Today, the problem is smog. A century ago it was the road apple.
It has been largely forgotten in this age of lead-free gasoline, tailpipe tests and, the latest wrinkle, federally mandated reductions in auto commuting, but the environmental offensive against the car is the second war America has fought against transportation pollution in its cities.
A century ago the villain was the horse.
Those were the days when heroin was widely seen as a cure for morphine addiction, and J. Frank and Charles E. Duryea’s mechanical carriage as a cure for horse pollution.
“They had a pollution problem with horses-both with the manure and with dead horses,” said Everett B. Miller, retired editor of the research journal for the American Veterinary Medical Association.
The year the Duryea Brothers took the first step to end horse pollution, 1893, also was the 400th anniversary of the introduction of the horse in the New World. Horses had evolved in the Americas, become extinct here and were reintroduced by Columbus on his second voyage.
For the better part of those four centuries, the horse was the dominant mode of transportation. George Washington rode them, as did the Plains Indians. Horses and their kin, the mule, plowed America’s fields, ran its races and pulled its wagons to market.
About the only thing Americans rarely did with horses was dine. Chicago Union Stockyards records from 1885 showed 1.9 million cows, 6.9 million hogs, and 1 million sheep passed through its gates, but only 19,356 horses.
The original domesticated horses were too small for draft use. Carriages and wagons were pulled by oxen. Horses were reserved for warfare, sport and to carry important messages.
“Before the time of Henry VIII, there was no horse on Earth that weighed more than 1,200 pounds and was taller than 15 hands, 1 inch,” said Deb Bennett, former Smithsonian Institution vertebrate paleontologist specializing in equines. She now runs her own business, Equine Studies Inc., in Santa Rosa, Calif.
A horse is measured in hands (four inches) from the ground to the “withers,” or high point above the shoulder. Thus a horse of 15-1 hands would stand 61 inches, or just over five feet.
Bennett ascribes the trend toward larger horses to Henry VIII’s desire to find mounts to carry his bulk.
Today, some draft horses are 20 hands (80 inches) tall and weigh close to a ton.
Just after the Duryeas arrived on the scene, there was about one horse in America for every four people-an indication of their importance in transportation. According to the nation’s agricultural census of 1900, possibly the only one in which numbers on the equine population were broken down, there were 21.2 million horses, mules and asses in the U.S., including 2.9 million that were not on farms.
At that time, there were only an estimated 8,000 motorcars on America’s streets, according to the American Automobile Manufacturers Association.
Miller said the horse population peaked at about 27 million in World War I. By 1991, when the American Veterinary Medicine Association completed the most recent census of horses, the equine population had fallen to 4.9 million from 6.6 million as recently as 1988. That amounts to about one horse for every 51 humans. On the other hand, the number of motor vehicles has grown to 188.4 million, or one per 1.32 people.
In the growing American cities at the turn of the century, horse populations were substantial. The 1900 agricultural census data indicated that of the 934,375 horses in New York State, 110,635 did not live on farms. Illinois had 115,260 non-farm horses out of a total of 1.6 million, and California had 37,306 city horses out of 515,404.
The Chicago City Railway alone owned more than 1,000 horses to pull its streetcars on the South Side before it converted to cable cars, and Willett Co., a local cartage company, had 600 horses as late as 1918.
And those horses left quite a mess. In New York City, for example, they annually deposited an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure-the ubiquitous road apple-as well as 60,000 gallons of urine on the streets. In Chicago, an estimated 500 tons, or 1 million pounds, of road apples had to cleaned up every year.
The large horse populations also were considered a health hazard. Their manure transmitted tetanus, a fatal disease known as lockjaw that became a serious problem in WWI. Horses also were susceptible to a form of encephalitis and an equine disease called glanders.
Dean Scoggins, equine extension veterinarian for the University of Illinois, said we now know neither disease can be transmitted directly from horses to humans, but there may not have been such knowledge in 1893, when people associated similar symptoms in horses and humans as having the same source.
In 1872, an epizootic (animal epidemic) swept the East Coast, killing 3,000 horses in Philadelphia in three weeks and killing or disabling 18,000 more in New York.
