Photo Gallery

In the 1870s, high wheel bicycle riding was an expensive hobby dominated by young, urban, and—given the physics involved—probably foolhardy men. Then, in the mid-1880s, came the safety bicycle with such advances as same-sized wheels and a rear chain drive. America was about to experience a bicycle boom, one that would soon reach, as Maine Outing magazine gushed, Portland: “1895 may be here, as it has been called elsewhere, the wheeling year. Indeed, it must be when a little city … in six months brings forth over three hundred devotees among the feminine population.”

Portland’s commuters would brave the dirt roads in summer, hardcore riders the packed snow in winter. One of the city’s cycling clubs—banned from riding through public gardens—commandeered an out-of-favor horse trotting park for races and social events.

A slice of Portland’s turn-of-the-century cycling culture was captured on camera by student James Arthur Hayes. His photos—and an accompanying collection of old cycling maps and guides in the state archives—were a revelation to present-day Mainer and bike enthusiast Sam Shupe (GRS’18).

“He [Hayes] had taken a bunch of photographs of him and his friends just going around on their bikes, racing and being goofballs,” says Shupe, who first saw the photos as a college history major in his home state. “They resonated with me so deeply because I rode bikes with my friends and that’s what we did.”

Shupe “realized that cycling is history” and that his hobby could become “an actual scholarly pursuit.” Today, as a graduate writing fellow and American Studies doctoral student at GRS, Shupe has made the pursuit a full-time one.

In 2013, he presented Racing to the Suburb: Bicycle Culture in Portland and Deering, Maine, 1880-1900 at the International Cycling History Conference in Portugal. Shupe’s argument “centered around this idea that cyclists were trying to develop a new understanding of public green space as being this active space for things like cycling or playing sports.”

The paper, which won him the conference’s Young Researcher Award, will form part of Shupe’s forthcoming dissertation. The topic, he says, is “kind of out there.” He’s exploring sweat and the history of sweating.

“As a daily cyclist, I sweat a lot,” says Shupe, who owns seven bikes and drives a pedicab in the summer. His dissertation will trace the 19th-century history of perspiration: its position in the 1800s as “a republican, American virtue” evocative of artisan work, a negative mid-century association with sweatshops, and end-of-century renaissance in the era of cycling.

“Sweating is an interesting lens to look at the 19th century through and see how it changed the built environment and how we think about cities,” says Shupe. Cyclists wouldn’t remain banished to neglected trotting arenas: public gardens would become the open parks we play—and sweat—in today. By the early 20th century, Shupe adds, Americans would even pay good money to watch others “professionally sweat.” At the grand American baseball stadiums, sweat was—and is—“a spectacle.”