WOMEN PIONEERS | Alice Huyler Ramsey

Alice Huyler Ramsey, pioneer driver, 1909. Photo:
 Library of Congress and Smithsonian Magazine.

June 9, 2020—This day, in 1909, Alice Huyler Ramsey set off in the rain from New York City for San Francisco in a Maxwell 30 automobile.

She was determined to become the first woman to drive across the United States. She traveled with three other women, none of whom knew how to drive!

Just over five feet, 22 years old, she posed next the car with her rubber helmet and visor in the rain until she got tired of the umbrella-toting cameramen. She kissed her husband goodbye and cranked the motor to start up the car.

Alice Ramsey and team first stopped at Poughkeepsie, according to the Vassar Alumnae Magazine. She was two years out of Vassar, two years ahead of Inez Milholland, and had a comfortable stop at her alma mater before proceeding across country on the so-called highways of the day. It was the month that Inez Milholland made her famous graveyard speech at Vassar. At graduation, the President of Vassar confided to Inez's father about his daughter: "Wonderful girl, Inez. I'm glad she's gone."

The four women in the car wore ponchos to keep themselves dry. Their touring car was a dark-green, four-cylinder, 30-HP Maxwell DA, with two bench seats and a removable pantasote roof.

Two men laid the groundwork for her trip:

• Her husband, John Rathbone Ramsey, decided to purchase a car for his wife when her horse was spooked by one. Ramsey found she enjoyed driving around the mostly dirt roads near her Hackensack, New Jersey, home.
• Then she entered a 200-mile endurance drive across Long Island to Montauk and back and an unidentified representative of automaker Maxwell-Briscoe Company saw her driving and was impressed. He proposed an expense-paid trip in a 1909 Maxwell, courtesy of the company,  if she would drive the other direction, across the country (but not back again; she took the train).

It all happened and she and her crew of three spent nights at hotels, eating restaurant food and an occasional home-cooked meal. They defied the advice of doctors, who warned that it was dangerous for women even to ride in cars because at 20 miles an hour it would overstimulate them. In fact, when the women got to the Cleveland Highway in Ohio they attained "the terrific speed" of 42 miles per hour with no ill effects. Ramsey fixed at least one tire blowout by then and had called for a mechanic to repair a coil in Syracuse, waiting near their car as someone in the crowd cried “Get a horse!” Altogether they went through 11 spare tires.

In the Midwest, the car ran out of gas. The women had forgotten to check the specially enlarged 20-gallon tank frequently enough. Some muddy roads proved practically impassable for the tread-less tires. At one point the women had to sleep beside an overflowed creek until the water receded. They took 13 days to go 360 miles, being towed by horses from time to time.

There were no road signs then. Ramsey relied on the Blue Book series of automotive guides, which gave directions using landmarks, but sometimes the route changed. And there were no books for regions west of the Mississippi River.

Unlike Robert Frost, when Ramsey came to a crossroads, she chose the road more traveled by. For example, she followed the roads with telegraph poles “with the greatest number of wires.”

On certain days, the Maxwell-Briscoe Company hired pilot cars familiar with the area to lead them. Even so, the party sometimes hit a dead end at a mine or sandpit and had to backtrack.

Locals rode horses for miles and waited by roadsides for hours to catch a glimpse of the Ramsey team. Only six years had passed since Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson’s 1903 drive marked the first male cross-country success.

They arrived in San Francisco on August 7, 1909. The trip took 59 days, 41 of them driving, and covered 3,800 miles. In 1960, the Automobile Manufacturers Association named her their “First Lady of Automotive Travel” for her trek across a “trackless land.”

Ramsey outlived Maxwell-Briscoe, which was absorbed in 1926 by Chrysler. She lived on to 1983. She was the first woman inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, in 2000. Her book about the trip was called Veil, Duster, and Tire Iron (1961). An abbreviated story from the book was printed in the Smithsonian Magazine on the centennial of the cross-country drive.

Other women pioneers in automobile history include Mary Dickerman Woodin, mother of William H. Woodin, FDR's first Secretary of the Treasury, who hired my father in 1933 for his first job working at the Farm Credit Administration. Woodin's mother was the first woman to obtain a driver's license in the State of Pennsylvania.