With a beginning dating prior to the
California gold rush, the Newton Wagon Company produced a wide variety of
vehicles during almost a century in business.
Several years ago, I wrote a brief history of this brand and you can
still find the two-part article on our website by clicking here.
Moving from New York to Batavia,
Illinois in 1854, founder Levi Newton worked hard to establish the brand as a
premium builder of buggies and carriages as well as a vast array of wagons
including farm, freight, spring, delivery, mountain, potato, and rack bed
wagons as well as teaming gears and lumber and log wagons. The firm employed a number of different
construction designs throughout its history.
As with many other brands, the paint and striping of earlier designs was
often more flamboyant and ornamented.
Circular box rod washers, triple riveted side board cleats, and even
multiple folding end gates were common on some models.
Another unique feature of later Newton
models is what was referred to as a ‘drop front hound.’ With this design the front hounds on the gear
were curved downward. This feature
reduced wear and tear on the reach and sway bar while also allowing for tighter
turning when the box was removed. While
a drop front hound is fairly easy to spot on a wagon gear, it was not common in
the industry as a whole. Even so, Newton
was not the first to have promoted this feature. As I shared in Volume One of the “Borrowed
Time” western vehicle book series, the legendary Peter Schuttler brand actually
had a patent on a very similar design in the 1880’s (see a portion of the patent below).
As a further note to this innovation, it
doesn’t appear that Newton made use of the design until well after the original
Schuttler patent expired. For historians
and collectors, it’s an important point as collective examination of all
vehicle features can help to identify, date, authenticate, and place values on
individual wagons. That commitment to historical details and collector support is another reason
we continually search for the rarest details from this industry. As of this writing, illustrated Newton materials in our
Wheels That Won The West® Archives span almost sixty years from the 1870’s
through the 1920’s.
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