Velocipede Mania

Velocipedes were all the rage in Paris, and by November 1868 they had made their appearance on the streets of New York and were causing a sensation.

By the spring of 1869, the craze had reached Cumberland County. The newspaper announced that a velocipede school would open in Rheem’s Hall on March 19 “where all can have a chance to see and learn to ride the strange animal.”¹

The first velocipede race was held in Rheem’s Hall on Saturday evening, March 27, 1869. A large crowd was there to see “the novel sight of a race against time on velocipedes.” The rider who made the fastest time around the circuit 10 times (1/4 mile) would win a silver cake basket. A. P. McGinnis won with a time of one minute and 17 seconds. A silver cup was awarded to Amos Buttorf who was the rider to take the slowest time to complete two circuits of the Hall.²

While velocipeding was having its day in Carlisle in the spring of 1869, the editor of Newville's Star and Enterprise said the season was over in Newville.  He thought velocipeding was a good exercise, “judging from the amount of perspiration which was required to keep one in motion for 10 or 15 minutes.” The machine would “glide gracefully over a level floor,' he wrote, "but was an unmanageable and peevish animal” on the streets. Several attempts were made by the most proficient rider in Newville “to climb the inclined plane on Main Street but it would put the thing entirely out of humor and would sway from side to side...and a stone the size of a walnut would demoralize it…”³

After seven months of velocipeding in Rheem’s Hall, the editor of the Carlisle Herald was at his wits end. The first floor of Rheem’s Hall was occupied by several offices, a restaurant and the newspaper's headquarters. The editor said everyone in the newspaper office “was made painfully aware by having a half dozen of these two-wheeled monstrosities cutting up all sorts of capers just above us every evening we are at work. There is a school for young gentlemen to learn velocipeding in the room just over our heads…the nuisance is insufferable.”⁴ It wasn’t just the newspaper employees who were driven to distraction. The lawyers were swearing, their clerks could hardly concentrate, and the restaurant men on the lower floor threatened to vacate. Complaints were made, but to no avail.⁵

In the fall of 1870, Professors H. H. Widner and William M. Thompson of Carlisle opened a new velocipede school in Rheem’s Hall.⁶  The Shippensburg News, reporting that Carlisle had a new velocipede school, wrote "We infer from this that the fools are not all dead yet.”⁷

By the summer of 1872 people could be seen riding velocipedes on the streets of Carlisle. The editor of the Carlisle Weekly Herald did not think people should be allowed to ride on the pavement, and that this ought to be taken up with the authorities. He added, “This effort to resuscitate this once popular amusement is far-fetched, as velocipedism has long since played out in this locality.”⁸