The King's Best Highway by Eric Jaffe

Author:Eric Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

IN MARCH 1846, when Albert Pope was not quite three years old, his family moved to Harvard Street, in Brookline, on a part of the original Old Post Road that curled down toward the neck of the Bay from Cambridge. His father speculated in real estate near the emerging lines of the horse-drawn street railways. Over the next five years Charles Pope bought many more lots, at least eight of them directly along the old highway, flipping them once their value rose. At first Charles succeeded. But in the nascent days of suburban expansion, so did many others. Toward 1852 Charles bottomed out. So Albert peddled fruits and vegetables up and down the Brookline streets to help support the family, and soon had several young men working for him.

Albert Pope’s service during the Civil War included fighting for the Union under General Ulysses Grant at the Battle of Vicksburg. He achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel, but it might have been his tendency to assume control in the absence of his regiment’s commanding officer that afterward led writers, colleagues, and friends alike to affectionately call him “The Colonel.” A decade after the war Pope’s shoe supplier business had become a sizable concern. He joined the Newton city council, a role that sent him to Philadelphia in 1876 to explore the Centennial Exposition. There he first laid eyes on a strange apparatus better suited to P. T. Barnum’s circus act: the high-wheel bicycle.

By 1876 a brief American fling with the velocipede, that bicycle antecedent, had come and long gone. A French mechanic, Pierre Lallement, had brought the contraption to the United States in 1866. He was arrested, twice, for scaring horses while riding around the center green in New Haven. And though Manhattan flocked to the sport for a couple years—Charles Dana, publisher of the New York Sun, was a notable fan—the fad had faded by 1870. But the high-wheel was gaining popularity in England, and when Pope took a trip there to view the industry, he decided it was high time to try again in America.

In the summer of 1877 Pope invited an Englishman named John Harrington to his suburban Boston home. There, over the course of two months, Harrington constructed a bike at a cost of around three hundred dollars. He then taught Pope to ride. This was no easy task. It often took hours just to learn how to mount the high-wheel—planting one foot on a notch, propelling with the other, then vaulting into the seat. The Popes lived on Washington Street, in Brighton, at the time. Pope likely took some of those first lessons, and no doubt those first face-plants, along the Old Post Road that crossed the river onto modern U.S. Route 20 toward Watertown.

The experience must have been a rewarding one, for Pope acted quickly, and at great expense, to ignite the business. He imported forty-two high-wheelers from overseas. He acquired, through shrewd maneuvers, Lallement’s original patent, so that for several years no person could sell a bicycle in America without paying Pope ten dollars.

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