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Interurban Effects on the Farm
Perhaps the interurban's greatest impact was on the rural farming community.
The interurbans were particularly well suited to agricultural traffic. The electric cars made frequent stops at conveniently located loading sheds and platforms; the use of city streetcar tracks provided a good distribution system in urban areas; and the fast, frequent service made trolley freight attractive for milk, fruit, and produce, which required prompt shipment to market. All of this greatly improved the farmer's access to markets.

There were social benefits as well. The interurbans gave farm families and farmworkers new mobility. Previously limited by the radius of a horse and wagon, they could board an interurban at the nearest country crossing and be off to town and city. It was a welcome release, for despite all of the nostalgia about the sterling values of life on the family farm, it was a hard, confining life.

The Chicago Tribune noted: "There has been an extraordinary impetus given to the social life of the farmer class of the country. A boy can remain at home, do his work on the farm during the day, and yet take his girl to the theater, or to a lecture, or a dance that night, and get home in time to do the chores in the morning at least. The farmers are coming oftener to the city. They find they can get city types of clothes as cheaply as they formerly could the antiquated garments which once distinguished the agriculturalist. The gawky country boy and girl is disappearing so rapidly that there will soon be little material in that line left for the comic weeklies, because the type is being wiped out by the interurban railroad."7

Adele Marie Shaw wrote about the improvement to farm life brought about by electricity: "Much of the talk about farm life is drivelling sentimentality," she wrote. "To the hard manual labor and the dearth of outside interests of many country places to-day a desert island would offer a pleasing contrast."8

Shaw spoke of the interurban as the "liberating trolley." Shaw wrote, "Everything that puts the farm into direct communication with people and things outside its own boundaries breaks the stagnation whose labor is unproductive and ill paid. . . . Closer contact with the town gives to the farm home a better table, better decoration, wider interests, and the trolley-lines provide this contact."9

John R. Graham, an electric railway president at Bangor, Maine, saw the new mobility as a good thing, saying that "Social conditions on the farm have been greatly improved as a result of the electric railway."10 Since the advantages of the city were easily available, Graham maintained, the problem of keeping young people down on the farm was solved.

Indiana State Statistician Johnson saw it the other way. In 1904 Johnson said that a dearth of farm hands in the state was “due to the rapid development of the electric interurban railways, which offer easier hours and more remunerative employment. The problem,” he said, was “a serious one in some sections of the state.”11

Shaw saw benefits from the interurban for farm children. "I know a country boy who in the summer earns $1 30 a day picking berries that he conveys to town by the early morning trolley. His fare for the round trip is twenty cents. Before the electric line was established he had no way of getting his wares into connection with a market. Every country place near an electric-railway line shows such instances; the trolley increases the earning power of the child of the small farmer as well as of his more prosperous neighbor, and enables him to spend what he earns to better advantage."12

According to Shaw there were educational advantages, too. "As an aid to cheap transportation the 'electrics' give the country children better education;" and "high schools in small cities show a striking increase in country patronage since the electric roads were built, and good education is good business."13

Shaw saw the interurban as a boon for the country wife, as well. [Amusement parks] “draw a large proportion of their visitors from the country. . . . Vaudeville on a rustic stage above bay or lake or river bank, electric fountains filling the night with color, out-of-doors as a pastime—these are good prescriptions for the woman who spends too many hours 'over a hot stove' in a farmhouse kitchen. . . . The 'out-of-doors' and the social opportunity are the great gifts of the country trolley to women."14

The Chicago Tribune even saw mental health benefits in the interurbans. “It is fair to presume that the loneliness of the farmer's wife is at an end, and if that be so the unfortunate percentage of suicides in the agricultural districts will surely decrease when a farmer can take his wife and children and in a few minutes be dropped at the nearest cross roads, or even at the village, or interior city which was visited only once in a season when the roads were good, and when the general farm team was not otherwise occupied."15

The contemporary accounts noted above clearly indicate that interurbans were seen as—and were—a new technology that brought a significant improvement in mobility and quality of life wherever they were developed.

The Lasting Effects of the Interurbans
Just what were the lasting effects of the interurbans?
Their physical traces can still be found—old stations, substations, freight houses—long since converted to other uses. Sometimes interurban routes can be traced by the presence of old bridge abutments, the remains of an embankment, or the alignment of a power transmission line. These are interesting, but in what lasting way were American growth and development changed by the interurbans? Sadly, in a general way at least, I would have to conclude, not many.

The interurbans did indeed follow in the path of the railroads in bringing major change and improvement to the nation’s mobility, but the period of their effect was almost tragically brief. Just how brief is perhaps best illustrated by the history of Maine's Portland-Lewiston Interurban. The maiden run over the line was made on 29 June 1914, with the car Arbutus, with motorman Charles H. Mitchell and conductor Joseph L'Heureux as its crew. When the line made its last run on 28 June 1933 it was with the same car, Arbutus, and with the same crew of Mitchell and L'Heureux.

The interurban was displaced by a newer automotive technology that did a far better and more complete job of bringing mobility to America. In summary, the interurban can at the most be regarded as a transitional technology that occupied a brief period between a time when local travel was severely proscribed by the limitations of country roads, horse-drawn conveyance, and steam railroads and the arrival of the almost universal mobility afforded by the automobile and improved roads.

Important as they were in their brief history, it would be hard to say that anything in Seymour, Terre Haute, Scottsburg, Muncie, or Fort Wayne is much different today than it would have been if the interurbans had never existed. But having said that, I think that within this rather discouraging general conclusion there are some important exceptions, and I would like to close with a mention of two examples.

Interurbans and the Growth of Los Angeles
The greatest interurban railway system in America was the Pacific Electric Railway founded by Henry E. Huntington, which grew to a system of nearly twelve hundred miles reaching over 125 cities in a four-county area of Southern California. Far more so than almost any other interurban, Pacific Electric was built to shape growth and development.

Huntington had a boundless optimism about the future of Southern California. "I am a foresighted man," he once said, "and I believe Los Angeles is destined to become the most important city in the country if not in the world. It can extend in any direction as far as you like."16

With this vision Huntington was active in property development, and the advance of the electric cars into new territory was carefully coordinated with his real estate interests. Thus Pacific Electric became the transportation framework upon which Southern California developed. When Huntington began the formation of his electric railway empire at the start of the twentieth century, the entire four counties of Southern California had a total population of less than 250,000, a figure that would double or more every decade for the next thirty years. Far more than most people realize, this great metropolitan area, which today is home to an estimated sixteen million people, was largely built along the lines of the Pacific Electric.

By the mid–twentieth century Southern California had discarded its great interurban network in favor of the world's greatest freeway system. Today, as the region struggles to relieve its traffic congestion with a rail transit system, it is interesting to observe how closely the routes of these new rail lines parallel those of the old Pacific Electric.