about the White House a writer said

In the late ‘80s and the gay ‘90s the White House reached the height of its popularity. The young – and the not so young – bloods of Portland, male and female, flocked out of town for the time of their lives. The fun did not begin until about 10 p.m., when, especially on moonlight summer nights, the White House road was a parade ground for all that was smart and modish – and fast.

Visitors could enjoy roulette, other gambling, horse racing, dining – and all the ancillary activities of seeing and being seen. Its formal name was the Riverside hotel, but everyone called it “The White House,” after its coat of paint.

The White House was also a popular recreational destination for bicyclists, and it seemed natural to want to make an improved bicycle path out to it. The very first bicycle path in the country had been built on Coney Island in 1895, and doing something similar for the White House seemed like an obvious thing to do.

In the 1896 Bicycle Road Map, Portland District, there are two references to the “proposed cinder path.” At the time of printing, it is clear that nothing had happened yet. They tried to fund it by taking subscriptions.

A year later, they were still taking subscriptions for it, and little of the path had been built.

1897 – Woodlawn, Piedmont, and the Routes North to Vancouver

The next year, the main cycle path building activity shifted focus dramatically. Instead of trying to build to a recreation or amusement site, path advocates directed attention to paths that ran through new suburban development, and helped to connect bedroom communities to the central city core.

Piedmont and Woodlawn were platted a decade earlier, in 1888. The Portland and Vancouver Railway served them with a streetcar up Union (MLK) that ran between the Stark Street ferry across the Willamette and the Vancouver ferry across the Columbia. The neighborhoods were solidly professional, with lots selling at substantial prices.

On this map you can see the “improved” section of Union, graveled to Prescott. The streetcar line follows it, and then jogs diagonally through Woodlawn. To the left is Piedmont, and you can see how the Vancouver Road curves slightly to the west. Williams is also improved part-way, a plank road to Prescott. A few other streets are graded.

There were two main bicycle ways north. The first was via Union, and followed the streetcar to the Columbia Slough road, where it left the tracks and joined the Slough road to the trestle of the Vancouver road across the slough and to the ferry. The other was up the planked part of Williams, through Piedmont on Williams, by the Piedmont Water Tower at Williams and Portland Boulevard (Rosa Parks), and then onto the old Vancouver Road all the way to the ferry.

During the spring and summer of 1897 workers built bicycle paths, separate from the road, on each of these routes. Organizers depended on work parties consisting of men from each neighborhood. At the base of the Vancouver road trestle, some ladies from Woodlawn hung some canvas tarp, and created “Cherry Grove,” a snack shack and resort that served refreshment to cyclists on the weekend.

Organizers financed the paths with small-scale, neighborhood kinds of fund-raising. They collected personal subscriptions; held bake sales and socials, including selling strawberries and ice cream at “Cherry Grove” for 10 cents a serving; sold tickets to benefit concerts; and gave away a new bicycle to the person who purchased a ticket and guessed the number of miles a wheel constantly turning with a new electric motor (from PGE!) would pass in 300 hours.

At the same time, it became clear the bicyclists would be most effective acting in concert. To this end in the spring of 1897 several influential Portlanders, sponsored by Judge Henry H. Northup, and meeting in his chambers, began meeting with a view to creating what became incorporated as the United Wheelmen’s Association. Bicyclists felt they needed a group broader than the League of American Wheelmen, whose primary focus was racing, and who was distracted by the controversy over Sunday racing, which led to the so-called California Association of Cycling Clubs and League of American Wheelmen Secession. The United Wheelmen’s Association chartered themselves in May of 1897 and had representatives from all the major cycling groups as well as several other kinds of clubs: The League of American Wheelmen, the Zig-Zag Cycle Club, the Oregon Road Club, the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club, and the Mazamas. Among the charter members were many more movers-and-shakers in Portland society. City Engineer William B. Chase was in charge of all road building, road repairs, and signed and approved plats for new developments. State Senator, US Senator and future Mayor of Portland, Joseph Simon was a charter member. County commissioner Ralph W. Hoyt, after whom Hoyt Arboretum is named, was also a charter member.

