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November 4, 2019

The golden age of New Haven’s carriage trade

From New Haven: An Illustrated History (1981) by Floyd Shumway and Richard Hegel A carriage from the 1860s by New Haven manufacturer M. Armstrong.
By Michael C. Bingham

New Haven’s contribution to transportation revolution in 19th-century America was the carriage industry.

While innovations in technology (e.g., steam power) and the creation of new infrastructure (e.g., railroads) helped to fuel the transformation of the nation from a rural and agrarian society to an urban/industrial one, the role of carriages remains a semi-obscure anteroom in the annals of transportation history.

New Haven’s role as a transportation center dates back to the dawn of European colonization in the 17th century, and the creation of the network of post roads blazed from Indian trails that by the 18th century linked New Amsterdam (now New York) to Boston. That, and New Haven Harbor’s status as one of just a handful of navigable ports on either side of Long Island Sound. The City of Elm’s role as a rail center would come later.

In Colonial times through the early days of the new Republic, the relatively few souls who needed to travel very far from the homestead negotiated the few roads that existed outside town lines by horseback or horse-drawn carriage. But mostly, they walked. Horses were (and are) expensive to feed and board, and horse-drawn carriages were suited mainly to city or town streets and only the best-maintained highways. Mostly, they were for the well-to-do.

The growth of the carriage industry and New Haven’s role in it is of interest to industrial historians because of its early use of machinery to cut costs and boost efficiency. This allowed vehicles that previously had been crafted mostly by hand to be produced — and sold — less expensively.

New Haven’s carriage industry grew rapidly to become of of the nation’s largest. One of the best-known carriage-makers was James Brewster, who founded Brewster & Co. in 1810.

“Brewster traveled to New Haven [from his home in Northampton, Mass.] and was surprised and impressed by the number of small manufacturing shops and quality of skilled workers here,” explains New Haven author and historian Colin M. Caplan.

Brewster earned a reputation for producing some of the nation’s highest-quality coaches. His namesake company endured for nearly 130 years, its waning years spent manufacturing “coaches” (bodies) for automobiles.

But he never had a whole neighborhood named for him. George T. Newhall did. In 1851 Newhall established a factory near the New Haven & Northampton Railroad line about a mile to the northwest of the New Haven Green. It quickly became the largest commercial enterprise in the namesake district on the New Haven-Hamden town line. Newhall’s enterprise grew rapidly to some 200 workers and by the late 19th century was the largest carriage manufacturer in the nation. Newhall’s growth led him to acquire adjacent properties, open up and/or expand new streets (including the present-day Newhall Street) and build houses for his workers, Caplan explains.

It was the invention of the horseless carriage and mass-production pioneered by Henry Ford that doomed not horses, but carriages. As late as World War I the carriage industry was still going strong: The 1918 Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County reported that “despite the supposed decline of the horse in the large centers of the east, New Haven today has 30 concerns [making]...carriages for the country.”

One of the last hangers-on was the New Haven Carriage Co., which had begun confidently in 1887 as “one of the last of the large local carriage concerns,” according to the same volume, building its last carriage in 1907. The company endeavored valiantly to adapt to the new age as “Builders of Automobile Bodies of Wood and Metal” (!) but went out of business in 1924.

C. Cowles & Co. is perhaps the last extant manufacturer from the golden age of the carriage trade. Today it manufactures heating and (wait for it) automobile components.

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