The Mount showcases rare 1904 Pope-Hartford motorcar, spotlights Edith Wharton's New England motoring tours and their impact on her writing

Lenox, Mass. (September 27, 2003) -- This weekend The Mount is displaying a rare 1904 Pope-Hartford motorcar, the model first owned by the author in the U.S., with experts hosting talks on the car and its historic Hartford maker, and on the literary legacy of Wharton's early motoring tours throughout New England.

The weekend program, "A Woman on Wheels -- Edith Wharton & her 1904 Pope-Hartford Motorcar," includes an up-close look at the early-model car, with daily talks by owner John Konwiser of Arizona. Only two fully intact 1904 Pope-Hartfords are known to exist today. Konwiser also displayed his 1910 Pope-Hartford touring car.

While touring The Mount last summer, Konwiser spotted the car in an historic photo. He immediately recognized it as the same rare antique car he had purchased a few years ago, and contacted The Mount's curator Erica Donnis, who worked with him to organize this special program.

Donnis and Wharton interpreters at The Mount are hosting talks throughout the weekend about Wharton's motoring trips through the Berkshires and New England and their influence on some of her most famous novels, including Ethan Frome, Summer and The Fruit of the Tree.

The 1904 Pope-Hartford: Automotive history in the making

In July 1904, Edith and Teddy Wharton purchased their first motorcar in the U.S., a new Pope-Hartford touring car produced by the Pope Motor Car Company in nearby Hartford, Conn. At the turn of the century, Hartford was considered the automobile capital of the world, turning out more than half of all motorized vehicles manufactured in the U.S.

Founded by Colonel Albert Pope in 1877, the Pope Manufacturing Company successfully built the Columbia bicycle, making Pope one of the country's most prosperous industrialists. His production techniques, developed for bicycles then adapted for autos, were critical to America's manufacturing legacy. In his 2000 biography of Pope, Stephen B. Goddard explains, "Historians list him in the first rank of contributors to modern industry based on his refinement of mass production and the use of interchangeable parts. Indeed, he was the first manufacturer to mass-produce automobiles." Pope also was the nation's leading champion of the "Good Roads" movement, which paved the way for the interconnected federal highway system.

The Wharton's 1904 car was the Pope Motor Car Company's first for sale. It also became the most successful of four lines, continuing in production through 1914, when the firm folded.

In July 1904 Berkshire Resort Topics reported that, "Mr. Edward R. Wharton has joined the ranks of the automobilists, having purchased this week, through the agency of [Lenox's] Thomas S. Morse, a very handsome Pope-Hartford light touring car of ten horse-power, with removable tonneau and brass trimmings." The medium-priced car featured one cylinder, two forward speeds, one reverse speed and lamps as standard equipment - a move criticized by competitors. Its steering wheel was on its right side, and it seated up to four. Konwiser purchased his restored 1904 Pope-Hartford three years ago and added a new fan top based on the original option.

The Pope-Hartford was introduced during a pivotal period in the auto industry, as motorcars were beginning to catch on widely with progressive, wealthy people. In 1904, U.S. production more than doubled to 22,830, gasoline powered-cars clearly pulled ahead of electric vehicles and steering wheels replaced tillers. In fact, only cars produced through 1904 may compete in the famous London-to-Brighton road race. This race has run annually every November since the 1896 "Emancipation Act" raised the speed limit from 4 to 14 mph and ended the requirement for cars to be preceded by a man on foot. Konwiser's Pope-Hartford has participated three times.

Edith Wharton: Using the car to explore "the mystery beyond the next blue hills"

Although Wharton was born into conservative "Old New York" society, she embraced modern inventions of her time, equipping The Mount in 1902 with electricity, a hydraulic baggage elevator, telephones, and abundant indoor plumbing.

But, the automobile was the technological innovation that proved to be the most important to her. During her motoring trips in New England, Wharton was deeply struck by the hardships of life in isolated villages, farms, and factory towns. She resolved to write about these harsh realities honestly rather than romanticize them. Her motoring tours influenced her classic works set in the Berkshires, Ethan Frome and Summer, and her tour of the Plunkett Cotton Mills in Adams, Mass., led to descriptions of factory working conditions in The Fruit of the Tree.

Wharton's fervor for the intense beauty of the region also grew with the introduction of the automobile, which she said, "restored the romance of travel." In her autobiography A Backward Glance she explained:

In those epic days roads and motors were an equally unknown quantity, and one set out on a ten-mile run with more apprehension than would now attend a journey across Africa. But the range of country-lovers like myself had hitherto been so limited, and our imagination so tantalized by the mystery beyond the next blue hills, that there was inexhaustible delight in penetrating to the remoter parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, discovering derelict villages with Georgian churches and balustraded house-fronts, exploring slumberous mountain valleys, and coming back, weary but laden with a new harvest of beauty, after sticking fast in ruts, having to push the car up hill, to rout out the village blacksmith for repairs, and suffer the jeers of horse-drawn travelers trotting gaily past us.

The Whartons nicknamed their car "Alfred de Musset" in honor of one of French author George Sand's lovers. Their motoring adventures led them through the Berkshires and to eastern Massachusetts, Newport, Rhode Island, the Hudson River area of New York, New Hampshire, and Maine.

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