One of the most interesting charter members was Bemer S. Pague, “Weather Prophet” Pague. Pague was born in 1862 in Pennsylvania, and joined the federal Weather Service in 1888. He established the Oregon Weather Service shortly thereafter, and in 1897 published Weather Forecasting and Weather Types on the North Pacific Slope. Through careful rain collection data, he established that Oregon wasn’t as wet as everyone thought it to be, and worked to encourage migration to Oregon, which needed greater population. As a weatherman in charge of meteorological instruments, Pague was a clever mechanic, and like the Wright Bros., it’s not surprising he was attracted to bicycling technology – which we must remember was at this time leading edge! By 1899 Pague had become the President of the UWA. He was also an attorney, and a newpaper report says:

Weather Prophet Pague made his debut as attorney in the municipal court yesterday afternoon, as assistant prosecutor in the case of the City of Portland vs. H. Bush, accused of driving his horse and buggy across the Vancouver bicycle path. Mr. Bush was not present, but his attorney was on hand to watch the corners and see that the prosecution did not have things all its own way.

Pague also lived on Williams avenue, in Piedmont. A late May 1897 article about opening the Woodlawn discusses his efforts:

Back of the Piedmont water-tank the repairing of this temporary path was done under the supervision of Mr. Pague, and the most timid wheelmen can now ride through this very pretty path with perfect security. The association is organized to help wheelmen and further cycling interests, and for that alone. Already something has been accomplished, and with the aid of all those who ride, cycle paths in every direction will soon be in order.

Here’s a photo taken about 1899 of the water tower. It was located at the intersection of Williams and Portland Boulevard. The path in the foreground is the cycle path, I believe. This might be the first photo of a Portland cycle path!

In addition to residents, the developers themselves had an interest in the cycle paths. George H. Durham was a charter member of the UWA, was one of the original investors in Woodlawn, and also an investor in the Portland and Vancouver Railway. Durham street is named after him. (Ralph L. Durham -Similarly, Frank Dekum (of Dekum street and the Dekum building) was an investor in Woodlawn and the Portland and Vancouver Railway. Though I have not yet been able to tie him directly to the UWA, it’s clear that just as today developers wanted robust connections from their developments to the rest of the city. Whether it’s the tram, the streetcar, or max, innovative transportation works in concert with development. The success of the two Vancouver routes suggests that the greater number of stakeholders, from residents of the neighborhood, like B. S. Pague, or developers of the neighborhood like G. H. Durham, helped to ensure that more people would work on the paths, more people would invest in the paths, and more people would use the paths.

Over the remainder of 1897, the UWA immediately began working on two main questions, and several smaller ones. They began to work on smaller path projects, most notably one on east 28th and one in Sellwood. More generally, they tried to get City Council to pass an ordinance to license or tax all bicycles in the city and using the fees to build more bicycle paths. At least three times in 1897 City Council refused to pass the law. The UWA was more effective in ensuring that during the rainy months, bicyclists would be able to ride on the sidewalks downtown. City Council considered making riding on the sidewalks illegal, but bicyclists were successful in retaining the privilege from November through May.

By the end of the summer, published accounts suggest that 800 people paid for the Vancouver routes, but 6000 use it. The disproportion between folks who paid and those who did not distressed those who had stepped up to support the work. Moreover, there are gaps in the system, and not every path is continuous. Volunteer efforts weren’t always fully coordinated, and fund-raising sometimes spotty. It was clear that Government authority and coordination was desirable.

1898 – The Expansive Vision of a Mt. Hood Trail and Turning to the State

Nevertheless, even in the face of problems with the DIY system, some path advocates were thinking big, really big. Colonel L.L. Hawkins pressed for a cycle path continuous to Mt. Hood. It was to be a grand route for recreation.

A June, 1898 article says

What wheelmen can accomplish when all unite on an object is well illustrated in the success Colonel L. L. Hawkins is meeting with in the prosecution of his plan to build a path to Mount Hood. What two years ago would have seemed an impossibility is now in a fair way of accomplishment. Prominent bicyclists all over the state have expressed their willingness to help in this enterprise, and there is no doubt that in a very few weeks will see it well under way.

The article goes on to detail donations, prizes, and races that will be part of the fund-raising.

There’s also a great map with the article. It shows routes out of town along Base Line, Section Line, and Powell Valley roads, out to Gresham, and then ways up to Mount Hood via Sandy, Welch, and Government Camp.

The scheme was too ambitious and the path was never completed.

More soberly, voices asked for a path to Oregon City via Sellwood. The United Wheelmen’s Association has about 600 members in the fall of 1898. They posted members at Mt. Tabor reservoir and the Piedmont water tower to corral subscriptions from bicyclists not yet members. Just how “persuasive” they had to be is not entirely clear!

Meanwhile, the Oregon Road Club decided that they wanted to be a state-wide organization rather than a Portland-centric one. In December they adopted a legislative agenda and sent copies of proposed bills to the House and Senate leadership, the Governor, and Governor-elect. Their agenda was not specifically for bikes, but the road improvements and road funding would certainly benefit bicyclists.

