Any railroad is nothing without cars. Building the cars was a big business in the early 20th Century. Columbus had a nationally known buggy factory. I know this in part because safely tucked away in a box of papers I inherited from Great-Grandpa Miller is a Bill-Of-Sale for a horse-drawn buggy from the Columbus Buggy Company.
Columbus had a wealth of wood in the surrounding forests and making horse-drawn buggies seemed the perfect business. In fact, all of central Ohio was in on transportation. By extension, if you can make horse-drawn buggies, you can also make railroad equipment or automobiles. Columbus had a railroad car manufacturer as well, the Ralston Steel Car Company. With the rise in automobile sales, the Columbus Buggy Company tried to make the transition to manufacturing automobiles and failed. The real news for the interurbans was elsewhere.
The Jewett Car Company located itself in Newark, Ohio, for a variety of reasons, all of which ended with 'a good place to do business.'
A Jewett Combine. This carried both freight and passengers.
A Jewett Freight Car
By 1901, the Jewett Car Company was running at full speed and produced 163 cars for places like Brooklyn, St. Louis, and Cleveland. Another smaller customer was the Newark and Granville Electric Road. The pictures above show two different examples of Jewett's interurban cars in service on the Lehigh Valley Transit Company's right-of-way.
A Newark & Granville Electric on Broadway in front of the Granville terminal.
The Newark and Granville electric was expanding. It had become more than a very local, very limited road between Newark and Granville. From Newark, the tracks now ran south along State Route 79 and the old Ohio-Erie Canal to Hebron, where you could continue to the new resort and amusement park at Buckeye Lake. Or, you could transfer to the route that ran down the Old National Road into downtown Columbus. Likewise, you could go to Zanesville. The route to Columbus ran roughly parallel to and at a distance from the Pennsylvania Rail Road's Pan Handle Route.
A Postcard view of the McGuire-Cummings plant in Paris, Illinois
What I found most amazing in researching the interurban is that while I grew up around this history, my cousins in Illinois grew up near one of Jewett's competitors, the McGuire-Cummings Manufacturing Company of Paris, Illinois. McGuire-Cummings was perhaps best known for their snow-removal equipment but offered a full catalog of interurbans for sale. Very little of McGuire-Cummings remains in Paris.
This interurban car asks the question, "Is Road wear paid for in proportion to use?" This sums up the position of the interurban companies as the government used tax dollars to maintain America's roadways for automobile and freight traffic at the expense of the interurban.
The Interurban was never fully appreciated or developed. Although local manufacturers created valuable skilled jobs, the action would soon switch to Detroit and the automobile. Even though the Interurban provided a valuable service for customers, businesses saw the interurban as a way to draw business from local, small-town merchants to the larger stores of the bigger cities. Gasoline producers favored the automobile, and the government was more than happy to oblige by paving America's highways while Interurbans were funded only by investors, passenger fare, and freight service. The car shown above is an example of the controversy. By 1925, the Interurban was yesterday's technology as people flocked to buy a Model T. To paraphrase a once popular song, 'Good Lord Mr. Ford, what have you done?'
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