Alice Ramsey’s Grand 1909 Auto Adventure

Alice Huyler Ramsey, standing beside her automobile, circa 1908. Public Domain

Alice Ramsey’s New York to San Francisco auto tour of 1909 was one of the splendid events of nascent road travel.

Driving 3,800 transcontinental miles was an outrageous proposition.  There were almost no road signs. Highways didn’t exist and road maps were baffling. On the raw maze of dusty, narrow roads and wagon trails more accustomed to horse hooves or a drove of pigs than automobile rubber, her car literally disappeared into the mud or gargantuan ruts the circumference of a queen-sized bed.

Though three companions accompanied her for most of the adventure, Ramsey drove the four-cylinder, 30-horsepower 1909 Maxwell Model DA the entire length. On the slowest days of the trip, Alice drove around four miles and on days when she needed to step it up and go, the Maxwell covered close to 200 miles.

The triumphant excursion took Ramsey 59 days, 41 of actual driving, an exercise in bravery and mystery and the striking opposite of what would be considered luxury, two months of jumping washouts and slogging through quagmire and trying to repair a vehicle close to rupturing at the seams. When the Maxwell ran out of water for the radiator, she made untold trips back and forth to a drainage ditch to fill it. At least 11 tires were ruined.

Alice Huyler Ramsey in 1909, changing a tire on her green Maxwell. Public Domain

Decades after the epic conquest, Ramsey did something equally distinctive: she penned her account of the ride in a mile-by-mile travelogue, “Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron,” published in 1961.

Roots of the Grand Adventure

Alice Huyler Ramsey was a 22-year-old housewife in 1909. Her husband was John Rathbone Ramsey, a Hackensack, New Jersey lawyer and later congressman from the Sixth Congressional District.

In 1908, Ramsey was driving a buggy when a car drove by fast, spooking her horse. John decided that a buggy was too risky for his wife, so he bought her an automobile. At the time he purchased the 1908 Maxwell, according to National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, there were fewer than 200,000 registered motorized vehicles in the United States.

From the time of her first driving lesson, it was love at first steer. Ramsey was as excited about car travel as her husband was impassive—John “never drove an inch,” and “was a little afraid of it,” according to Ramsey. She logged about 6,000 miles in the first four months of owning the car.

Wholehearted about all things related to cars, she attended car rallies and races and caught the eye of the Maxwell-Briscoe Motor Company during a “reliability run,” or test drive, on Long Island.

Maxwell-Briscoe Motor Company representatives asked Alice whether she would be interested in driving cross-country as part of a campaign to enhance the Maxwell’s visibility.  Not only would Maxwell sponsor the trip and pay expenses and pledge to help with the car’s maintenance, the company would even provide the trendiest means of transportation. The deluxe Maxwell included a few modern additions to make the trip easier: a removable pantasote roof; a bigger gas tank, a rack for extra tires, and such roadside safety aids as pick, shovel, rope and additional axle.

Her husband’s consent came with two major conditions: Alice would need to travel with her two sisters-in-law Nettie and Margaret and a family friend Hermine, and, also, she would need to find a nurse to care for their two-year-old son John.

“I drove the whole trip,” Ramsey recalled in later interviews.

Four Wheels Together With Daring

Ramsey and friends started their trip at 1930 Broadway in Manhattan, at a Maxwell dealership on June 9, 1909. The horn was a rubber gadget; the headlamps were torches enclosed in brass coverings that required a match to light them; the outsized 20-gallon gasoline tank was located under the front seat and a stick was kept nearby to measure the amount of gasoline. Tires didn’t have treads and even a slight bit of rain and mud could easily leave a vehicle disabled, so they were wrapped in chains.

The first thing that Ramsey realized about traveling in car in the early 1900s was that she didn’t have to tap the brakes regularly, or worry about the other cars—there weren’t all that many. And she didn’t drive fast—normally about 25 to 30 miles per hour. Gas was available mainly at general stores (purposely built gas stations were unusual), costing on average 33 cents a gallon.

Between New York and Chicago, the trip was comparatively uneventful, mostly flat-tire repairs, though she was sideswiped by a hit-and-run Cadillac.

