Late 19th to Early 20th Century Auburn Square Box Buggy

  From the early 1800s to the early 1900s, people on the North American prairie who could afford them used horse-drawn buggies and wagons to venture around their towns or to travel over longer distances, to haul goods around or to enjoy an afternoon ride.  Somewhere on the North American prairie, for example, a farmer and his wife might have ridden in a buggy just like this one into town to attend church or to do some shopping.
 If you look closely at this buggy, you might notice that, in contrast to the Staver single seat buggy next to it, this buggy’s suspension consists of elliptical springs at the front and back instead of springs on the side bars.  You might also note that this buggy has a box shaped body and is painted all black, in contrast to the Staver buggy which has the popular Concord body shape and is black with red side bars, axles, and wheels. Thanks to a metal nameplate on the rear of this buggy, we can identify it as one made by the Auburn Buggy Company in Auburn, Indiana.

During the 1910s, about a decade-and-a-half after automobiles became more widely available to the public, the number of cars and trucks may have passed the number of horse-drawn vehicles on North American roads.  Although the popularity of the horse-drawn buggies and carriages was declining, many people on the North American prairie continued to use them to travel and transport goods into the 1920s and beyond.  Just as many farmers put off purchasing tractors, choosing to continue using their horses to pull and power their farm machinery, many farmers and townspeople on the prairie put off buying an automobile, preferring to ride in their traditional horse-drawn vehicle.  Even after the car replaced the carriage for many families, during the depression of the 1930s, some automobile companies converted gasoline cars into horse-drawn vehicles because the car owners had access to horses but could not afford the fuel and maintenance costs on their cars.

Note the top of the weight on the buggy floor next to the
near side of the buggy body, and the muffler-shaped heater
on the buggy floor near the front of the body.

You probably cannot see it from the walkway, but this buggy has a rather heavy weight on the floor in front of the seat.   This weight was referred to as a hitching or tether weight, although it has also been given a variety of other related names.  The driver of the buggy would use this weight to hitch or tether the horse when he or she was going to be away from the horse and buggy and when there was no hitching post around.  Even though a horse might be able to drag the weight around, the horse’s training along with the feeling of being securely tied to the ground usually kept horses from wandering off.  Weights varied in material - often iron, lead, or wood - as well as in weight and form.  During the late 1800s and early 1900s, a variety of inventive people came up with several weight designs which made tethering the horse easier and made it more difficult for the horse to walk with the weight.

The Horse Review, vol. XXXII, no. 24 (December 12, 1905).

This buggy also has a heater shaped somewhat like a car muffler sitting on the floor near the front.  The riders of this buggy would have used it to keep their feet warm during cold days.  This particular heater is called the Clark Heater, and it was made by the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company of Chicago, Illinois probably sometime in the early 1900s.  In order to create heat, the riders of the buggy would place a fire-heated fuel cake, called a Clark Carbon, into a drawer that would slide into the heater.  The cake was specially made so that it would not emit any flame, smoke, dust, or odor – only heat.  According to a 1903 Automobile Trade Journal article, the heater, which was fourteen inches long and weighed ten pounds, cost $3.50.¹  A dozen cakes cost 75 cents, or one hundred cakes cost $6.00.  According to the article, one cake, which measured 7 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches, would give off continuous heat for fifteen hours, and one-third of a cake would be enough for ordinary purposes.²

From the December, 1917 Hardware Review.

 Founded by John K. Stewart and Thomas J. Clark in 1893 and incorporated in 1897, the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company began by making horse clipping machines.  By the beginning of the 1900s, the company was also making sheep shearing machines, and wagon and buggy heaters.  By 1917, they had also added furnaces, gasoline engines, electric irons, and the Stewart Handy Worker 6-in-1 tool to their products.³

Ad for heaters from the January 3, 1913 Hardware Reporter.

Notes

¹ The Automobile Trade Journal, vol. VII, no. 8 (February 1, 1903). p. 206.

² By 1921, the company had several models of the Clark ranging from $3.00 to $12.00 in price.  By this time, a dozen Clark Carbons cost $1.20, and 100 cost $9.50.  See Hardware Dealers’ Magazine, vol. 56, no. 325 (November, 1921), p. 817.

³ See Hardware Review, vol. 21, no. 4 (December, 1917), for product lists and descriptions.