Transcontinental Racing

Curt McConnell’s book, A Reliable Car and a Woman Who Knows It: The First Coast-To-Coast Auto Trips by Women, 1899-1916, summarizes trips by John and Louise Hitchcock Davis (1999), Alice Huyler Ramsey (1909), Blanche Stuart Scott (1910), Anita King (1915), and Amanda Preuss (1916). Suffragist Sara Bard Field made the trip (west to east) in 1915. Emily Post drove out to San Francisco in 1915. Pictured below are several images from other transcontinental races. Here we see the No. 1 racer, in his Ford Motor car, coming off the ferry across the Missouri River in Glasgow, MO during the 1909 transcontinental race.

A racer in his Ford Motor car (top) coming off the ferry across the Missouri River in Glasgow, MO, during the 1909 transcontinental race from New York City to Seattle. Three men review their situation after their Ford Model T Roadster becomes stuck in heavy mud along a country road in Kansas in the 1909 race (bottom left). Ford automobiles racing on dusty rural roads during the 1909 race.