“Seven hundred horses a day were dying and they dumped their bodies in the Hudson River,” said Miller. “Talk about pollution.”
“I have seen pictures of people pulling streetcars,” he added.
New York had to deal with an estimated 15,600 horse carcasses a year, Chicago with an estimated 7,000.
That epizootic, possibly more than any single event, led to the first systematic search for a replacement for the horse in cities.
A San Francisco man named Andrew Smith Hallidie in 1873 had developed a horseless streetcar system powered by underground cables. By 1880, C.B. Holmes, president of Chicago City Railway, went west to look at the contraption that used a giant stationary steam engine to pull a continuous cable through conduits beneath the street. The cable cars had a grip on the bottom to hold them to the moving cable.
Holmes’ street railway had oper-ated horse-drawn cars since it was opened in 1859. But the horse-drawn cars were slow (4 to 6 miles per hour) and produced a rather poor return on investment because of the high costs of their care and feeding.
On Jan. 28, 1882, Chicago’s first cable car line began operating on State Street, and officials discovered street railways could be operated at 10 1/2 cents per mile, or half the cost of horse cars. They also could go twice as fast.
Six years later, Frank J. Sprague in Richmond, Va., demonstrated a more efficient electric streetcar that in a few years rendered the cable car obsolete.
But cable cars and streetcars needed paved streets to protect their conduits and tracks and to enable riders to reach them without having to stand knee-deep in mud and road apples. So the middle of the streets were paved, often with bricks. That move also paved the way for motor cars.
Chicago’s early paving, six-inch-deep wood-en blocks covered with a tarry substance, gave way to the center strip method to protect the cable-car conduit. The conduit was set in steel and concrete and bricks were laid around the tracks for protection.
The next blow to the horse came from the safety bicycle, introduced in 1885. It is for all practical purposes the bike we have today.
According to auto historian James J. Flink at the University of California in Irvine, the bike in effect created a demand for individual transportation that within two decades culminated in the auto. Bikers also were a strong lobby for paved roads.
Many technological innovations in bicycles, such as steel-tube framing, ball bearings, chain drive and differential gearing, were important to automobile development, Flink said.
After arriving in 1893, the auto was little more than a toy for the rich for more than a decade. But after Henry Ford put his Model T into mass production in 1908, the car became affordable ($345 for a runabout by 1916).
The final blow to the city horse was the motor truck.
The experience of Chicago’s Willett Co. probably was typical of what happened in all big cities. A.T. Willett founded the company in 1868 with 8 wagons and 12 horses, which he saved from the Chicago Fire three years later by driving them into Lake Michigan.
According to the late Howard L. Willett’s 1959 company history, just after the turn of the century, as competition was picking up, the firm modernized by equipping its wagons with ball-bearing-mounted wheels. Using 1,750-pound Belgian draft horses to pull the new wagons, Willett could increase the hauling capacity 50 percent and cut costs 25 percent.
Nevertheless, the company bought its first motor truck in 1912. By the end of WWI its truck fleet had been expanded to 30 vehicles, but the company still had 600 horses. As late as 1925, three-horse teams pulling ball-bearing wagons were still cheaper on short runs than motor trucks.
Other companies had replaced their horse wagons. Jewel Tea Co., a national home delivery food service, completed its conversion to 1,230 trucks and cars by 1926.
The Depression doomed the horse at Willett. By 1932 the company stable population had been cut to 60 animals, and by 1937 only one was left.
“I was in Chicago in 1940 and they still had drayage (work) horses pulling beer trucks and garbage wagons,” recalled Miller.
But for at least one contemporary company, some good came from the road apple. Elgin Sweeper Co., the nation’s largest street sweeper builder, got its start in 1911, when John M. Murphy, a former city council member in Elgin, invented the mechanical street sweeper.
“As the streets were paved, there were still a lot of horses on them,” said Elgin Sweeper President Roger B. Parsons. “That’s why Murphy developed the sweeper.”
Before that, New York used a small army of men, called “White Wings” because of the color of their uniforms, armed with push brooms and carts to clean its streets, according to William A. Richmann’s 1962 history of street sweeping.
