 Two spares came with the cars, mounted on the driver’s side of the vehicle, which precluded using that side for entry or exit. The driver had to slide in from the left side. This was even more frustrating since all of the cars were right-hand drive in 1911
One of the most cautionary tales of the early motor industry in America was the rise and fall of Civil War veteran Colonel Albert A. Pope’s automotive empire. Established in Hartford, Connecticut in 1904, the automobile company was built upon the success of Pope’s earlier endeavors manufacturing bicycles, from 1877 up to the turn of the century, by which time he had established The American Bicycle Co., a conglomerate comprised of some 45 independent manufacturers.
Pope’s early motorcars included the Pope-Hartford, the Pope-Toledo, and lower-priced Pope-Tribune models. The Colonel was also behind one of America’s first electric cars, the Columbia, developed in 1897. One of the early success stories in battery-powered automobiles, at the turn of the century Columbia and Col. Pope entered into a merger agreement with the Electric Vehicle Company of New York and William C. Whitney, a New York financier and former Secretary of the Navy, who had purchased the company from founder Isaac Rice in 1899. Pope’s arrangement with Electric Vehicle and Whitney not only brought an infusion of cash into the Columbia Automobile Co., but the promise of manufacturing a fleet of electric taxi cabs, some 2,000 of which were produced in Hartford by 1900. Electric Vehicle had essentially ceased manufacturing in 1899 becoming a holding company for Whitney, which managed the funds for the reorganized Columbia Automobile Company. Columbia built Whitney’s fleet of electric-powered taxi cabs and continued to manufacture a variety of electric cars well into the early 1910s, the last being produced in 1911. Columbia itself lasted until 1913 building gasoline powered models. Their first, offered in 1903, was powered by a single-cylinder engine. The following year Columbia developed both two and four-cylinder engines. The last cars built in 1912 and 1913 were all four-cylinder models, known as the Caviler and Knight, the latter having a longer 129-inch wheelbase chassis. The less expensive Caviler line rode on a 120-inch wheelbase.
Though the electrics and Columbia gasoline cars were a modest success for Pope in the early 1900s, fortune of another kind had smiled on the Colonel through his partnership with Whitney. He had brought a literal cash cow to Pope-Hartford’s doorstep. Among Whitney’s various holdings shared in the merger were the rights to the Holy Grail of early automotive patents, George B. Seldon’s November 5, 1895 patent for the automobile. It’s an absolute fact that Seldon hadn’t invented the motor carriage, or even conceived of the idea; but he had the sagacity to beat everyone else to the US patent office with the detailed design for a motorized carriage back in 1878. His final 1895 patent laid out all of the fundamentals for a four-wheeled motorized carriage. Why the 16-year gap? His original patent application (which predated Carl Benz’s 1886 German patent by almost eight years) was followed by a litany of amendments over a 16-year span to include everything from the use of an internal combustion engine to the basics of chassis, suspension, and steering design. The patent drawing showed a steering “wheel” rather than a steering tiller, and the engine was positioned over the front axle rather than under the driver or in the rear as were most early designs. Selden’s illustration wasn’t too different from a dozen other designs (with the exception of the two previously noted features), but it was the only design with a US patent number! Selden was six years ahead of Ransom E. Olds, almost a decade ahead of David Buick, and had his patent in force a year before the first Duryea production models were offered for sale. Although Charles E. and J. Frank Duryea had built their very first horseless carriage two years before Seldon’s patent was granted, they had never applied for one, and J. Frank Duryea didn’t build his first production cars until 1896.
 For Pope-Hartford 1911 was a fairly good year, considering what was coming in 1912 with the collapse of the United States Motors Corporation. In 1911 the company offered six different body styles for the Model W including the exclusive 7-Passenger Touring only available for the Model W 124-inch wheelbase chassis. Though sales were good, the company’s annual production rarely exceeded 700 cars a year. In 1911 sales totaled 693 cars. This example has a late 1911 style body similar to the 1912 Model 27 Touring with a front passenger side door.
In 1899 George Selden made a shrewd business decision, he sold his patent rights to W. C. Whitney. In rerturn, Whitney’s Electric Vehicle Company agreed to pay Selden a $15 per car royalty with a guaranteed minimum annual payment of $5,000. That wasn’t nearly enough (since he was essentially paying Selden for the cars being built by Columbia and Pope), so in the early 1900s Whitney set about collecting “royalties” from other automakers for infringement of the Selden patent. It was a legitimate claim, albeit one that had the air of a shakedown. (A similar situation had arisen in the mid 19th century over inventor Rollin White’s 1855 patent for the breech loading bored through cylinder. The White patent prevented American firearms makers from producing breech loading cartridge revolvers without paying a royalty to White and Smith & Wesson, which had wisely purchased the rights before introducing America’s first cartridge revolvers in 1857. S&W and White pursured every patent violation, even during the Civil War and ran more than a few companies out of business!) Col. Pope had born witness to this during the War Between the States, and surely had Selden and Whitney’s ear in this matter when they decided to go after other American automakers.
They were initially successful in their royalty claims, negotiating a 1.25 percent payment (other statistics claim it was 0.75 percent) for all American cars built and sold by the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, the ALAM. Over the years this put several hundred thousand dollars into Whitney and Selden’s pockets and helped fill Col. Pope’s coffers for quite awhile, while at the same time hindering other company’s from venturing into the automotive field and angering many others, including the newly established Ford Motor Co.
