Circa 1870
Campbell House Museum
Descriptive Detail
Elegant, just a little bit sporty, and painted black with green felt seat coverings, this light, four-wheeled phaeton with open sides was a carriage model popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically, the phaeton contained one or two seats, usually had a folding top and was owner driven—no outside driver’s seat. (In Greek mythology, Phaeton is the son of Helios the Sun God, who drove his father’s chariot. The horses bolted and almost set fire to the Earth before they were stopped.) The Campbell House model is a mail phaeton because it was constructed with springs originally constructed for mail coaches. However, it was still considered a gentleman’s carriage to be used for pleasure driving or for traveling by post. (Traveling by post means making a journey by stages using hired post horses driven postilion, by a post boy. The Postilion is someone who rides the near horse of a pair in order to guide the horses pulling the carriage.) Designed for use with a pair of horses, it was considered an excellent carriage for carrying passengers with luggage. The open sides also allowed the passengers to be seen in all their finery, which gives us the term "carriage trade,” referring to the wealthy patrons or customers of a store who arrived in their elegant horse drawn carriages.
The two carriage lamps attached to either side of the front seat were important safety measures. Made of metal with reflecting glass, they made the carriage visible to other drivers and also provided light for the passengers. Carriage lamps were either candle-powered or burned fuel oil. These lamps were run with fuel oil, which was kept in the vertical fuel post below the four-sided shade.
Local and National Historical Connections
Travel in the early nineteenth century was so much slower and more difficult than it is in the twenty-first century. Roads and streets were rough, rutted, and often muddy. If you did not have a horse, you walked. In a big city such as St. Louis, you could hire a horse-drawn cab or ride a horse-pulled trolley with windows. If you were a wealthy man like Robert Campbell, you would have a carriage or perhaps two to take you where you wanted to go. The Campbells had another closed and more luxurious carriage with Robert’s initials painted on the side. Servants would take care of the horses, the vehicles, and the equipment. The distinction was that carriages carried people, while carts and wagons were mostly used to carry goods and, sometimes, servants or the lower classes. The Campbell horses were boarded at a nearby stable.
An important nineteenth-century industry, carriages and buggies were mass-produced from the mid-nineteenth century until the popularity of the bicycle, the horseless carriage (the automobile), and electric trolley cars took over in the 1890s.
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