Germans Under Seige
(Courtesy USWhips.com)
The ultimate metaphor for a product overtaken by progress is the buggy whip. If you’ve never seen one, here’s what one looked like.
See, they are still being made after all—and in a rainbow of colors to suit any mood (horse or human). But, in truth, I expect the market for buggy whips is today a tiny fraction of what it was in 1900, when just about everyone in charge of his or her own transportation needed one.
The same might be said of horse-drawn anything: carriages, wagons, buckboards, bobsleighs, fire engines, even snowplows. There are exceptions, but in 1900 horses and mules (a mule is a hybrid whose father is a donkey and mother is a horse) made most everything go.
The 1886 Benz Patent Motorwagen. Wikipedia Commons License.
But that was changing fast. The first more-or-less-modern automobile, the Patent Motorwagen, was introduced in 1886 by German Carl Benz, and the idea of autonomous transportation–without stables, feed, manure, or (especially in the case of mules) occasional equine protest against pulling stuff around all day–spread like a grassfire.
Buffalo—being at least with, and often ahead, of the times circa 1900—was no slouch in taking up the ‘automobiling’ hobby. While the earliest automobiles were too small, too fragile, and too expensive to do much more than spirit around a couple of thrill seekers at the breakneck speed of twenty miles per hour, as soon as cars appeared most understood that the days of the horse were numbered. It would be only a matter of time before cars–and then trucks and buses–would become faster, more powerful, and (with the introduction of the Ford Model T in 1908) more affordable.
The automobile would wreak a profound change on society as a whole, and also more specifically on Buffalo’s German-American community, which dominated the blacksmithing, wagon- and carriage-building trades. Consider for a moment that in 1900 Buffalo boasted ninety-two wagon and carriage manufacturers, twenty-eight makers of tack, eighty-three livery stables, a score of ‘carriage repositories’ (garages), twenty horse traders, and five rendering plants to deal with deceased animals, and you have a very substantial industry.The handwriting was on the wall, though, both for the horse-powered industry and for Buffalo’s ethnic German community as a whole. A good example of both was the Jacob Duchmann family, which owned a wagon and carriage manufactory at 860 Seneca Street, but who lived in Buffalo’s German enclave, the part of East Buffalo then called The Hill. The epicenter of this thriving community was the intersection of Jefferson and Genesee Streets. (Jefferson was a street then.)
The epicenter of The Hill, Jefferson & Genesee, circa 1930. Note Memorial Hospital in the rear right. Collection of the Buffalo History Museum.
Soon after the appearance of automobiles, the Duchmanns wisely added automobile bodies to their line of wagons and carriages. Those two trades were, at the time, more similar than they might at first appear—automobiles, after all, began as ‘horseless carriages’ and were all ‘coachbuilt’—which is exactly what it sounds like. An automobile company would build the chassis and drivetrain, and then a ‘coachbuilder’ would fashion a wooden frame on which metal panels were fastened to form the body. This whole assembly was then bolted to the chassis, and could be changed if tastes or style dictated.
(Completely off-topic, but perhaps still interesting, is that ‘coachbuilt’ was not the only ‘horse-powered’ term applied to the then-new automobile technology. Station wagon? Originally a horse-drawn wagon used to convey people and their trunks from the train station to their final destinations.)
In 1895, only five years after the family had cut the ribbon on their new factory, Charles–one of the three Duchmann sons–left the business entirely for another, more promising one: healthcare, now such a big part of the Buffalo economy. He resigned from the wagon works to start up a new hospital, The German Hospital, in The Hill; you can see it as ‘Memorial Hospital’ in the preceding photograph.
Meanwhile, the outlook for anything horsey continued from bad to worse. In 1917, the Duchmann boys at last shuttered the wagon and carriage business entirely. I can only speculate on the reasons for this timing. Obviously, the internal-combustion engine had continued to expand its dominance–and yet another, more sinister current was tugging at the feet of Buffalo’s German community: anti-German sentiment and persistent surveillance whipped up by the Woodrow Wilson administration as one of the pretexts for entering World War I against Germany. (The thought was that people of German ancestry on the Niagara Frontier were more likely to be spies or saboteurs.)
Charles Duchmann in 1937.
A concentrated ethnic community like The Hill was the perfect place, too, for Wilson’s crew to implant a few agents-provocateurs, who made it known that any person or business acting ‘too German’ might also fall under the gaze of the all-seeing eye. You may imagine that this made being of German extraction, even in The Hill, a rather tenuous matter, and the neighborhood’s former pride about its Germanic roots curdled into shame. Many businesses raced to distance themselves from their Teutonic origins–the German-American Bank became Liberty Bank, and in Buffalo restaurants the good old frankfurter shed its casing to re-emerge as the ‘hot dog’. ‘Liberty Cabbage’ made everyone feel better about sauerkraut, and in 1918 Charles Duchmann, too, de-Germanized his German Hospital, renaming it ‘Memorial Hospital’, even though one is tempted to observe that most folks would rather be German than a memorial. Even many ethnic Germans changed their surnames to conceal their origins.
(Dumb, right? Those silly ancestors of ours! Yet you may recall that in 2003, after almost another hundred years of human progress and enlightenment, French fries and French toast were, with appropriate pomp and circumstance, renamed ‘Freedom Fries’ and ‘Freedom Toast’ in Congressional cafeterias, since those pesky French had decided they weren’t up for one of the Iraq wars. The name was quietly changed back in 2009.)
Alongside the loss of its sense of identity and pride, The Hill began a decades-long process of decline. I’d sum it up thus: over the course of a short engagement in a much longer war, the Wilson administration’s legion of enforcers didn’t catch many actual German spies (about ten were arrested in the entire US) and not a single saboteur, but they were expert at turning neighbors into, well, spies–just on other neighbors–and in vilifying anything or anyone of German ancestry.
As if all this weren’t a bitter enough pill to swallow, yet a third challenge to Buffalo’s German community was a-brewing: in 1920, the beer making and distilling industries–very big ones, much bigger than wagons and carriages, and another one dominated by ethnic Germans—would be blown to atoms by the Eighteenth Amendment, also known as Prohibition. I’ll tackle it in another post.
A typical German brewing business pre-Prohibition. Note location at the very heart of The Hill.
The Lang’s Bottling Works corner today. (c) Google.
But let us rejoice, because all is not lost! In a triumph both of historical preservation and the Universal Law of the Conservation of Irony, there is good news: The Duchmann wagon factory still stands, and now makes . . . liquor, which became legal again in 1933. So if you visit the Buffalo Distilling Company, make sure to raise a toast to the Duchmanns!
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.