The United Wheelmen’s Association also had an agenda. B.S. Pague was in charge of it, and it ultimately was the one passed. Its centerpiece was a bicycle tax.

It was key that the incoming Governor was himself a bicyclist. On June 29, 1898 the Oregonian announced “Geer has a Wheel” and talked about his intent to ride to and from the Capitol on his bike. In 1911 Geer himself wrote about riding to Champoeg in 1900 to locate the site of the historic 1843 meeting to decide whether Oregon should become a Territory and form a provisional government. He lived on a farm about 8 miles out of Salem in the Waldo Hills. Sometimes he also rode his bike to pick up the mail. The farm he purchased in 1877, and just a few years later he was elected to the state legislature. After a decade he was Speaker of the House, and soon the Governor.

1899 and the Bicycle Tax

The bicycle tax was passed on February 18, 1899. It provided for the collection of $1.25 on each bicycle, the display of a numbered tag on each bike, and for the proceeds to go toward the construction of cycle paths.

It had become clear that local, uncoordinated efforts could command neither sufficient capital nor a coordinated workforce, and that the larger powers of the state would be necessary to create meaningful infrastructure. Support was broad. Bike dealer Fred Merrill took out ads disputing rumors that he opposed the tax. Some merchants offered to pay the tax for purchasers of new bicycles. They understood that more infrastructure would generate more bicyclists and more demand for bicycles.

By the end of 1899 about 10,000 tags had been sold in Multnomah county. The monies funded work on five main paths. Additional work on the Vancouver road path, paths on Willamette and Portland Boulevards to St. Johns, the Base Line path to Gresham, the Section Line path to Gresham, and the northern leg of the Oregon City path along SE 11th & Milwaukie road to Sellwood.

In July, a reporter described the Section Line path:

The Section Line road has been treated to paths four feet wide on each side, as far as Gresham. Beginning at Seven Corners, at the intersection of East Twenty-first and Division streets, these paths are to be used under the rule “keep to the right,” and wheelmen going out toward Gresham must take the path on the south side of the road. Coming back into town, take the north side. This rule will be enforced wherever two paths exist on the same county road, as the safety of pedestrians as well as the wheeling public will be promoted thereby.

Here is a postcard of a similar path on a county road.

Even with state and county resources – or perhaps even because of the greater funds involved – developers remained important, just as they had been in Woodlawn and Piedmont. A large number of payments from the 1899 law went to Aaron H. Maegly. Maegly was married in Jackson county in 1885, and by 1888 had started selling plots in his “Maegly Highlands” subdivision. It was bounded on the south by Prescott, on the north by Alberta, on the east by Union, and the west by Vancouver road. It’s possible that he worked on or promoted the Woodlawn and Piedmont paths as well, but thus far I haven’t found any records of this. But there are records for his work in 1899. Maegly later build a grand Italianate house on 226 SW Kingston, which today is on the National Register of Historic Places. He also built the Maegly-Tichner building, at 610 SW Broadway. It is clear that developers remained interested in providing good transportation infrastructure connecting their developments to the central city.

Conclusions

While drawing conclusions over the four year interval from 1896 to 1899 may invoke the usual caveats about “small sample size,” nonetheless some patterns emerge, and I am eager to test these as I continue my research. Proposed cycle paths whose destinations were primarily recreational, like the White House path and the Mount Hood path, were not completed. Paths that linked residential communities to the city core were generally completed. The pragmatic business of getting people to and from work attracted more investment in time and money than the prospects of recreation. Moreover, developers had vested interests in promoting their subdivisions, and saw cycle paths and the transportation infrastructure as significant benefits to new residents. The capital and labor requirements of the path building were ultimately to big for do-it-yourself enterprise, and required larger entities to fund, administer, and coordinate. Finally, DIY funding and work parties led to a grossly unequal distribution of the burden, and questions about “fairness,” led bicyclists to desire an impartial authority to oversee collection of user fees. The Bicycle Tax of 1899 answered at least some of these concerns.

Credits

Bicyclist Road Map, Portland District – Main image and details, Bicycle Transportation Alliance

Portland Paving Map, 1894 – Main image and details, Portland Bureau of Planning, Historic Resources

Graph of “Relative Usage of Transportation Modes in Portland” – Reprinted in E. Kimbark MacColl, The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon 1885 – 1915.

