Little Egypt Heritage Articles Stories of Southern Illinois © Bill Oliver 24 September 2006 Vol 5 Issue: #30 ISBN: pending Osiyo, Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen of Little Egypt “Street Cars” There is a picture that was passed down to me by Grandma Oliver. It was of two tall men in uniform standing outside a streetcar in Cincinnati, Ohio. The older brother, who stood taller than Abraham Lincoln, towered over his brother by better than two inches. Grandpa Oliver and his brother, Lando, worked as a team, one ticket taker and the other operator for the Cincinnati Streetcar Company during the year that my Aunt Nellie was born, which was the third of February, 1907. When I was a boy I could not jump high enough to look into the window of a street car, but Grandpa Oliver could just walk over and see the flooring if he looked into the window. So could Great Uncle Lando, except he had to raise his heels up a mite to gain the floor in his sight. Grandpa Oliver was a “gentle” man, in fact, come to think about it, so was Uncle Lando. Big strong Scot-Irishmen who did not seem to get overly excited in any situation. Following his service in the Spanish American War, Uncle Lando become a “security guard” in Panama during the building of the canal. I remember his stories about folks who didn’t want to see the canal built and the explosions from blowing up of the dynamite sheds. I could always imagine him loping across rocky terrain chasing such folks. But this side tracks my topic for this article. I can hear Uncle Lando asking ... “how does one spare horses the excruciating labor of moving folks up and down the steep roadways of San Francisco?” He was speaking of the street passenger cars utilized in that city for transportation. When we couldn’t answer, he would say something like, “Use your head like Andrew Smith Hallidie did.” Andrew Hallidie, just five years earlier than Grandpa Oliver was born [19 April 1876] in Creal Springs, Illinois, developed and patented the “cable car”. A man of vision and ingenuity, Mr. Hallidie patented metal ropes and used them in a mechanism to draw cars by an endless cable which ran between the car rails, propelled by a steam-driven shaft in a powerhouse. The first cable railway ran from Clay and Kearny Streets up to the crest of a hill 307 feet above the starting intersection. There were twenty-eight hundred feet of track. It is interesting to note that the inaugural trip on the morning of 1 August 1873 was from the hilltop to the bottom. A few men, with apprehension, braved the descent to arrive safely at the bottom. Mr. Hallidie, of course, was at the controls. Due to the very steep terrain of San Francisco, Mr. Hallidie’s “cable car” is known world wide and immediately became a tourist item. The success of this venture led to its expansion and introduction of street railways in many cities. In general, by the 1920s, American municipalities had replaced the horse drawn cars with electrically powered cars. At first the “omnibus” began carrying passengers up and down Broadway in New York City in 1827. The omnibus was primarily a stagecoach pulled by horses. Its uniqueness lay in that it was the first mass transportation vehicle in these United States. The man who helped organize the first fire department in New York, Abraham Brower, owned the system. Besides running along a designated route, the system charged a very low fare. Folks would “wave” it down to board and pull on a leather strap when they wanted to get off. You probably imagine that the “pull cord” was attached to some sounding device. Nope; it was attached to the ankle of the driver. While Grandpa and Uncle operated their streetcar in Cincinnati, omnibus’ had been running for eighty years, but there is no evidence that any were still running in large cities much beyond those eighty years. In 1832, the streetcar, though still pulled by horses, ran a more rigid path along steel rails which ran down the middle of streets. The wheels were constructed so that they would not roll off the tracks. This new streetcar was more efficient in that it was larger to carry more passengers while mechanically could be pulled by one horse, thus saving “horse power.” I would imagine that running along steel rails made the ride much more comfortable – no “pot holes.” It didn’t take long for the next large city, New Orleans, to install streetcars in 1835. Typically in America, a streetcar was operated by two crew members. A driver, who rode up front “driving” the horse. To keep the car from rolling into the horse, there was a brake controlled by the driver. The second crew member, the conductor, rode in the back of the streetcar, helping folks get on and off the car, and also collect the fares due. It was also the responsibility of the conductor to signal the driver when all passengers were aboard and it was safe to proceed. This was usually done by pulling on a rope that was attached to a bell located near the driver. As was already mentioned, in 1873 the first machine to replace the horse was the San Francisco Cable Car. And, though San Francisco was the first to run a fleet of cable cars, largest fleet was located in Chicago. Frank Sprague, who worked for Thomas Edison, is credited with establishing the first large scale and successful system to use electricity as the power source for streetcars in Richmond, Virginia. Though the cars still used tracks to run over, electric power was supplied from overhead wires. By the nineteen thirties when I first rode “cars” they resembled the buses which utilized gasoline combustible engines and they, though the electric wires still ran down the middle of the street, could maneuver from the center over to the curb to pick up and let off customers. e-la-Di-e-das-Di ha-wi nv-wa-do-hi-ya nv-wa-to-hi-ya-da. (May you walk in peace and harmony) and Wado, Bill -=- 978 PostScript: Other sites worth visiting: PostScript: = = = = http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/SOIL http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/ILMASSAC http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/state/BillsArticles/LittleEgypt/intro.html