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ca. 1847-1867 L. Downing and Sons Concord Stagecoach
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Description
The Concord stagecoach is an icon of the American West but its roots are in New England, both as a product and for its uses.
The history of Abbot-Downing, the company that made Concord coaches, illustrates America’s transition from hand-made to assembly line, from horse-drawn to motorized, and from regional markets to national markets. Throughout it, the company…
The Concord stagecoach is an icon of the American West but its roots are in New England, both as a product and for its uses.
The history of Abbot-Downing, the company that made Concord coaches, illustrates America’s transition from hand-made to assembly line, from horse-drawn to motorized, and from regional markets to national markets. Throughout it, the company was simultaneously a driver of these changes and unable to adapt to those same changes.
In 1813, Lewis Downing open a wagon shop in Concord, NH to sell wagons “as cheap as can be bought.” Working on his own, Downing began selling wagons to local residents. Within a decade, Downing focused on producing heavy freight vehicles needed to bring goods between Boston and Concord. His focus also led to him expanding his staff to 6-12 workers.
In 1826, Downing recognized improvements to New England’s roads and increasing interest in travel would require better coaches. Downing also recognized that he needed help to create this better coach. He found that assistance by convincing J. Stephens Abbot, a 22 year old chaise builder in Salem, MA, to move to Concord. By the following year, Abbot became a partner in the firm and renamed it Downing and Abbot.
It was the partnership of Abbot and Downing that led to their lasting contribution to American transportation, the Concord Coach. Most passenger coaches in the early 1800s were built with oval bodies. While esthetically pleasing, this design limited their value for long-distance travel because it lacked space to store passengers’ luggage. The issue was slightly solved with the addition of trunks below the driver’s seat and on the coach’s back. But it was not enough.
Abbot and Downing opted to build their carriages with a flat roof and a rounded bottom. They did not originate the design but it was becoming popular among carriage makers in the early 1830s. Where Abbot and Downing was different from the rest of the industry was their suspension system. Most builders used spring suspensions made with metal that bounced up and down over rough roads. Abbot and Downing used strips of leather called “throughbraces” that cradled the entire coach body. On rough roads, their coaches swayed side-to-side.
In addition to their unique suspension system, Abbot and Downing coaches earned a reputation for being durable and decorated to the buyer’s desires and budget.
The first Abbot and Downing Concord Coach was sold to an inn in Salisbury, NH in 1827. The design remained in production until 1899. While the Concord Coach remained in production, the company changed multiple times. In 1847, Abbot and Downing dissolved their partnership, but both remained in the coach building business in Concord, NH as J.S. and E.A. Abbot and Company and Lewis Downing and Sons. In 1865, 73 year-old Lewis Downing retired and his sons decided to recombine the companies. The newly merged organization was now Abbot, Downing, and Company. Eight years later, the company changed names again after incorporating with $400,000 in capital the Abbot-Downing Company.
Abbot and Downing coaches became valuable and iconic during America’s westward expansion of the 1840s through the 1880s. For frontier regions not yet linked by railroad, the Concord coach became a vital source for people, mail, and goods. The Concord Coach was such a well-respected vehicle that stagecoach operators specifically advertised their usage. When John Butterfield won the overland mail contract connecting the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean in 1857, he used only Concord carriages to carry the mail.
However, Concord coaches were not only used to conquer rough terrain and unforgiving wilderness. In Maine, New England, and throughout the East Coast, inns, hotels, and tourist companies used the coaches as well. The design was ideal for bringing vacationers and their baggage the short distance from railroad depots to hotels. Some owners adapted the flat roof to add more seating. With this permitted scenic tours for up to 20 passengers.
During the 1850s, the company responded to customer requests for interchangeable parts. At the time, the entire carriage industry was individualized production, even for large orders. This meant that even when carriages looked the same, you could not always use a wheel or yoke from one carriage to repair another. Customers ordering many carriages or ordering new ones began asking that parts be made interchangeable to better use the company products. By the 1880s, Abbot, Downing, and Company was advertising they could save customers money by shipping carriages in pieces for final assembly by the customer.
While Abbot-Downing modernized some production methods, it did not fully embrace industrialization of the late 1800s. Through interchangeable parts, the company’s 250 workers could build around 2000 vehicles a year by 1890. One of its competitors, J. H. Birch Company of Philadelphia used assembly line production methods to complete 10,000 vehicles with a similar sized staff.
At the world entered the motor age in the early 1900s, Abbot-Downing remained rooted in the 1800s and suffered for it. It continued to sell only horse-drawn vehicles until 1915. In the same period, it endured receivership, bankruptcy, and numerous financial and managerial reorganizations as the horse-drawn vehicle market shrank. The final blow occurred in 1915 when Yellowstone National Park vendors decided to replace sightseeing carriages with automobiles within the park. By the end of the year, Abbot-Downing announced they would start producing motor truck and motorized fire equipment. Like many manufacturers of the era, Abbot-Downing bought engines and other mechanical parts from other companies and assembled them in their own bodies.
In June 1916, the first Concord Motor Truck was completed. Early trucks were largely sold to existing customers who previously bought carriages and wagons. Like the carriages, these first trucks were each handcrafted, custom orders.
In 1918, the company reorganized once again at the Abbot-Downing Truck and Body Company. To further modernize and compete with much larger and established automobile companies, they stopped taking custom orders in order to shift towards an assembly line process. Despite the changes, the company could only build 8 vehicles at a time and sold only 53 trucks in 1919. By comparison, Ford produced 498,342 Model Ts in 1919.
The end of Abbot-Downing finally came in 1925 when the company dissolved and Wells-Fargo, one of the company’s major customers in the 1800s, bought the name. Of the thousands of Concord coaches made by Abbot-Downing, fewer than 150 remain in existence around the world. Of these, Wells-Fargo owns at least 10 of them and display them in some of their museums across the United States.[1]
History of Our Stagecoach
This is one of the oldest surviving Concord Coaches in the world. It was produced by Lewis Downing and Sons during the 1847-1865 period when Abbot and Downing were separate companies. It has a deep history in tourism, but in New Hampshire where it was owned by the Atlantic House and Farragut House in Rye, NH.
The Atlantic House was the first hotel in Rye John Colby Philbrick opened the business in 1846 when he recognized Rye’s oceanside location meant it might be able to compete with other growing oceanside resort towns like Bar Harbor, Maine and Newport, Rhode Island. Over the next 20 years, this town of barely a 1000 residents built another 10 hotels. Among them was a 3 ½ story hotel that Philbrick built expansion next to his Atlantic House in 1864. This hotel became known as Farragut House in 1866 after Admiral David Farragut, best known for leading the U.S. Navy’s mission to regain control of the Mississippi River from the Confederacy during the Civil War, stayed at the hotel.
The hotels acquired this $2000 ($69,000 in 2019 dollars) deluxe stagecoach from Downing for two reasons. First, it was used to fetch visitors and their luggage from the North Hampton Train station that was five miles from the hotels. When not serving as a station wagon, the stagecoach was used for sightseeing tours of the area. When not carrying luggage, almost two dozen hotel guests could be inside, on the roof and perched on any flat surface. The hotel names are still faintly visible along the top of the stagecoach.
Like many hotels of the 1800s, fire was a serious risk and both hotels burned down in April 1882. While the Atlantic House was left in ashes, a new, larger Farragut House opened in 1883 and remained in business until 1975.
Year:
1849
Make / Manufacturer:
Lewis Downing and Sons
Model:
Concord
Location Created:
Concord, NH
Donated By:
Horace K. Sowles