White House Photo – Courtesy of Lake Oswego Public Library

Piedmont Water Tower Photo – Reprinted in Portland Bureau of Planning, Woodlawn Neighborhood Plan, 1993

County Road Postcard – Personal Collection of Evelyn McDaniel Gibb, reprinted in Two Wheels North: Bicycling the West Coast in 1909.

This work by
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

“Weather Prophet Pague, Governor Geer, & Portland’s first Bicycle Paths”

I’d like to thank Professor Jennifer Dill & the Center for Transportation Studies here at PSU, my friends at the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, Jonathan Maus of BikePortland, and all of you for joining me here. Thanks for coming.

My talk represents a work-in-progress, and I hope at the end you’ll share comments and questions. My email is on the slide and I’ll show it at the end again.

“Geer has a wheel. Governor-elect learned to ride in two lessons. He will bike from his home to the State Capital during half the year.”

Governor Geer was the first in an series of illustrious politicians for whom the bicycle was an important part of their image & self-definition, their activities, and their policies. The context of bicycling a century ago was a little different than it is today, of course. At that time the bicycle was leading edge technology! Even so, Governor Geer deserves to be better known. Together with “Weather Prophet Pague,” he was part of the first Golden Age of Portland Bicycling.

At a time when Portland seeks to gain Platinum-level recognition as a Bicycle Friendly Community, we can look back at a few of the ingredients and people in Portland’s first golden age of bicycling.

In 1851, 8 years before Oregon became a state, Theodore Geer was born in the Waldo Hills east of Salem & south of Silverton. His family’s farm was established in 1847 and remains there today. Homer Davenport, Silverton’s favorite son, and important political cartoonist in NYC, was in his extended family. Geer went to school in Salem, Willamette University, and for a decade after the Civil War & his parent’s separation lived in Eastern Oregon. In 1877 he bought land near his family’s farm and started farming himself. In 1880 he was elected to the House. In 1891 he was Speaker of the House, and in 1898 was elected the 10th Governor of Oregon. He is probably best remembered for signing into law the “Oregon System” of Initiative & Referendum in 1902. If you voted for measure 49, you can thank him.

[Correction - Initiative & Referendum together was the first amendment to the Oregon Constitution of 1857. This required that they pass the legislature two times, first in 1899 and again in 1901. Then, on June 2, 1902, Oregon voters ratified the amendment, 62,024 - 5,668. The Governor's signature was never required. Interestingly, William S. U'Ren, the "father" of the Oregon System, wrote about its origin for Joseph Gaston's 1911 book, Portland, Oregon, Its History and Builders (vol 1, pp.565-566), and he doesn't mention Geer. Nevertheless, I believe Geer supported Initiative & Referendum.]

Geer was a Republican. “Republican” was not always a dirty word. You all know this, of course; still, it’s important to remember that long before Tom McCall & Mark Hatfield, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as was Theodore Roosevelt. The early 20th century brought the great switcheroo and the political parties realigned. Progressivism became rather more Democratic than Republican.

In his Inaugural Address, Geer highlighted several planks of a progressive program. The plank I want to highlight here is on road infrastructure.

GOOD ROADS

Few questions demand more serious consideration at your hands than the enactment of some system that will give our people better roads. ….we will always have bad roads until we overcome them by systematic legislation. This we have never had, not has any serious attempt ever been made in that direction.

Our present road laws… amount to a mere travesty on the object for which they were intended. They are the result of haphazard, patchwork legislation from session to session, usually amendatory of previous acts that were themselves mere apologies for existing conditions…

He goes on to say that the “present system” needs to be “wholly revolutionized” and that a central authority needs to supervise the collection & spending on roads. The system is broke, a “dismal failure,” and must be changed.

In May, 1898, here in Portland, city road activists observed:

The present method of securing street improvement in Portland is by petition of a majority of property owners along a street, the expense of the improvement being assessed at an equal rate per foot frontage. The repair of streets is made also by the property owners, on an order issued by the city council.

In practice it is found that a street must become almost impassible before such an order can be secured.

A year and a half later, in December 1899, Senator Simeon Edward Josephi (whom we’ll meet again later) says to a packed courtroom

I am here with the others of Central East Portland to aid in removing an intolerable condition. It is amazing that East Morrison street should have remained closed up for the past year, dangerous to the public…I understand that the recent proceeding to get it repaired failed because the property owners refused to repair the roadway…

Apparently some things hardly change. Just like today, there was a problem funding & building roadway infrastructure. Road poll taxes, requiring either labor or a flat fee, were regressive. Construction activities were held up by uncooperative property owners and uncoordinated between municipalities & areas.

So what did the roads look like?

