Opinion

License plates predate automobiles

San Antonio had an ordinance about license plates in the early 1900s, such as this one. San Antonio had an ordinance about license plates in the early 1900s, such as this one. Photo: Courtesy Of Gerald Hewitt Photo: Courtesy Of Gerald Hewitt Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close License plates predate automobiles 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

A couple of years ago, I dug up what I was told was a license plate of early San Antonio. It is dated 1900 and was for a two-horse vehicle. I'm sure there must be some interesting stories of vehicular transportation around the turn of the century here in San Antonio.

— Gerald Hewitt

While we associate license plates with automobiles, they were around long before carriages went horseless. According to research by local historian Ed Gaida, author of “The Sidewalks of San Antonio,” the City Council passed an ordinance April 1, 1879, “requiring all vehicles used for public hire to have affixed to them a metal plate with a license number and the number of horses required to pull the vehicle.”

People in need of transportation for themselves or their goods could hail a “hack” — a horse-drawn carriage — on the street or call on a livery stable to hire one. Owners of two-horse vehicles, Gaida says, were required to pay the city a fee of $5 per year — “no small amount in those days” — for any hack, wagon or other “public vehicle.”

At the end of each year, the license number on the plate was to be repainted in a different color to indicate payment of the fee, thus saving the cost of issuing new metal plates annually. The number also had to be painted in the same color in a prominent place on the vehicle itself.

The year your plate was issued was about the time automobiles were introduced in San Antonio, says Hugh Hemphill, author of “San Antonio on Wheels” and manager of the Texas Transportation Museum. The first was an electric Studebaker, delivered in 1899 to Staacke Bros. livery service on Commerce Street. It was a two-seater that was steered by a tiller and ran on “bicycle-type wheels,” says a history of the city's automobiles on the website of the Transportation Museum, www.txtransportationmuseum.org.

Two years later, the first gasoline-powered automobile, a Haynes-Apperson, came to town. Growth in automobile ownership was slow in the early 1900s, when cars “often cost as much as houses,” says the online history. Not until 1904 did the city require owners of all local vehicles — motorized as well as horse-drawn — to be registered. As with the horse-drawn vehicles, early cars had to display identification numbers at a minimum size applied in different ways, often stenciled on the front of the car's radiator.

The city established rules in 1910 to encourage peaceful coexistence of both kinds of vehicles. “Motorists were obliged to pull over if they noticed a particularly skittish horse or mule,” Hemphill says, “(but) they did not have to stop their engines.” For drivers of livestock-powered vehicles, trainers advertised that they could educate horses and mules to “stay calm in the face of internal combustion vehicles.”

Lower-priced mass-produced cars boosted the motor vehicle's adoption in the 1910s. The tipping point for automobiles, says Hemphill, came in 1917. Not only improved technology, but “the introduction by Ford of a 1-ton version of its famous Model T allowed farmers and contractors to switch from horse wagons, turning gasoline-powered vehicles from toys for the rich to serious work implements.” Federal and state funding for better roads made driving safer and more comfortable, and cars soon left horse-drawn vehicles in the dust.

Rough diamonds: Paul Frisch, a librarian at Our Lady of the Lake University, is researching an article on community baseball in San Antonio, excluding professional teams such as the Missions or college baseball. “I am especially interested in industrial, semiprofessional and ethnic/racial leagues,” writes Frisch. If you know of any published or unpublished sources or played community baseball before 1960, contact Frisch at 210-431-4183 or paulfrisch@att.net.

Email Paula Allen at historycolumn@yahoo.com. Follow her on Twitter at @sahistorycolumn or like her at www.facebook.com/SanAntonioHistoryColumn.