Remarks Made by Richard G. Coker at the Hartsville Museum

November 1, 1981  

The Locomobile Steam Car was Model 2 of the year 1900. It was bought during the summer of 1901 by my father, J. L. Coker, Jr., at Sound Beach, N. Y.  He and his family had rented a beach cottage there. Sound Beach was on Long Island Sound and near the home of my mother’s parents at Mount Vernon, N. Y.

  After enjoying the novelty of the early automobile during the summer, an arrangement was made to bring the little car to South Carolina. My Uncle Duncan Gay put the car on a ship in New York, and the ship took it to Norfolk. There my uncle got it from the dock and drove it to Hartsville, a distance of some 400 miles over sandy unimproved roads.

  It was an interesting adventurous trip and I can recall stories of how horses were so frightened, and farmers so exasperated in trying to hold and calm their horses, saying “Dern you!. Here I‘ve  been wanting to see one of these contraptions and now you won’t let me look at it!” For this adventurous trip a trunk was lashed onto the back of the car, and a wicker hamper onto the front dash-board.

  There were no mechanics to make repairs, and of course no filling stations. The fuel used was kerosene, readily available since it was in use everywhere for lighting with kerosene lamps.

  If you wanted to take a drive it was essential that you plan ahead. You removed a U-shaped pipe from beneath the boiler, put the pipe in a fire that would heat it red hot. You then put the hot pipe back into place, opened a fuel valve to admit kerosene which was vaporized by the heat and piped to a burner under the boiler. The burning vapor also kept the pipe hot and so continued to vaporize the oncoming fuel, the heat from the burner heated the boiler and produced steam for the steam engine.

  The small steam  engine was very powerful, so that the car could go through the sand-rutted roads and up almost any hill.  Car pulled a loaded trailer easily—my uncle built the trailer from an old buggy. Certainly it was a very early automobile trailer. As for speeds attained, the speed was always limited by the roughness of the roads.

  When I was 13 years old I thought it would be a fine thing to fix the car up and put an engine of some sort into it. With help from our stable man, I rolled the car out of the carriage house. Outside in the shade of a Darlington Oak I studied and planned. Then my father walked by and he said, “What are you doing, my son?”  I answered that I thought of removing the steam engine and installing an unused  marine engine that we had; I would  do this and take a ride. My father with gentle pride said, “Let’s  not do that, let’s keep the old car just as it was. Put it back in the corner of the carriage house. Some day you may want to give it to a museum.”

  The Locomobile Company of America was founded in 1899 at Bridgeport, Ct. It had a considerable fame for a time but went out of business in 1929. This information was given me by my friend Mac Segars who has a collection of books on early automobiles.

The First Car in Hartsville...

The First Car in South Carolina....