 Rear accommodations included a wide leather upholstered seat for three, and two folding jump seats, making the car suitable for seven.
Henry Ford, a renegade from the start, was not part of the ALAM, and challenged the legitimacy of the Selden patent in a benchmark legal battle that lasted eight years. After appealing the first court decision, which found in Selden’s favor, Ford finally prevailed in 1911 and brought an end to the Selden patent’s bloodletting of independent automakers. Ironically, without an extension, a patent has a 14-year life span, and Selden’s would have expired in 1912.
As an automaker Pope-Hartford built some impressive motorcars, particularly between 1911 and 1913, when examples such as this pair of tall, stately 7-passenger Touring models were regarded among the most luxurious of American automobiles.
The Pope-Hartford sales brochure noted that, “...a wide range is offered the prospective purchaser in the matter of body styles and the choice offered in finish and upholstering is almost unlimited. We lay great stress upon the fact that the complete car, including the motor, carburetor, bodies, transmission, crank shaft, radiator, axles and other important members, are made in the Pope shops at Hartford.”
The 1911 models were powered by an OHV four-cylinder engine displacing 389.8 cubic inches with a bore x stroke of 4-3/4 x 5-1/2 inches and an advertised output of 50 horsepower, an increase of 10 horsepower over the previous model year. The price when new was a lofty $3,250. In 1911 Pope introduced the six-cylinder Model Y, also providing 50 horsepower, but built on a longer 134-inch wheelbase. The four-cylinder Model W chassis measured 124-inches.
For 1911 the Hartford automaker offered six standard body styles for the Model W and four for the Model Y. Both were available with 5-Passenger Touring, 4-Passenger Roadster, Limousine, and Landaulet coachwork. The Model W was also available with exclusive 7-Passenger Touring coachwork (as shown) and as a 4-Passenger Pony Tonneau. Additional body styles were added in 1912 and the six-cylinder engine's output was increased to 60 horsepower.
 Pope-Hartford engines were built at the Hartford, Connecticut, factory. The 50-horsepower, four-cylinder model of 1911 had a bore x stroke of 4-3/4 x 5-1/2 inches for a total swept volume of 389.8 cubic inches. Top speed was estimated to be upwards of 50mph. For a car measuring over 12 feet in length and weighing more than 3,200 pounds that was quite adequate in 1911!
Despite the quality of its cars and the diversity of products and models, Pope-Hartford had suffered an irreconcilable reversal of fortune by 1914. A year before the end, Pope added a new lower-priced, four-cylinder model built on a shortened 118-inch wheelbase chassis and reduced output of 40 horsepower. The 124-inch models continued as in the previous two years, with a few new body styles added, as did the larger 60-horsepower line. That was really the last year for Pope-Hartford. For 1914 the product line was reduced to only a 118-1/2 inch wheelbase, 40-horpseower series which was limited to just three standard body styles. This drastic change in a single year was a dire warning that the end was at hand. What had brought Pope-Hartford to this sad end? It wasn’t necessarily “what” but rather “whom”, and the “whom” was Benjamin Briscoe.
The tale of greed and empire building that brought down Pope-Hartford and Columbia, took with it nearly all of the companies associated with Benjamin Briscoe’s ill-fated United States Motors Corporation. Brisco had watched from the sidelines as William C. Durant began establishing General Motors in 1908. From his perspective it could easily be done again and Briscoe put together his own automotive conglomerate comprised of Brush (established in 1907 by W .C. Durant protégé Alanson P. Brush); Stoddard-Dayton (one of America’s early premier marques, founded in 1904); Pope-Hartford and Columbia; and the Maxwell-Brisco Motor Company started by Brisco and automotive engineer Jonathan Maxwell in 1905. Maxwell was doing quite well on its own by 1910 when Brisco set up the United States Motors Corporation using General Motors as his model. Unfortunately, what seemed to work for GM and founder William C. Durant did not work for Ben Briscoe and his associates. In 1910 even Henry Ford was content to be a one product automaker, knowing the risks of over extending one’s own reach. This would later be Durant’s downfall, but for now Durant had been lucky, he had the right combination of companies; Briscoe did not. What could have been the greatest challenge to General Motors in the early years of the 20th century came and went in a comparative blink of an eye. The whole affair ended in 1912. The only long term survivor of the United States Motors Corporation debacle was Maxwell (later Maxwell-Chalmers in 1921), which became the Chrysler Corporation in 1925 under the stewardship of former GM executive and Buick Division President Walter P. Chrysler.
As for Pope’s little fiefdom, now being headed by his brother George (Col. Albert having passed way in 1909) only the Pope-Hartford was still in production by the time the United States Motors Corporation was organized in 1910. The Pope-Tribune had been discontinued a year before the Colonel’s death, and the Pope-Toledo came to the end of the road in 1909. Faced with rapidly declining sales, the lost Selden patent revenue in 1911 and the failure of the United States Motors Corporation in 1912, Pope-Hartford was forced to close its doors two years later, selling the main assembly plant in Hartford, Connecticut, to Pratt & Whitney.
Today we are left with a handful of various models that bore the Pope-Hartford name, cars that for a brief time shared the spotlight with Packard, Pierce, and Peerless as one of this nation’s prestige automotive marques. As the French say, fame and success, like youth are ephemeral, fleeting. Put into a more contemporary context, Pope-Hartford had its 15 minutes. For collectors of this rare marque, it was time well spent.. |
