Category: Blog posts

by Tom Ewing December 23, 2025 A widely circulated advertisement in December 1925 depicted a bicycle, improbably, carried within Santa’s toy bag. The front wheel and handlebar protrude from the open top, while a windswept Santa tots the full bag. The text published in the Washington Daily News on December 18, 1925 emphasized the benefits…

by Tom Ewing December 18, 2025 Bicycles and Christmas have been connected for almost one hundred fifty years, since the first popularization of wheeled cycles. In 1879, an editorial statement in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette told parents: “It will pay you to get your son a Bicycle for a Christmas gift — it is better than…

By Tom Ewing December 11, 2025 Bikecentennial organizers held training sessions for group leaders to prepare them for trips planned in the summer of 1976. In December 1975, one of these groups trained in southern California, where good weather and challenging roads provided an ideal setting to prepare the team leaders. A photograph published in…

By Tom Ewing December 4, 2025 A century ago, growing awareness of transmission of communicable diseases produced ad campaigns on the theme of germs and bicycles. One advertisement from the Ogden Standard (Februar 14, 1920, p. openly proclaimed the health benefits of bicycling: “Germs love crowds . Why be crushed and trampled night and morning…

by Tom Ewing November 27, 2025 Thanksgiving bicycle parades, races, and festivals emerged in the 1890s and continued into the 1920s, during the first golden age of cycling. In 1892, a Thanksgiving bicycle race in San Antonio, Texas, featured races over quarter and half miles with various categories of tires. Four years later, in 1896,…

November 20, 2025 by Tom Ewing In 1875, James Mason rode a bicycle from Hillsboro, Ohio, to the town of London, and then back again, a distance of 99 miles. The entire trip took eleven hours and forty minutes, which included a 20 minute rest in Washington Court House and a 30 minute rest in…

November 6, 2025 by Tom Ewing As cyclists ride along Route 76 in the town of Draper, in Pulaski County, they pass a mural depicting a bicycle pulling a child’s trailer. The entire mural covers a low wall in front of Draper Mercantile, located on Greenbriar Road (Route 658) between Old Baltimore Road and Old…

October 30, 2025 by Tom Ewing A recent blog post by the Virginia Bicycling Federation lists several ways that cycling tourism benefits communities: bringing tourists to small towns, boosting outdoor recreational tourism, offering a sustainable travel option, connecting people to history, and attracting events and visitors to bicycle-friendly communities. The organizers of the Bikecentennial shared…

By Tom Ewing October 23, 2025 Organizers of the Bikecentennial used many pitches to encourage cyclists to sign up to ride across the country. One distinctive strategy was to promote the route as a low cost way to see the country during the Bicentennial year. Given that the US inflation rate at the beginning of…

October 16, 2025 by Tom Ewing The release of Beth Macy’s new book, Paper Girl, is a reminder of the relationship between local newspapers, the lives of young people, and major transformations in recent American history. Fifty years ago, Virginia newspapers celebrated the boys and girls who made deliveries of the daily paper — often…