Henry Ford camping in 192...
Henry Ford camping in 1921.
What has come to be called RVing has its origins in the living shelters that people have been constructing on trailer and wagon beds for centuries. Nomadic tribes have been carrying their goods around with them since time before memory.
Medieval kings had luxury wagons fitted out for hunting expeditions and for touring their realms. These were cumbersome, unsprung horse-dawn affairs that must have been packed with cushions to keep their exalted passengers in place against all the bumps and lurches of rutted and stony roads, but at least they gave the traveler a leisurely opportunity to observe the slowly passing countryside, while providing the roadside peasantry with a good look at what they were missing.
It's hard to put your finger on an exact time for the birth of any activity that grew up through an evolving technology. Although many people enjoyed the time and inclination to go camping in the U.S. by the late 19th century when natural horsepower was being nudged aside by the spark plug, handmade motor coaches were being manufactured around the turn of the 20th.
The RV industry has brought...
The RV industry has brought families together for generations.
In 1914, about the time that WWI broke out in Europe, there were companies here building tent trailers, though many of these early designs were little more than canvas kits that you could attach to your car or trailer to be rolled out for shelter. People called them "canvas hotels," but with improvements to automobiles and their pulling power these early designs gave people an alternative to rail travel.
The wealthy could travel by private rail car, but of course the railroads didn't go everywhere, and thus the automobile introduced a wider public to an unprecedented degree of independent and affordable mobility. If you wanted to sleep under the trees or stop to enjoy a bit of fishing, the automobile made it possible. Of course the roads were terrible and often non-existent, but the private vehicle, modified for camping, introduced people to a wide and smiling land full of open choice.
Roger White of the Smithsonian Museum places the birth of RVing at 1910, because by that year there were three enterprises manufacturing true RVs in the U.S., including the elegant Pierce Arrow company. Taking that date then makes this year the centennial of RVing.
Airstream owners value the...
Airstream owners value the history of their motorcoaches and trailers.
In 1910, the Telescoping Apartment Company produced a modified Ford Model T with an extension at the back that featured multiple slide-out drawers and a pair of removable ground braces, presumably to keep the car from tipping backward when the rear space was occupied. Henry Ford himself used to go camping each year famously with Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burrows, but their outings were rather cushier.
They did not use what might be called RVs, although they did use Fords modified to carry their gear-silver, china, generator, and refrigeration equipment to keep them supplied with ice cubes. They slept in large, comfortable tents that supplied plenty of shade and cut the drafts.
A vintage advertisement proclaiming...
A vintage advertisement proclaiming the virtues of the Curtis Clipper.
By 1913, the Earl, an elegant hard-sided, single-axle trailer with double-entry doors at the back and isinglass windows with roll-up shades, was custom-built for two college professors for their fieldwork. It was a beautifully handcrafted advance on the idea that just because you're headed into the field, you don't have to sacrifice the luxury to which your tenure has led you to become accustomed. The original can be seen at the RV Heritage Museum in Elkhart, Indiana, and is believed to be the oldest non-tent travel trailer in existence.
Though the real explosion in the business came after WWII with massive improvements to both cars and the roads, large "trailerite" parks where like-minded travelers could stay to rest and meet began to appear in the late '20s. Notably, one of these, called Trailer City, in Florida offered a place to park for $1 a day, plus 25 cents for electricity. In the 1920s there were in excess of 3,000 such parks in the U.S., and in 1922 The New York Times estimated that there were 15 million campers on the road.