When I say “roadway,” many of us still probably think of cars. But of course around 1900 cars were still pretty exotic. The first automobile came to Portland in 1899. By one account in 1905 there were 218 of them in Oregon, and 40 in Portland; another account suggests that in 1906 the Portland Auto Club had 40 members, and residents of Portland owned 242 total autos in the city.

For comparison, around 1900 there were about 10,000 bicycles in Multnomah County, and a total population of about 103,000. So almost 10% of citizens used bikes fairly regularly. That’s against two-tenths of a percent for autos.

We have to remember that the roadways were built for livestock, horses, carts, and buggies. Farmers usually were responsible for repairing the sections that fronted their property. In the summer the roads were dusty, in winter thick with several inches of gloppy mud and standing water – and “fertilized,” we might say, with animal droppings. They were stinky when wet and not very pleasant. This image is from downtown Salem, very near the Capitol Building in 1909 – and it’s still not paved.

Early Road Sharing – 1885

In the mid 1880s, “sharing the road” started being institutionalized. At least as early as 1885, Oregon Statute recognized the right of bicyclists to the road, and merely required

That it shall be the duty of any person or persons running or propelling a bicycle…over the public highways or streets in this State, to bring the said bicycle…to a stop when within one hundred yards of any person or persons going in the opposite direction with a team or teams, and remain stationary until said team or teams have passed by.

Five years earlier, in 1880, a group of bicyclists in Newport, Rhode Island formed The League of American Wheelmen. The first Oregonians joined the national group in 1886, and a decade later, in 1896, sufficient numbers had joined to warrant creating the “Oregon Division” of the League of American Wheelman.

There were other bicycle clubs and entities with bike clubs as well. The Oregon Road Club, the Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club, the Portland Athletic Club, the First Regiment Athletic Association, the Portland Speed Association, the Zig-Zag Cycle Club, and the United Wheelman’s Association (aka United Wheeling Association).

The fact that bike riders desired, formed, and joined bicycle clubs suggests that social formation and the development of distinctive bicycle culture was important to them. Let’s look at some of it.

Though the “penny farthing” or “high wheel” is the picture we have of the old-timey bicycle, its riders probably shared more with bmx, cyclo-cross, or extreme mountain bikers. The penny farthing was a bike for the young, the adventuresome, and the risk-and thrill-seeking. Technologically, in the early 1890s the transition to the safety bicycle, the form of the bike we know today with two equal-sized wheels and a diamond frame, made bicycling easier and more available. The inflated, pneumatic tire also helped cushion bumps the hard rubber tires transmitted directly on the “boneshaker.” These were fixies. The coaster brake & free-wheel enters only very late in the decade of the 90s, and most of the time we are dealing essentially with fixies. The 3-speed doesn’t happen until 1903.

By 1899 when this ad was published – I’ll have more to say about Fred Merrill later -, it was not wildly implausible to show this old fellow talking about going buggy-free – just as today more and more people are talking about going car-free. Note also that he talks about getting a bike for Sarah. This could be a daughter or a wife. The important thing is that the bike implied a freedom to travel for women. This, and bloomers, were important ingredients in turn-of-the-century feminism and the movement for women’s suffrage.

Indeed, in August of 1897, a newspaper writer says – more than a little rhapsodically:

The Portland “summer girl” is bred to her wheel, as a trooper is bred to his horse. From dawn till dark she lives in the saddle.

Whatever be her errand, she mounts her wheel and rides easily to her destination, dismounts…performs whatever duty happens to be hers, and bowls home again, serene, tranquil, content.

And more soberly:

Since bicycles came to Portland, not to play with, but as useful and valued servants, they have become a part of the daily life of many women.

But with more people riding there was more conflict.

Portland restricted riding on the sidewalk to certain hours and times of the year. As early as 1893 a Portland City Ordinance required ringing a bell at intersections. In May 1897, City Council passed a measure to permit bicyclists to use the sidewalks only during the rainy months of November through April. During the summer, they must use the street. When on the sidewalks riders had to dismount within 30 feet of pedestrians.

To help develop sharing & civility, the United Wheeling Association handed out “Rules of the Road” pamphlets, which said “Don’t Scorch,” “Keep on the Right,” and “Ring your bell and pass on the left.”

A May 1899 article headlined “Barbarians on a Bicycle” castigated scorchers and asked the bicycle clubs to rein them in:

But there are a few notorious scorchers who shamefully abuse the public without any interference or even reprimand from the police.

