June 6: Mysterious Petroglyphs of Safe Harbor Presentation

3 thoughts on “June 6: Mysterious Petroglyphs of Safe Harbor Presentation”

1. The Conestoga Traction Company, later Conestoga Transportation Co., was a classic American regional interurban trolley that operated seven routes from 1899 to 1946 radiating spoke-like from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to numerous neighboring farm villages and towns. It ran side-of-road trolleys through Amish farm country east to Coatesville and Strasburg/Quarryville, south to Pequea, west to Columbia/Marietta and Elizabethtown, north to Manheim/Lititz, and northeast to Ephrata/Adamstown/Terre Hill.
   Conestoga Traction began operations in 1899 with a track gauge of 5’-2 ½”. CTs rural trolley system provided reliable and relatively fast transportation between many southeastern Pennsylvania farm towns in the days when people traveled in horse drawn buggies and freight traveled in horse-drawn wagons on narrow wandering dusty roads in summer or rutted deep mud roads in winter. In 1924, when business and profits were still good, Conestoga Traction updated its aging wood trolleys with a purchase of all steel small interurban trolley cars from Cincinnati Car Company.

   CT also transported farm freight, such as milk and produce, from farms to towns. Pickups would occur with stops at farm gates using trolleys called “combines” designed to carry passengers in one section and freight in another. With its Lebanon connection to neighboring Hershey Transit, it shipped fresh uncooled Amish farm milk to the Hershey Company for immediate use in chocolate production until Hershey cancelled its milk contract in 1929. Hershey Transit permitted trolleys from the neighboring connecting lines, including Conestoga Traction, onto its rails to carry summer crowds to the Hershey Park for the amusement rides and to picnic. Picnic specials ran into the 1930s.

   Electric trolley cars and earlier horse-drawn railway cars originated in the 1800’s as a solution to transportation problems in our cities. City streets were either poorly paved or not paved at all, and were decorated with the debris left behind by the many horses used to pull wagons. Rural wagon roads were dusty in summer and fall; and muddy, rutted, and impassable in the winter and spring. Without reliable transportation, cities could not expand. Most people spent their entire lives within ten miles of home and only infrequently went more than a mile from their houses. Until the adoption of the horse car (1859) or the invention of the electric car (mid 1880’s), people needed to live close to their work. Their only means of getting to work, church, and to stores was walking or a buggy. In spite of a very high fare of a nickel in most cities, urban passenger railways were immediately popular because they allowed people to choose where they wanted to live, worship, shop, work, or be entertained. The electric railway industry became so important to Pennsylvanians that in just one year (1920) the 5 million people in the state paid 1.8 billion times to ride on the cars, an average of about two journeys every week for everyone. At that time, Pennsylvania electric railways operated 9,500 vehicles over 4,600 miles of track and employed 31,000 people. The end, however, was in sight. The development of the automobile almost paralleled the expansion of electric trolleys. And the allure of being able to go anywhere, at any time, caused almost everyone to travel by automobiles and forsake the trolleys. In 1910 all the roads in the state were dirt. Most roads were still dirt in 1920. But between 1920 and 1930 half the road miles in the state were paved. Fresh white concrete was everywhere. Over a million new Pennsylvania customers bought cars and trucks between 1920 and 1930, bring the total number of motor vehicles to one and a half million. By then, two families out of three had a car and those who did not lived mostly in large cities.

   Trolley Car #236
   This trolley car, now in Manheim, was built in 1926 for the Conestoga Traction Company in Lancaster, which purchased it for $7,164. In actuality, the trolley company had lost money due to automobile competition in 1923, 1924, and 1925 and the last five trolleys were ordered by a subsidiary company that had money, the United Gas Improvement Company (now called UGI Utilities). Car #236 was part of the last order of electric cars built for Lancaster. The 41 identical cars provided service on a dozen routes in the City of Lancaster and one line inside the Borough of Columbia. Until the late teens (1913-1919), trolleys were operated by two men, one of whom collected fares and the other ran the car. The loss of business to automobiles and extreme inflation during World War One made it imperative that railways find a way to reduce costs; firing the second man was deemed necessary.

