Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America

The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America

Kinney, Thomas A.

Hardcover

Series: Studies in Industry and Society, Book 20

Technology & Engineering19th Century United States History20th Century United States History

ISBN10: 0801879469
ISBN13: 9780801879463
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr
Published: Oct 1 2004
Pages: 381
Weight: 1.65
Height: 1.16 Width: 6.46 Depth: 9.56
Language: English

Co-Winner of the 2005 Hagley Business History Book Prize given by the Busines History Conference.

In 1926, the Carriage Builders' National Association met for the last time, signaling the automobile's final triumph over the horse-drawn carriage. Only a decade earlier, carriages and wagons were still a common sight on every Main Street in America. In the previous century, carriage-building had been one of the largest and most dynamic industries in the country. In this sweeping study of a forgotten trade, Thomas A. Kinney extends our understanding of nineteenth-century American industrialization far beyond the steel mill and railroad. The legendary Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company in 1880 produced a hundred wagons a day--one every six minutes. Across the country, smaller factories fashioned vast quantities of buggies, farm wagons, and luxury carriages. Today, if we think of carriage and wagon at all, we assume it merely foreshadowed the automobile industry. Yet., the carriage industry epitomized a batch-work approach to production that flourished for decades. Contradicting the model of industrial development in which hand tools, small firms, and individual craftsmanship simply gave way to mechanized factories, the carriage industry successfully employed small-scale business and manufacturing practices throughout its history.

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