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Wisconsin’s First Automobiles

Vintage Wisconsin: Cars Sparked Tourism Boom In Northern Wisconsin

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Wisconsin Historical Images

In the above image, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Zimmerman drive their locomobile steamer automobile in Madison in 1902. It wasn’t the first time an automobile had been seen in Madison, but this was likely the first to be owned by a resident.

The Zimmermans’ automobile was the product of the Locomobile Company of America. Formed in 1899 in Massachusetts, the company first produced steam cars, like the one owned by the Zimmermans, before switching entirely to internal combustion automobiles in 1903. Steam-powered automobiles were unreliable and finicky, taking time to raise enough steam to move. But that didn’t matter to middle and upper-class Americans who clamored for the latest technology.

Wisconsin played an important role in the development of steam cars. In 1873, the first steam-powered, self-propelled automobile in the United States was designed and built by Reverend J.Wesley Carhart of Racine. Carhart named the car “Spark.” It had a top speed of five miles per hour, but even at that slow speed the car made so much noise that Carhart was not particularly popular with his neighbors.

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One of the first Wisconsinites to try his hand at manufacturing automobiles was Edward Joel Pennington. He joined the Thomas Kane & Company in Racine to build the “Kane-Pennington Hot Air Engine” in 1895. With his motor attached to a bicycle, Pennington claimed to have covered a mile in 58 seconds. Pennington had more marketing bluster than technical skill, however, and the car failed to live up to Pennington’s promises.

More successful was Thomas B. Jeffery, who began making automobiles on the side of his bicycle business in Chicago. He then moved to Kenosha in 1902 and produced automobiles known as Ramblers (the same name he’d previously used for his bicycles). Charles W. Nash bought the company in 1916 and made the Kenosha plant the largest producer of automobiles outside of Detroit.

Cars and horses competed for space on the roads in the early days. In Madison, the Park and Pleasure Drive Association designated separate car and carriage days for scenic drives on the roads created for horse-drawn vehicles along Madison’s lakes.

But the roads soon largely belonged to automobiles as more companies, including many in Wisconsin, created cars and more Americans purchased them. These automobiles fueled the growth of tourism in Wisconsin as people drove north for vacation, just as they do today.

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