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The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. By Thomas A. Kinney. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv, 381 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-7946-9.)
Contrary to popular perception, it was not the low-cost Model T Ford, but the low-cost horse-drawn vehicle that introduced Americans to personal transportation. Customers were buying over 900,000 carriages and wagons a year by 1900 (p. 21). The industry that supplied these inexpensive vehicles lived a short but intense life, generally from the Civil War to World War I. This widely ignored success story has, in Thomas A. Kinney, a superb chronicler to provide redress.
Prices of carriages and wagons collapsed as producers vied for urban and rural markets. The $150 buggy of 1860 became the better equipped, lightweight $20 buggy of 1900 (p. 21). The number of vehicle makers grew from 3,800 in 1879 to a peak of 6,200 in 1899 (p. 34). The...