120th Anniversary of George Wyman’s Coast to Coast Ride – Part 21

June 26, 1903

(Perrysburg to Cleveland, OH)
“From Perrysburg I got a 7 o’clock start, but soon discovered that I did not have any more lubricating oil than enough to last for 30 miles. By economizing I managed to reach Tremont(sic Fremont) where I got some oil at a machine shop. It was so thick that I had to heat it before it would run, but it was better than nothing.

After leaving Fremont the roads began to grow very poor. There had been several days of rain on them Just before I came along and as they were simply dirty roads for repeated stretches of 10 miles or more the mud was deep and wide.

Near Amherst about 30 miles west of Cleveland I got my first reminder of the one-horse story and a foretaste of what was in store for me.

The truss on the front forks of my bicycle broke. When I stopped to remove the remains of it, I found that it had crystallized so that it was like a piece of old rusty iron. It broke in several places like a stick of rotten wood. That was the effect of the terrible pounding the machine had received over the railroad ties.

It occurred to me at the time that the whole machine must have suffered similarly, but it did not show signs of disintegrating at the time, and I concluded it would carry me to New York.

After leaving Elyria, 25 miles from Cleveland…

I struck a good sidepath that continued for 20 miles. It was only six inches wide in places, but those few inches spelled salvation for me, because the road was so heavy with sand that if I had not had the path to ride I would have had to have walked for long stretches.

Just out of Elyria I met an automobile, and it was having a hard time of it. It was all the engine could do to keep it moving.

The last five miles into Cleveland I went over the best roads I ever had ridden on anywhere in my life. It was 7 p.m. when I reached Cleveland, and my first move was to hunt up an automobile station in order to get some oil.

At the Oldsmobile branch I found what I wanted, and they gave me enough to last for 300 miles, all I cared to carry, in fact. They took a lively interest in me and my bicycle and examined my motor carefully.

Like everyone else, though, they had to be shown the photographs of my start from San Francisco before fully accepting my statement that I had come from California. My distance for this day, to Cleveland, was 121 miles, and I used five quarts of gasoline.”

June 27, 1903
(Cleveland to Conneaut, OH)

“It was on the day I left Cleveland, June 27, that my troubles began to come thick and fast. I started from Cleveland at 10 a.m. and had gone only a mile when the lacing holes in my driving belt gave way and I had to stop and relace.

For the first five miles the road was fine, and then I came to a stretch where the road was being rebuilt and I had to walk for a mile and a half. After that, I had a plank road for six miles, and then it was sandy for 30 miles, all the way to Geneva.

From there to Conneaut, 22 miles.

The road was good in places, with occasional stretches of clay and sand, through which it was hard going. It was a dreary day of travel through a pretty farming country, where the ranchers seemed to be as heavywitted as the cattle. The belt broke five times during the afternoon, and the last time I fixed it I laced It with two inches of space between the ends in order to make it reach.

I passed through town after town, where I wondered what the people did for recreation. There was nothing for them to do after their day’s work but to walk around the block and then go to bed. One thing I noticed is that it is a poor country for shoemakers for nearly everyone I saw, men, women and children, were barefooted.

It was plain that much of the country I saw was settled by immigrant farmers from Germany and other parts of Europe. I made only 75 miles this day. When I arrived in Conneaut, I got a piece of belting at a bicycle store and spliced my troublesome piece of driving leather. Then I discovered that the screws in the crankcase of the motor were all loose, so I put in some white lead and tightened them. It was so late by this time that I concluded to remain at Conneaut that night.”

June 28, 1903
(Conneaut, OH to Angola, NY)

“My hoodoo was with me all the next day. I left Conneaut at 7:30 a.m., and before I had gone quite 10 miles the oil began to leak out of the crankcase, although I had done my best to make it tight and seal it with white lead the night before.

The belt again gave out and I had my own profane troubles with these two defects all day. First it was the oil, and then the belt, and I became so disgusted before noon that I felt like shooting the whole machine full of holes and deserting it.

This was my first visit to Pennsylvania – for I been riding in the little 50-mile strip of the Keystone State that borders on Lake Erie ever since leaving Conneaut – and I can say that all my Pennsylvania experiences were hard ones.

The roads were fairly good and for most of the way I rode on footpaths at the side of the road. The view from the road with the luxuriant verdure clad bluffs on one side and the horizon bounded expanse of the great lake on the other side was as magnificent as I had seen. It reminded me of the good old Pacific.

By afternoon I had crossed the Pennsylvania strip and at last was in New York state. It seemed as if I was nearing home then, but it is a big state, and I came to realize the truth of the song that “its a blanked long walk to the gay Rialto in New York.” I didn’t have to walk, but walking would have been easier than the way I traveled from the western boundary of the Empire State to the metropolis. It was on the afternoon of June 28 that I entered the state, and it was eight days later before I got to the confines of the great city.

USGS, c.1899

That route today by the dock area

I had hoped to reach Buffalo on the day I left Conneaut but was still 25 miles from the Queen City when my troubles climaxed by the breaking of a fork side. The crystallization resulting from the continuous pounding was telling again.

I walked two miles to Angola, and there sought a telegraph office, and wired Chicago for a pair of new forks. I learned that I would not be able to get a pair there for two days, because they would have to go first to Buffalo and then be reshipped to Angola.

I therefore determined to get the forks repaired there if possible, and make them do till I got to Buffalo. It is a fortunate thing that I was not riding fast or going downhill when the fork side broke.

I was told that automobiles and motor bicycles frequently traveled the road that I took from Chicago to New York, but the behavior of the natives belied it. People all came running out of the houses when I passed, and they stared as if they never had seen a motor bicycle before.”
He sought accommodations that night, and in the morning went to a “repair shop” to work on the forks. In 1903, Angola was the home of the Emblem Bicycle Manufacturing Company, on York Street. Emblem would later produce motorcycles.

The Emblem shop was here