Interurban

Interurban rail car at tunnel.

Experimentation with electric rail began in the early 19th century in the United States and England as inventors tinkered with developing electric motors. Charles Page scored a milestone of development in 1851 with an electric rail engine that could travel as fast as 19 miles per hour on its Maryland track. After the invention of the generator in 1860, what was often seen as an invention of limited practicality began to gain traction. An early successful line developed in Richmond, Virginia in 1887. New streetcar connections were developed between Minneapolis and St. Paul in 1891, and Portland and Oregon City in 1893. The push for "interurban" rail grew rapidly after its display at the Chicago World's Expo in 1893. The development of electric, interurban rail in Licking County, Ohio in the late 1880s was an early and advanced investment in this novel form of transportation.

Newark-Granville Line

The use of electric rail locally in Licking County was the brainchild of a Pittsburgh man named R. A. Cunningham. Cunningham collected a group of local investors and set out to build a line that would run from Newark to Granville. Construction began in 1888 and the line was completed on December 21, 1889. The first electric car ran from Newark to Granville on October 4, 1890, inaugurating what may have been the longest stretch of electric road in the world at the time

A postcard showing the Jewett Car Company factory

Not only did Licking County enjoy an early electric car line, it was also a production center for the interurban cars; the Jewett Car Company, which relocated to Newark in 1900, specialized in the manufacture of elevated, subway, and interurban cars. The company thrived in the early 1900s, expanding and employing up to 400 workers and supplied cars not only to the interurban lines of Ohio, but to the elevated rails of Chicago and New York's subways.

Electric rail lines proliferated in central Ohio in the early twentieth century with lines connecting the Newark-Granville line to Zanesville, Buckeye lake, Columbus, and beyond. The line companies became consolidated under the Ohio Electric Railway Company in 1906.

After enjoying tremendous growth in the first decades of the 20th century, the interurban lines went into decline in the 1920s. The Jewett Car Company was an early victim, closing down its production in 1919 as demand for new cars cratered. Devastated by the popularity of the automobile and hampered by the economic catastrophe of the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, most lines saw severe drops in use after 1930. By 1960, only a few cities preserved the electric rail cars in use, most famously in Chicago's South Shore Line.

Photograph of interurban rail cars with line employees.

A restored Jewett interurban car can be seen in Newark today; The Works Center for History, Art and Technology in Newark houses the railcar in its display on the local interurban rail. Visitors can climb aboard and imagine what it was like to ride the electric rail in the early nineteenth century.

For more information see:

Lawrence Brough and James Graebner. From Small Town to Downtown: A History of the Jewett Car Company 1893-1919. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.

William Middleton. The Interurban Era. Milwaukee: Kalmbach, 1961.

J.G.