   Trolley car #236 is known as a safety car in industrial vocabulary. It was developed out of a need to make cars safe for operation by just one person. This particular configuration of a safety car was also given the name of its creator, Charles O. Birney, and engineer for Stone and Webster Utilities in Boston. While most of the Birney cars went to Stone and Webster properties in Washington, Texas, and Florida; many other companies bought car and they often found homes in the smaller cities and towns. The Lancaster company had moved nearly 14 million people in its peak year, but this number had dropped by one-third by the early Depression years. Eight consecutive years of losses due to automobile competition had taken its toll. In 1931 the local traction company was no longer able to pay off its bond interest and was cast adrift by its profit making partners (UGI and Pennsylvania Power and Light Co.). Through a reorganization, most rural trolley lines were converted to bus service between 1932 and 1935. No longer was the Lancaster company the sixth largest electric railway in the Commonwealth, with lines serving most towns in Lancaster County. After 21 years of service and almost no unessential repairs during World War II, buses replaced trolley car #236 in September 1947. It was sold to a local scrap dealer that year but was rescued by the Lancaster Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society and was moved to a short section of track at the Landis Valley Museum which was then owned by the Landis Brothers. When the museum was transferred to the state in 1953, the ownership of the car was also given to the state. It was loaned to two different museum groups after 1958 before it returned to Landis Valley in 1967. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission had a derelict car that didn’t fit the theme of any of their museums, and happily transferred the trolley car on a long-term lease to the Manheim Historical Society in May 1990. It arrived there much like the Christmas toy that advertised “some assembly required”. Unfortunately, there were no assembly instructions and parts were missing. It is a great credit to men in the Manheim Historical Society, principally Ben Hershey, William Althouse, and Charles George who donated two years of labor to make the car run again. Since that time, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has turned over ownership to the Manheim Historical Society.

   The Museum
   The Manheim Historical Society at 210 South Charlotte Street, Manheim, PA 17545 operates the restored streetcar (#236) on about 150 feet of track next to the former Manheim railroad station. The museum is open on Sunday afternoons from June through September or by appointment and the car operates art those times.

   Rocky Springs Amusement Park
   On May 10, 1903, the Conestoga Traction Company began service to Rocky Springs with the only double track line on the system. During the summer months, as many as 20 Birney cars would be assigned to the line at one time, to handle the crowds. This was the last line to operate trolleys in Lancaster, being abandoned on September 21, 1947, when Rocky Springs closed for the season.

   Decline and abandonment
   Most interurbans like Conestoga Traction did not survive improved highways with increased use of automobiles, or the economic impact of the Great Depression. Conestoga Traction abandoned most of its lines in 1932 (specifically the last day of interurban service to Manheim was March 9, 1932). The Lancaster-Ephrata line was still running in 1946 having been ordered by the Federal Government to do so because of World War II transportation needs. The Leola station was located where the Fulton Bank is now located. One can still follow the route towards Ephrata along Conestoga Avenue and across the fields that are still marked with the original electric lines overhead. Lancaster’s Birney Car street car operation continued until 1947. Neighboring Hershey Transit survived until 1946. According to “To Lancaster, by Trolley” by Kurt R. Bell, in September 1947 “the (Conestoga Traction Co.) took their remaining fleet of streetcars to Rocky Springs one by one, where they were turned over on their sides and systematically burned.”
   Toonerville Trolley Comics
   A popular and long running national newspaper cartoon strip was “Toonerville Folks” written by Fontaine Fox. It began in 1908 and ran to 1955 with the inscription “The Toonerville Trolley That Met All The Trains.” Central to the strip was a very short and bouncy electric trolley (often shown running above the track) operated by a grizzled old conductor named “The Skipper” and his cheerful motorman. The strip was modeled after Conestoga Traction and similar hill-and-dale rural interurban trolley lines in Pennsylvania.

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2. How can I send you some pictures of the CT trolley?
   Skip Reynolds

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   1. You can email them. adam@unchartedlancaster.com

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