Reflections: The only unchanging thing in history is change

I was chatting with an elderly fellow several years ago and he recalled his stepfather had been a carriage painter. When automobiles came in, he accommodated the new technology and started painting cars instead of carriages.

He was one of the lucky ones when, just after the turn of the 20th century, life underwent one of those major periodic changes that historians call inflection points.

From 1900 to about 1930, dozens of professions either ceased to exist or became increasingly rare because of the advent of the automobile. In addition, hundreds of businesses dissolved because there was no longer any need for them as technology shook out the nation’s economy.

We’ve all heard the hoary old tale of the buggy whip maker who made the best buggy whips in the world but who was driven out of business because automobiles replaced the horse and carriage market. There was nothing wrong with the buggy whips he made – they simply weren’t needed for anything but hobbyists any more.

Buggy whip makers, however, were probably the smallest part of the market affected when that major change in technology took place.

Every small town and wide place in the road was home to blacksmiths who did farrier work shoeing horses and mules. Oswego had several, as did Yorkville and Plano. When horses were replaced by the horseless carriage, there was no longer so much need for farrier services, although blacksmithing was still an important service in farming communities. That’s because the blacksmith could repair and service tools and farm implements.

Carriage makers were also put out of business by the change. Oswego had one carriage manufactory run by Oliver Hebert and one wagonwright shop run by John Young. Wagonwrights hung on for a while because wagons don’t care whether they’re pulled by horses, trucks or cars, or farm tractors.

Each town’s livery stable also was put out of business by the arrival of the auto. With the advent of cars, no one really needed to rent or board riding horses or horses and buggies.

Harness makers also quickly fell on tough times, as did the companies that sold grain to feed the millions of horses that provided the motive power that grew the Midwest.

By 1900, about 3 million horses were kept in U.S. towns and cities, and another 20 millions were stabled and pastured in rural areas. So that change also had a major effect on the farmers that grew the grain and who raised all those horses that were no longer needed.

Down at the Little White School Museum in Oswego, we have a set of maps published by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company that give extremely detailed pictures of portions of the town during five periods: 1885; 1892; 1896; 1905; and 1931. The most striking thing about the maps is the change in business between 1905 and 1931. In every case, the wagon and carriage manufacturers and blacksmiths shown on the 1905 map had either completely disappeared or turned into car repair shops or service stations by 1931.

And when all those horses faded away, they took a giant slice of the area’s heritage and history with them. The small barns that dot lots all over the older parts of Kendall County towns were quickly modified into garages to house the new Model T Fords coming off the assembly lines in Detroit. Auto dealerships quickly popped up in Main Street business districts all over the country. And it was pretty clear a large fraction of the nation’s work force would have to be retrained.

Some trades – like blacksmithing – lent themselves to a change to the internal combustion engine or to concentrating more on tool repair and maintenance. Blacksmiths, after all, were considered to be the mechanics of their heyday. But other skills, such as the ability to repair a broken spoke in a wooden wheel or fixing broken harnesses were unneeded.

The horse-drawn transportation sector wasn’t the only one where profound change took place locally during that era of course. Button factories that bought clamshells by the millions from the clammers who worked the Fox River and the giant ice houses that once supplied ice to the meat packing industry, railroads and private homes had also seen their day come and go. And each had required a substantial infrastructure to operate. The button factories relied on a large network of local clammers who used their river scows and a few specialized tools to harvest Fox River clams. Inexpensive plastics and the river’s pollution eliminated clamming.

In order to harvest ice for storage in their gigantic ice houses, the ice companies required relatively clean water to be backed up behind the low dams that dotted the Fox River. The Esch Brothers owned ice houses in both Oswego and Yorkville and each winter hired up to 75 men at each location to cut blocks of ice and store them in ice houses on shore for later shipment by rail to the Chicago market. The invention of economical refrigeration machines to manufacture ice, and then the advent of home refrigeration, killed the local ice business – but so did increasing river pollution levels.

We like to think that the fast pace of life these days and the changes wrought by the onset of the Information Age – from computers to the Internet – are unprecedented. And they are, at least when it comes to information technologies. But the nation has gone through other times of change that were just as profound and which affected large segments of the nation’s workforce. The evolution from horse power to the internal combustion engine was probable the most sweeping of those, but not by much. The extension of telephone and electrical service to every home probably had an even larger social and health impacts, for instance.

We tend to think of the past as a calm, even idyllic time, but it was not. If we are to make sense of the repeated changes we’re going through now, it’s imperative that we realize the only unchanging thing in our lives is change.

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