127 years of Bicycling in Rochester, New York

127 years ago the Bicycling Craze came to a small city in New York:

They had practiced all that winter of 1879-80, these Rochester Bicycle Club members, learning to ride their new contraptions. Late in April, "nine hardy men emerged and rode boldly through the streets," Rochester historian Blake McKelvey wrote.

It was a small beginning, to be sure. And yet by 1897 there would be an estimated 40,000 bicycles on the streets of Rochester. What happened in the intervening years was nothing short of extraordinary.

"It was a crazy time that swept across the nation with a fervor rarely matched in history," Edwin Sayers wrote in an August 1985 article for Upstate Magazine. "Like kids around a Christmas tree, America reveled in its new toy. For the first time ever a person could go a reasonably long distance under one's own power and still get home by nightfall without collapsing from exhaustion. It was transportation on the cheap, a highly personal way of conquering distances that seemed close to miraculous."

In 1881, for example, in its "Bicycle Briefs" column, the Democrat and Chronicle noted that in a single day W.H. Leonard and W.W. Reid "took in Henrietta, Scottsville, Caledonia, LeRoy, Bergen, Chili and Churchville ... on their wheels. The roads were good and when home again their cyclometer showed the distance gone over to be fifty-six miles."

Read the full piece:

Rochester Democrat and Chronicle ( 5/22 ): Bicycling craze swept city in 19th century by Bob Marcotte.