Wheeling Season

When English inventor John Kemp Starley introduced the Rover Safety Bicycle—featuring two equal-sized wheels, a chain-driven rear wheel, and a diamond-shaped frame—it sparked a national bicycling craze. The year was 1885. Starley’s precursor to the modern bike replaced the precarious velocipede, whose large front wheels often had the unintended consequence of pitching the cyclist forward.

 

As the Safety Bicycle’s popularity exploded, bicycle clubs launched nationwide. This postcard photo, taken by the prolific River Towns photographer George Washington Freeland in the early 1900s, shows the Milford Bicycle Team in front of the Upper Black Eddy–Milford Bridge.

 

“In that time, each town was its own universe: Each had its own churches, newspaper, grocery, baseball team, tennis team, fire department, and bicycle team,” says Rob Castagna, a Milford historian and the proprietor of Chestnut Hill on the Delaware, a local bed-and-breakfast. Castagna notes the team is standing by the covered bridge, the grist mill, and Hightsman’s Grove, a former park that has long since been washed away by floodwaters.

 

Safety Bicycles, whose frames accommodated skirts, and clubs like the Milford Bicycle Team were a game-changer for women’s liberation. By allowing women to move independently, suffragist Susan B. Anthony noted, bicycles did “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

 

Despite debates about women’s right to ride bicycles, the Milford Bicycle Team embraced women as members. Anthony, who died around the time this photo was taken, noted in an 1896 interview in The World, “I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel … the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”