The Surrey: "America's Family Buggy"

Family with surrey, Olivia, Texas, circa 1907

 "You have met a stranger driving a skinny, bony horse hitched to a rickety buggy. You formed a mental picture of his home surroundings. In your mind you can see his tumble-down buildings, weedy fence corners and barren dooryard. It seems clear to you this man is poor.... you know how little respect is shown such people....

           " People are judged by their “turnouts” quite as much as their clothes.”

              

                                                                                            (John Deere Buggy ad, 1909)

Unlike the stranger in the ad description, the family in this picture with their nicely equipped surrey and healthy horses was bound to make a good impression.

The surrey, with its two seats and wide body was the “family vehicle” in the pre-automobile era.   Purchasers had a wide range of choice in price, quality, and style. Customers could choose from different wheel sizes, and different wheel widths – wider for the country lanes or narrower and more elegant for town driving. A customer buying a buggy from the John Deere company in 1912 had a choice of 18 different styles of seat and several types of roof (fringed, auto, etc.) and numerous options such as lanterns, mudguards, and decoration.

The surrey shown here is probably in the more expensive category as it sports a decorated rear fender which extends to become a foot step for the passengers in the rear seat; an “auto top” with a back curtain and side guards and appears to have one of the wider bodies accommodating its five passengers.

Buggy and carriage manufacture and repair dropped precipitously from its peak in 1904  (4956 establishments) to 1921 (826 establishments). The 1924 biennial census of manufacturing noted:   

"The striking decline of this industry since 1909, and especially since 1914 is due in large part to the enormous increase in the use of automobiles and motor trucks, which have supplanted horse-drawn vehicles to a very great extent in cities and towns, and to some extent even in agricultural communities."pg 1008

The family pictured here is, very tentatively, identified as the Gustaf Swenson family of Olivia, Texas. The picture would have been taken circa 1907.

Identifiers:

Negative: Paulson238 (Originally scanned at 1200ppi tiff, downsized to 400ppi jpeg for this post)

Place: Olivia, Texas

Date: Circa 1907

Sources:

Hughes, Ralph C. John Deere buggies and wagons. American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 1995

Rittenhouse, Jack D.  American horse-drawn vehicles. Floyd Clymer publisher: 1948

Bureau of the Census, Biennial census of manufactures, 1924. "Carriages and wagons and materials." Pages 1008-1022.