THE story begins in 1833, when James Cunningham first came to the United States, He was eighteen that year, a large and strong Scotch-Irishman from a Canadian farm, making a visit to an uncle in New York City.
It was a leisurely journey he made, by sailing packet across Lake Ontario and then by slow stages from Rochester to Albany and down the Hudson Valley; it gave him a chance to appraise the country he was seeing for the first time and to recognize that his future lay here.
It was an optimistic and restless country that he saw. Andrew Jackson was in the White House, and his accession to the Presidency had been in the nature of a revolution: it marked the beginning of a new era. Especially in the West there had been a liberation of the hopes and energies of young Americans. The country between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was no longer frontier; the frontier was now beyond the Mississippi, and Westerners had taken over from the conservative politicians and merchants of the Eastern Seaboard; but the sense of new possibilities was everywhere. In the eighteen-thirties, more than ever before or since, America was the land of opportunity.
The opportunity was not so much to get rich quickly as to use one's talents. Most men expected to work hard; but in their work they would not be hampered by class barriers and rigid customs. There was an absence of governmental interference, for the Jacksonian revolution had done away with any notion that the United States would be developed by federal agency and according to plan. Moreover, there were no large, established industrial enterprises dominating the market place. On the other hand, there was sufficient civilization; there were a common language and tradition and the American instinct for co-operation among neighbors; these kept the surge of expansion from being merely anarchic, though it sometimes threatened to become so. There was a solid base for development.
James Cunningham was a fortunate young man. In a
climate of optimism he was not simply optimistic; he had a talent. Back in Ontario it had manifested itself as an interest in woodworking and designing, and he had already left the family farm long enough to work in a carpenter's shop in nearby Cobourg; but Canada in those days was sleepy, as the United States had been a generation ago, a country for farmers and small craftsmen who clung to the methods they had been taught as apprentices. James' talent demanded something more than a repetition of old techniques. Exactly what this was he could not have said, but his journey to the United States was essentially a search for it.
Probably he hoped to find a job in New York City with his uncle, who was an architect. If so, he was disappointed. At any rate, after a short stay, he made his way back toward Canada through the raw towns that lined the Erie Canal and came again to Rochester, and it was here at last that he discovered what he had been looking for. One Matt Brown had set up the first machine shop in Rochester, in 1830, and by 1833 there were others, producing farm and factory tools.
The power machinery they used was primitive, produced rather out of the Yankee instinct to tinker and improvise than because of economic considerations. It was inefficient. Craftsmen were distrustful of it. The merchants of the day, who were learning to become capitalists by dint of sub sidizing the craftsmen, were skeptical as to its usefulness. Moreover, it was not suited to fine woodworking. Power-driven saws, planing and grooving machines, mortise and tenon machines would not come into use for another fifteen or twenty years, but James, lingering in Rochester, doing odd jobs, caught the connection between the potentialities of the new machinery and his own talent.
Before he sailed home across Lake Ontario, he had the promise of steady work. Messrs. Hanford and Whitbeck, entrepreneurs and more optimistic than most, were in process of setting up the first coach-making shop in Rochester. It would open next year, in 1834.
The family James returned to consisted of a widowed
mother, a sister, and three older brothers. Arthur Cunningham, his father, had died when James was only four.
They were Scotch-Irishmen from County Down, in northern Ireland. The oldest brother had come to New Brunswick in 1824 and made enough money there to bring the family to America in 1831, when James was sixteen. They settled on a farm near Cobourg, and eventually they prospered: the locality became a hamlet and took on the name of Cunningham Corners.
They were not farmers by inheritance. If they had been, they might have been less sympathetic with James' ambitions. Men on a new farm could not easily have dispensed with the services of a strong and healthy boy, however much talent he had for woodworking and however much he wanted to travel; but their father had been a theological student and their mother's father a Presbyterian minister: they were men of the class that "carried the sinewy tradition of Scotch intellectual life through the disappointments of northern Ireland," men with a respect for learning and for serious ambition. Their characteristic virtues were perseverance and a stubborn insistence on good workmanship, mental or manual.
James inherited these characteristics along with his talent for design. He would need them, for although he prospered, it was always by dint of hard work. Things never came easily.
Rochester, when James returned to it in 1834, was a town of ten thousand people. Although it received its charter as a city that year, it was far from having attained its permanent character. Its leading citizens were small independent proprietors: merchants and flour millers for the most part. It was almost untouched by the factory system, which was only beginning to develop in the United States. Three-quarters of its population had arrived within the last five years. Labor turnover was extremely high. Dissatisfied or merely restless young men could always move farther west. Harsh debtors' laws were an added incitement; but, if only because of the ease of migration, those men who stayed were
apt to be steady and hard-working. Generally, they were plain, practical men, native Americans in the Calvinist tradition, having the Yankee gift for improvisation.
From 1834 to 1838 James worked as an apprentice and journeyman for Hanford and Whitbeck, and then, being twenty-three years old, he formed a partnership with two of his fellow-workers, James Kerr and Blanchard Dean. Together they bought out Hanford and Whitbeck, taking over their premises. In that same year James married.
It was not an ideal time to launch a new venture, for there had been a financial panic in 1837; but the effects of the long depression that followed it were not felt until 1839, and James and his partners were producers, not financiers, and they were anxious to get to work on their own.
The little firm turned out cutters, better known as one-horse open sleighs, and buggies.
The buggy, which is simply a small, light carriage, was America's most characteristic contribution to coach-making. Its necessary merits in a country of long distances and primitive roads were lightness and durability; but even the first of the buggies produced by Kerr, Cunningham, and Company added to those merits a certain elegance. The design of its hood would reappear in the bonnet of a Cunningham automobile ninety years later.
However, the excellence of its products was not enough to guarantee the success of the partnership. By 1842 the general depression was at its lowest point, and the firm was in debt for more than six thousand dollars.
Kerr and Blanchard resigned, and James Cunningham assumed the entire debt, borrowing the money to do so at an interest rate of 18 percent a year. He was then twenty-seven, with a wife and three small children. Given his experience and talent he would have had no trouble finding a secure job as an employee, but he was one of those men who need to be their own masters, and he had a passion for making fine carriages.
