Bicycle 'Landseeërs': The 19th-Century Cyclists Who Rediscovered the American Landscape
In 1894, a group of Baltimore wheelmen formed an association called The Thirteen Cyclers, hoping to explore as much new territory as possible given the topography of the surrounding countryside and the time at members’ disposal. The group’s travels are recorded in two small, handwritten volumes titled “Route Book” and “Book of Runs”; together, they are an archive that revels in discovery — and one noticeably different from the records of many other bicycle clubs, because the entries contain few references to social activities or reports of racing. Charles Rhodes served as captain, and his year-ending missive, written shortly before the club’s anniversary ride in April 1895, became a proclamation of the club’s founding purpose. Noting that they had covered much ground that had been little known to the cycling fraternity during the preceding year, Rhodes outlined his ambitious objectives for the coming year, an itinerary that stretched across most of Maryland and steered toward locations in Pennsylvania, reaching as far as Steelton and Gettysburg.
Rhodes observed that the greatest difficulty for touring in new districts was to find suitable points to obtain meals, but on more than one occasion the group also had trouble finding its way, venturing along cow paths of dubious outcome, into thick woods, across fields of high weeds, or through deep pockets of sand. Although some narratives capture the appeal of special outings — for instance, a moonlight ride “of the old kind” to Ridgeville — or point to notable land features, such as a windmill-like signal for a ferry crossing on the Little Choptank River, with red blades for passengers and white for teams, the books are most valuable as unadorned impressions of travel by bicycle during the late 19th century, best read with a willingness to tarry if one hopes to imagine those journeys. Possessing a heightened awareness of their surroundings and stirred by the compositional elements inherent in those landscapes, these Baltimore wheelmen had become discerning landseeërs.
