Clear the way! Car coming!

Folks along the way were “astounded” in the fall of 1902, when the first car was delivered from the railroad stop in New Iberia to its buyer in Abbeville.
R. S. McMahon and W. E. Satterfield made what the New Iberia Enterprise described as a “novel trip, which took them an hour and fifty minutes, “allowing ten minutes for oiling in Erath.”
The newspaper said it was “the first trip ever made to that thriving town in an auto and the gentlemen are the pioneers of this wonderful method of locomotion.”
People along the route “were completely astounded, and their surprise and consternation in some instances was shown in the most ludicrous manner,” according to the Enterprise.
The Abbeville Meridional of that week noted “to Dr. F. F. Young belongs the credit of bringing to Abbeville the first automobile ever seen here. It arrived Wednesday evening and operated very nicely.”
Country doctors like Young who had far-flung practices seemed to be among the first to take advantage of the new technology in several places — probably for the convenience, but also because they were among the few who could afford a car. For some of them it required a leap of faith that they could learn to run it once they got the machine.
Dr. Guy Shaw brought the first automobile to Loreauville, also in 1902. According to a long-told story, when the car was unloaded from the train there. Dr. Shaw sat down behind the wheel, read the directions on how to drive it, then had a friend run ahead of him to clear the way as he steered home.
Clearing the way became a point of contention as the number of cars grew. The Alexandria Town Talk reported after the first car got there that “how our horses will like the new visitor is a subject much discussed. Some think that when the auto comes steaming down the street at a speed surprisingly rapid that horses will climb the trees or anything else at hand to get out of the way.”
They didn’t always do that. The Welsh newspaper reported in 1909 that its “first serious Auto accident” was caused by a man who deliberately pulled his horse-drawn buggy into the path of a car, forcing the driver to take to the ditch.
By 1910 they had become nuisance enough that towns across south Louisiana were adopting laws to slow down cars traveling at “dust-raising speeds,” besides drawing general ire.
Everybody paid to maintain the streets and roads, the Opelousas Clarion complained in 1910, but “the streets and highways today are practically monopolized by … owners and operators of automobiles … Horse-drawn vehicles, the only kind that can be generally afforded by the average citizen, are practically banished from … streets, and are frightened from the main highways.”
Something, the newspaper said, had to be done.
The ordinance adopted in Crowley was typical. It made it “unlawful to drive an automobile on a public road at a speed exceeding twenty miles an hour,” required that “when a car is within a distance of three hundred feet of any vehicle to which is hitched any domestic animal a rate of four miles an hour must be observed,” and that “when an animal hitched to a vehicle becomes frightened … the machine must be stopped for a full period of three minutes.”
Laws like that were the first attempts in many towns to try to regulate cars, and also the beginning of a long-standing habit of drivers generally ignoring them.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.