Nobody need look to the police to interfere with these hoodlums, but a little effort on the part of the members of the Wheelmen’s Association, who expect their paths to be respected, would soon put a stop to these scorchers. These hoodlums, these barbarians on a bicycle… all are “backed like a camel”; they all have the same goose look; the same low brow…the same idiotic, open mouth, looking like a country churchyard, full of weather-stained tombstones upheaved by the frost….These froway, unkempt, reckless hoodlums on a bicycle will run down some old man, or woman, or child…and then in the outcry that will be made over a serious accident public indignation will take the form of an unreasoning but natural indifference to the legal rights of the wheelmen.

Note the request for self-policing. Enforcement was also problem, whether perceived or real.

In response, that June 1899 the police came up with an involuntary brake:

TERROR FOR SCORCHERS

East Side Policeman’s Simple but Effective Invention

The scorchers of Portland must beware. An East Side policeman has a device…called “the scorchers terror.” …It consists of a flat piece of board with one end well perforated with sharp pointed shingle nails…the “terror” is applied to either front of rear wheel. Only one application is needed…The scorcher stops instantly. The device is a rather savage looking affair, but assurances are given that it is perfectly harmless, except when in action; then look out!

I don’t know how often it was in action.

For speeding that was welcome, there were also several parks with tracks and Bike Paths. The Multnomah Amateur Athletic Club operated one at the site of PGE Park, and the Portland Amateur Athletic Club operated one at NE 12th & Davis. There was the Mechanics Pavillion at 2nd and Clay, and another group operated Cycle Park in Sullivans Gulch. Below Dunthorpe, at the end of Macadam Avenue was the White House. Thousands of people attended bike races, parades, trick riding exhibitions, and bike shows. Young people went out riding at night regularly. One news account tells of a night parade on July 3, 1895 with 1,200 bicyclists! Pedalpalooza, Chunk 666, & Cyclo-cross all have parallels and even some direct ancestry from a century ago.

One of the wackiest bike leaders was Fred Merrill. Merrill was Portland’s largest bike dealer. He was quite possibly the largest dealer, west of the Mississippi. His showroom at this time was on SW 6th, just south of Burnside.

Citizens elected him to city council in 1899. He felt that vice – gambling, prostitution, even opium – ought to be regulated rather than outlawed. People were going to do it anyway, so why not license and manage it rather than play “whack-a-mole” and chase it fruitlessly and corruptly. Many of the city leaders were profiting from it covertly anyway. Merrill sat on City Council for six years, until 1905.

Merrill placed this ad in 1899. It’s not clear whether Governor Geer directly authorized it – but it’s a funny take on a celebrity endorsement. Rules were a little different back then.

Governor Geer, as I mentioned, rode a lot. In his book Fifty Years in Oregon, Geer writes about going into Salem on his bike, getting the mail on his bike, and riding on May 1, 1900 to Champoeg for the Oregon Historical Society. George Himes also attended the meeting. He was the Director of the Oregon Historical Society and has a park on SW Terwillger named in his memory. Geer’s mission was to locate the site of the 1843 Champoeg meeting that authorized the formation of the Provisional Government in the Oregon Territory. Today a small white obelisk stone commemorates the site, and Champoeg Park has some nice multiuse paths, which bicyclists can use.

In addition to Governor Geer, another important personality is Bemer S. Pague. He was the Director of the Oregon Weather Service in Portland. The US Weather Bureau had been established in 1871 in Portland, and he joined it in 1888. Shortly thereafter he got the legislature to establish the Oregon Weather Service. Pague ran both the State and Federal services from the same office and became one of the country’s leading meteorologists. In his book Weather Forecasting & Weather Types on the North Pacific Slope and in articles, he championed the “Chinook Wind,” and through careful data on rainfall demonstrated that Oregon wasn’t as rainy as everyone thought. Later he was admitted to the bar in Portland & practiced law.

In the weather service, Pague had experience working with mechanical instruments. Things like wind, rain, and snow gauges; anemometers, aneroid barometers, barographs, hygrometers. Like the Wright Brothers, he was good with tricky mechanical gadgets. Even arms manufacturers, like Remington Arms, made bikes. It’s not surprising Pague was also into bicycles.

Pague was more than interested in bicycles. He was also the president of the United Wheelman’s Association. In May 1899, the paper notes that

Weather Prophet Pague made his debut as attorney in the municipal court yesterday afternoon, as assistant prosecutor in the case of the City of Portland vs. H. Bush, accused of driving his horse and buggy across the Vancouver bicycle path. Mr. Bush was not present, but his attorney was on hand to watch the corners and see that the prosecution did not have things all its own way.

Judge Hennessy went out to the site to see the buggy tracks, and afterwards found Bush guilty.

