The Story of Pedaling History Bicycle Museum

Pedaling History Bicycle Museum [1] – The History and Mission….                                                                                                                                                                     ([1] see footnotes)

 

In the 1970s Carl and Clarice [Clary] Burgwardt attended a country auction in Western New York State and brought home the parts of an old, original highwheel bicycle. At the time, casual cyclists at best, knowing nothing of such a machine [2] and seeking to learn more about it, they joined a collectors' club called The Wheelmen, a National organization that had been founded about a decade earlier. Soon afterward they attended a National meeting of that club where they then became acquainted with a variety of old bicycles and soon realized that the rich and colorful history of the bicycle was little known in depth and even far less appreciated by the masses.

 

The Burgwardts were impressed by individual members of the club who had been collecting, restoring and then riding [3] these bicycles for fun thereby preserving much of the bicycle's heritage as a living museum while enjoying them. Over the next few years, in a quest of finding bicycles for their children to ride as well as for themselves, they acquired several additional vintage bicycles and much cycling memorabilia in a short period of time.  By the middle of the 1980s the Burgwardts had assembled a sizeable and fair representation of the bicycle's history in their growing collection and then decided to more seriously focus their collecting a bit differently than other collections they had seen. This is when they more aggressively, just as a hobby, began putting together what today has become the world's largest collection of American bicycle history. The Pedaling History Bicycle Museum's collection, ninety-five percent American, has now become a heritage treasure of American bicycling history that is unsurpassed in both size and comprehensive historical content anywhere in the world.

 

The collection and the exhibits in their museum present a virtual reality experience of social changes in the world that came about as the bicycle's early development and use revolutionized personal transportation in the late 19th Century weaning man's dependency from the horse. The exhibited machines and memorabilia vividly express the intensity of the innovation, development and technologies of the bicycle's manufacturing and use from its early years to the present. Early on, the public was consumed by this new mechanical transportation and quickly applied it to a changing society and a new competitive sport of bicycle racing which for nearly half a century was America's second most popular spectator sport.

 

The bicycle's zealous and popular use led the way in personal pre-1900 transportation becoming the catalyst of all of man's personal mechanical transportation that we use today. Its avid popularity and use brought about the need for the development of our nation's roads, automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes and more. America's first bicycle club - the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) - was established in 1880.  It printed the first road maps, crusaded and lobbied for the building of roads and wrote the driving rules of the road; all of which became the pattern for the American Automobile Association yet to come a couple of decades later when the automobile seriously entered the transportation scene.

 

As safety bicycles with air filled tires appeared in the early 1890s, droves of women took to using the bicycle, prompting Susan B. Anthony's statement that “the bicycle was the greatest invention of the 19th Century for the emancipation of women.”  Womens' fashions had changed to be bicycle user friendly.  By then, one-third of the bicycle's annual million units plus [4] production was of ladies models.  A hundred years ago the bicycle was as popular and essential to the peoples' life style then as the personal computer is to us in our world today.  Just as that PC has changed our style of living in communication today, the bicycle did so with transportation a century ago; in each century - in just the last two decades.

 

Since opening fifteen years ago the museum has continued adding rare vintage items and exhibits regularly. Rarely does a week go by without something being added.  New additions generally blend in adding more depth by complementing and adding enrichment to the presentation of what was there before.

 

Carl and Clary Burgwardt are not only the owner-curators of the museum, but also, hands-on historians who often personally greet their visitors and treasure the opportunity to share their collection and vast historical bicycle knowledge with them. They are active internationally [5] among advance collectors and scholarly historians, ever expanding their knowledge of bicycle history, and are themselves high-ranked historians of the bicycle. All these factors and much more embellish a museum visit reliving a delightful history richly enhanced with many extremely rare and surprising bicycle related antique treasures.

 

             The Pedaling History Bicycle Museum's mission is:

•  to the continued research of accurately documented bicycling history.

•  to the preservation of vintage bicycles, bicycling ephemera and artifacts.

•  to the proper archival exhibition and sharing of those materials and documents.

•  to the promotion of accurate bicycle history for educational purposes and to correct misquoted elements of that history previously recorded in poorly and carelessly researched sources.

[1] A private independent museum in Orchard Park, New York - USA.

[2] Except that they liked it and were attracted to it as an antique.

[3] Generally in near authentic period clothing.

[4] America's annual production numbers in each of the last years of the 1890s.

[5] Personally and on line at www.pedalinghistory.com