Texas Monthly – March 2016
There was the romance of the stagecoach, and then there was the reality of the mud wagon.
The phrase “stagecoach days” brings up visions of the swaying carriages pulled by teams of six horses that are familiar to us from watching westerns and Wells Fargo commercials. These majestic vehicles were Concord coaches, made by the Abbot-Downing Company, in Concord, New Hampshire. The plush-lined compartments were about four feet wide and four and a half feet high and could carry nine passengers in relative comfort on three benches; another nine could ride on the roof. Their swaying motion was the result of thoroughbraces, multilayered three-inch-thick leather straps that were fastened to iron stanchions on the running gear to support the coach’s body. Mark Twain described the Concord as “an imposing cradle on wheels.” Over a period of fifty years, Abbot-Downing built about three thousand of these coaches and sold them to stage lines in the United States, South America, Australia, and Africa.
A few Texas stage lines used Concord coaches. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Freemantle, a British Army officer who visited Texas in 1863, rode in one from San Antonio to Alleyton, outside Columbus, and recorded in his diary that he was reluctant to put his head out the window for fear of “a shower of tobacco juice from the mouths of the Southern chivalry on the roof.” However, in addition to being expensive—costing $1,200 in the 1840’s—the coaches were also extremely heavy. Weighing about 2,500 pounds, they were best suited to well-graded and relatively flat roads, the kind, more often than not, that weren’t found in Texas. [READ FULL ARTICLE]