Outdoors: Cycling in Richmond has deep history
RICHMOND, Va. –
While most of the Richmond cycling community has spent the past couple of years looking forward, debating where we’re headed, a local mail carrier spent that time looking deep into Richmond’s two-wheeled past, to see where we came from.
The result is “On Richmond’s Wheel,” a labor of love and a fascinating look at the largely forgotten history of cycling in the River City.
Author Tom Houff has been an avid cyclist all his life. A couple of years ago, in the free time from his day job with the postal service, he started digging into the history of the Bryan Park race series. He quickly found himself immersed in newspaper articles from the late 19th century detailing the explosion of cycling in Richmond.
“I started digging up all this stuff,” he said. “The thing that struck me was nobody knew any of it.”
Examples abound. One picture in the book shows the start of a race in 1892. It’s a drawing from the Richmond Times, which estimated the attendance for the event at Exposition Field at 15,000. The Flying Squirrels would kill for those numbers.
As bicycles became popular in the late 1880s and early ’90s, bike-centered clubs formed. Lewis Ginter built the Lakeside Wheel Club at the end of the Hermitage line to encourage trolley ridership. There were the Richmond Cycle Club and the Owl Club. In 1896, the Independent Cycle Club formed, Houff writes, probably in response to the exclusivity of the others.
Soon after its founding, Independent “invited the City out for a nighttime parade . . . each bicycle carried a ‘Chinese lantern’ to light the parade route that started at the Broad Street Clubhouse — roughly where VCU’s Siegel Center is today. The route zigzagged to the Capitol.”
The event sounds a lot like the late 1800s version of the Sports Backers’ Anthem Moonlight ride. And like the Moonlight Ride, the parade drew a healthy crop of participants. Newspaper estimates ranged from 800 to 3,500 riders, the discrepancy likely owing to the fact that spectators showed up to watch on bikes and couldn’t be discerned from the riders.
Jake Helmboldt, Richmond’s Pedestrian, Bicycle and Trails Coordinator, wrote one of two forewords to the book.
“I thought it was pretty interesting some of the comments parallel what we’re talking about 100 years later,” he said.
“(There are) comments about how riding one’s wheel was easier than going and hitching up the
To read the whole story, visit here: http://www2.timesdispatch.com/sports/sport/2012/oct/26/tdsport04-outdoors-cycling-in-richmond-has-deep-hi-ar-2312417/