The American Automobile Association edition of the 1909 tour book—also known as the “Blue Book”—only dealt with the eastern United States, and it wasn’t very much help to Ramsey. Roads and turns were identified by landmarks that were ephemeral, such as yellow barns or red silos or the color of nearby buildings.

Near Toledo, Ohio, she said that she reached maximum speed, racing the Maxwell at 42 miles an hour.

Stops and stays in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California followed. West of Chicago, most roads were really nothing more than rugged, garbled cattle paths. Time and again, they only had electric poles to shepherd them from town to town, and that wasn’t always the most accurate escort.

In her journal, Alice described the roads of Illinois as clogged with teams of pigs and said that it took13 days to complete Iowa’s 360 miles, which she coped with almost all the way in low gear.

At several points along the Mississippi River, the dirt road dissolved into a thick, grimy muck nearly impossible to negotiate. At a stream in Iowa called Weasel Creek, cloggy mud made progress hopeless. A man hired by the Maxwell Company named J.D. Murphy was sent to accompany Alice after she decided that the car was too heavy and would benefit from the loss of weight if Hermine, Nettie and Margaret would travel by railroad to meet her later in Omaha, Nebraska.

Quite a Challenge: Ramsey Travels the West

Nebraska and its craggily defined and weather-beaten landscape were equally problematic for Ramsey and her new companion. At one juncture, the Maxwell was plopped in a crater filled with muddy water, each of the four tires submerged in separate holes. Murphy’s muscle was put to good use, and after much jockeying and rocking, he was able to help wedge the Maxwell loose.

After reuniting with her companions and saying goodbye to Murphy, Alice proceeded on with her coast-to-coast journey, and the mishaps came fast and furious: when the Maxwell’s brake pedal snapped loose, Alice wiggled underneath the vehicle and fixed it with a slice of wire; an axle snapped (another mechanic installed a replacement) and hail storms erupted (forcing the women to seek shelter at a nearby farm); on one especially harsh leg, in South Dakota, Ramsey needed to be dragged out of giant pothole by a boy driving a team of horses.

In one section in Wyoming, the arroyos were so steep that the car kept slipping backwards and in order to reach the crest, Margaret, Nettie, and Hermine had to stand beside the Maxwell and insert pieces of wood behind the tires, crawling inch by inch.

At one point, the group needed to traverse the Platte River in Wyoming on a Union Pacific Railroad bridge built exclusively for trains. All other bridges near the crossing had been washed away, prompting Alice to make a dicey executive decision. Bouncing wickedly from tie to tie across the trestle, Alice manipulated one wheel between the rails and the other on the perimeter of the bridge to cross the most unnerving mile of the journey.

Utah and its seemingly endless miles of outstretched desert provided the longest, hottest days of the trip, and perhaps the most uncomfortable. One day, Alice was behind the wheel for 17 hours, and without the luxury of lodging or a modern rest stop, she napped on a bed comprised of seat cushions from the two bench seats of the car.

Nevada and the Sierra Nevada Mountains failed to provide much relief or comfort, either. Towering mountains and serpentine roads strewn with boulders and rocks almost destroyed the overworked engine. In order to keep the motor cool and compliant, Alice rested the Maxwell and lifted its hood at each turn, and 70 miles of travel took eight hours. After entering California, Alice steered the Maxwell to Oakland and then to a ferry that carried the foursome to San Francisco.

On Aug. 7, 1909, the Maxwell and its intrepid passengers rolled off the ferry having successfully driven across America, departing the East Coast 59 days earlier. The Maxwell Company had signaled their arrival, and a host of viewers greeted the automotive trailblazers. Ramsey described it as a grand party, replete with horns blaring and spectators cheering and even a procession of cars escorting them through the streets of San Francisco.

Love of Road Travel Undiminished

Alice Ramsey returned home from her cross-country journey to New York City and her family as a hero. Over the subsequent 70 years, she drove across America more than 30 times.

At age 91, she was photographed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, which noted that she wore “a hearing aid, bifocals, and a pacemaker and walks with a cane,” but said that driving presented no difficulty. “Cars today are a cinch—if you can steer, you can drive—but the people are another story,” she said. “People are just in too much of a hurry today.”

Alice Ramsey died on Sept. 10, 1983, at age 96.

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