What is interesting to note here is the attractiveness of bike paths to the buggy driver. Bicyclists and bike clubs together led the funding, development, and building of the best roads. Bicyclists were leaders.

Many of you know have heard of the “Good Roads” movement. The League of American Wheelmen was the principal mover in the beginning. They published The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer in 1891. Its success led to the “Good Roads Magazine.”

In 1892 the National League of American Wheelmen proposed legislation for a Federal Highway Commission. It went nowhere, alas.

Here in Oregon, the League of American Wheelmen’s Oregon Division published the 1897 Good Roads Book, which listed about 60 routes from city to city in the state. It gave directions, general road conditions, and information on lodging. The League of American Wheelmen’s Oregon Division also published the 1895 map of the greater Portland area, which the BTA currently has for sale.

Alongside the League of American Wheelmen, an independent but parallel group, The Oregon Road Club, began working on the road effort. They formed in 1894 and held their first convention two years later in 1896. This led, in 1898 two years after the convention, to a proposed Highway Improvement Act.

The Oregon Road Club were not the only ones with a legislative agenda. For reasons I have not yet understood, but possibly related to the 1897 secession from the League of American Wheelmen widespread on the west coast, the Oregon Division of The League of American Wheelmen did not lead the legislative agenda here. But Bemer Pague and the United Wheelmen did, and their legislation was the one ultimately passed and signed.

The one connection was Dr. Simeon E. Josephi. We met him earlier at the Morrison road repair meeting. Dr. Josephi was a State Senator who sponsored bicycle legislation, the first Dean of the University of Oregon Medical School (now OHSU), and a key committee member of the League of American Wheelmen Oregon Division. I will need to understand the connection between Pague, Josephi, and the two different bicycle clubs. If any of you bike club historians can help on this, please email me!

But before bicyclists lobbied the legislature, they tried the city. In May of 1897, City Council defeated a proposal by the United Wheelmen to license bicycles and fund paths. So in time-honored Portland fashion, the Club tried Do-It-Yourself. Initially, the United Wheelmen took up a collection and built the first path on Vancouver Road. It went from the end of the Williams Avenue Plank Road at Portland Boulevard to Vancouver Road and the ferry crossing. In 1899 the Wheelmen concluded that while 800 had paid for it, 6000 were using it at one time or another. On nice weekends, several thousand rode it.

The United Wheelmen and other bicyclists also had a vision of a path out to Mt. Hood. This is from 1898. How great would that have been! It unfortunately did not get built – but parts of it we see here did. [I need to figure out how to show this slide.]

Hopefully you can see more detail here. I want to point out Base Line Road & Section Line Road in particular. We’ll see on another map that these were two paths that did get built.

Additionally, there was second self-funded a path out Macadam to the White House in 1896, but only a mile got built and an 1899 news article said “it began nowhere and ended nowhere.”

Ultimately, self-funding the bicycle paths was neither sufficient nor fair. More monies were necessary to expand the network, and many cyclists who were using the paths were not club members and paying the user fees. Cyclists and road advocates concluded that state action was necessary.

But large enough numbers of people still objected to comprehensive taxation for large scale infrastructure projects. Facing this resistance, bicycle owners carved out a smaller project: They would volunteer to be taxed in order to get better roads built for themselves & for pedestrians. Separate facilities was a compromise solution. Since funding roads for everyone, for the common good, encountered too much resistance, they did something mainly for themselves.

A February 1899 letter to the editor makes three arguments:

First, it is necessary outside of town to have a place where the wheelmen can be safe from the road hog; second, outside of the town the county roads are generally unfit for a bicycle; third, it is fair that all should pay for what all enjoy, and finally I take no stock in the wheelman who says that neither he nor his family has any use for a bicycle path. One Sunday spent in watching that little three-mile path to Vancouver is sufficient to meet that objection.

Governor Geer signed the bill in February 1899. As soon as the weather dried out, workers broke ground. Almost 10,000 tags were sold – again, 10% of the population. Multnomah County worked on paths at Willamette & Portland Boulevards, Baseline Road (Stark), Section Line Road (Division), and Milwaukie Avenue. North-South connections were built at 12-mile in Gresham and along 11th/12th by Ladd’s Addition to Milwaukie.

Though this map is and early AAA map from 1917, it shows most of the bicycle path routes and the way the main bike routes became main auto roads.

A July 1899 summary describes the Section Line Path:

The Section Line road has been treated to paths four feet wide on each side, as far as Gresham. Beginning at Seven Corners, at the intersection of East Twenty-first and Division streets, these paths are to be used under the rule “keep to the right,” and wheelmen going out toward Gresham must take the path on the south side of the road. Coming back into town, take the north side. This rule will be enforced wherever two paths exist on the same county road, as the safety of pedestrians as well as the wheeling public will be promoted thereby.

The paths were graded & crowned, packed dirt, and then graveled. The gravel covering made them drain better than most of the dirt roads. Consequently, mud was less of a problem on them. They were almost as good as Macadam roads.

Not two years after Governor Geer signed the bill, the Oregon Supreme Court invalidated the bicycle tax in 1901. The Bicycle Tax Collector, JW Johnson had seized JA Ellis’ bicycle for non-payment, and Ellis sued the Sheriff, William Frazier & Multnomah County. The Court’s main objection was that bicycles were taxed on a flat fee, and the Oregon Constitution requires that property be taxed proportionally. This would have required that each bicycle be assessed individually. Instead, the Legislature quickly enacted a second law that used the language of licensing rather than taxation in order to satisfy the court’s requirements.

It’s not clear that all counties built cycle paths. In 1901 after the court struck down the first tax, the Marion County Sheriff refunded the taxes, about $1500 worth, which suggests that nothing was ever built around Salem. Multnomah County did not see it necessary to refund the tax, by the way, and kept working on the paths.

Between 1899 and 1902 a gigantic bicycle Trust, the American Bicycle Company, came together and crashed. At inception it united 36 different manufacturers, and gathered more each month. The market for new bicycles declined precipitously, however. Few riders needed anymore to keep up with the latest model. As the Trust came apart, membership in the League of American Wheelmen also declined quickly, and leaders in society and politics turned from bicycles to automobiles.

It’s interesting to note that the bicycle manufacturers played a key role in the development of rolling out new models every year. The bicycle industry was a model for the auto industry! We like to think sometimes of bicycling as an anti-consumerist act, but back then it was in the forefront of consumer capitalism and advertising.

In the 1900s many of the bicyclists, being early adopters, and looking to the next instance of leading-edge technology, became auto drivers. Bicycling became more prosaic than fashionable, and bicycling also declined in status. You can see even here in 1899, the way a long Sunday feature on the Oregon Road Club highlights luxury & status. [Working on this slide.] From this point it wasn’t long to the view that you bike only when you can’t afford to drive.

So now it was former bicyclists who were the main influence on the good roads movement. It took more than a decade after the League of American Wheelmen’s 1892 proposed Federal Highway Commission for Congress to establish the Bureau of Public Roads in 1905. Another decade had to pass before 1916 the Federal Highway Act.

Here in Oregon, in 1913 the Legislature repealed that second law, the bicycle license law. Concurrently the Legislature started the State Highway Commission and its own set of property taxes. These property taxes proved inadequate for road building. The year of the Federal Highway Act, 1916, also marks the year the Gorge portion of the Columbia River Highway opened. Three more years passed, and in 1919 the Oregon Legislature hit on the first Oregon gas tax. This finally provided the first stable and adequate fund for roadways. The tax on gasoline was the right solution at that time.

Our golden ages share some important things. We have politicians who bike, bicyclists who self-organize, and activist bike dealers & merchants. These are clearly essential ingredients.

Some things are different. Bicyclists back then appear more eager to self-police and show “good behavior,” and I think this is an important element of PR that bicyclists aren’t at present always ready to embrace. I would like to research more closely the history of the ways scorching was perceived, because I think every time there’s an enforcement action at Ladd’s Addition, perceptions & not reality are what matter. The perceptions around scorching are similar. Bicyclists were also willing to give up things in order to achieve a greater good, they had a sense for trade-offs. I have complicated feelings about a bicycle tax or bicycle licensing. It may be impractical, but there might be – shall we say – “externalized benefits” that don’t show up in a bottom line accounting. Arguments for “paying for fair use” are manifestly false. But again, perceptions count. And perhaps most important of all, bicyclists created something that buggy and auto drivers themselves craved. The KGW feature on Wednesday night that showed a auto driver enjoying the bicycling – things like this that create an active sense of desire for what bicyclists currently enjoy – is an example. I think we bicyclists really need to focus on creating desire & craving among auto drivers.

There’s more work to be done, and I hope to take my research more closely into the 1900s. Perhaps I’ll have another report for you.

Thank you all for joining me!

[If on the PSU CTS site you scroll down to "ARCHIVE: Fall 2007 Transportation Seminar Series," on the November 30 row, my slide deck and audio/vidio of the talk are available.]

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