The Day San Francisco Retired Its Last Horsecar

At noon on June 3, 1913, Mayor James Rolph climbed aboard a small, worn streetcar at the Ferry Building, took the reins and drove a team of horses up Market Street. Crowds lined the route. Newspaper photographers caught the mayor in a conductor's cap, watering one of the horses. When the trip was over, San Francisco no longer had a horse-drawn streetcar in service anywhere.

It was a small ceremony for a large change. For about sixty years, horses had been the engine of public transit in the city.

Before the rails: omnibuses

San Francisco's first public transit, in the Gold Rush city of the 1850s, was the horse-drawn omnibus, essentially a stagecoach run on a city route. Streets were rough. Cobblestones gave horses a foothold but shook passengers in anything on wheels.

Rails solved that. A car running on smooth track could carry more people with the same team, and the ride was far gentler. After noisy steam engines were banned from Market Street in 1868, the company holding the Market Street franchise converted its line to horse-drawn cars, and the horsecar became a fixture of the city's main street.

What the horses were up against

Horsecars worked well on level ground. San Francisco is not level ground. A loaded car on a steep grade was hard, dangerous work for a team, and many of the city's hills were simply out of reach.

That problem produced the city's most famous invention. In 1873, Andrew Hallidie won a franchise on Clay Street for cars pulled by a moving cable under the street. Cable cars could climb hills that horsecars could not, and on flat ground they were faster. Electric streetcars followed. By the turn of the century, according to transit historians, most of the city's horsecar lines had been abandoned.

The one that would not quit

One horsecar line outlasted the rest by more than a decade. On lower Market Street, between Sansome Street and the Ferry Building, a single horsecar kept running under a franchise held by United Railroads, long after cable and electric cars had taken over everywhere else. For years, riders coming down Sutter Street had to change to the slow horsecar to reach the ferries while the city and the company fought in court over the tracks.

The standoff ended in 1913 with what was called the Lower Market Street agreement. The horsecar franchise was given up. Sutter Street's electric cars would run all the way to the Ferry Building, and the city's own Geary Street cars would share the Market Street tracks.

The last trip

The newspapers treated the changeover as a holiday. The San Francisco Examiner reported the next morning that the last horsecar was given its final drive just as the first electric cars started down Market Street to the ferries. The car was United Railroads No. 45, which had begun life as a trailer on the Sutter Street Railway's cable line. Rolph drove it away from the Ferry Building himself, and a veteran driver took the reins for the rest of the trip.

The trip ran well beyond the horsecar's usual short loop: out Market Street to Valencia Street and then south on Valencia. The Cable Car Museum's account notes that the horses were rewarded with a bucket of water at the end of it.

A sister car, trailer No. 46, survives. It is on display at the Cable Car Museum in San Francisco as part of a Sutter Street Railway cable train.

What the horsecar left behind

It is easy to treat the horsecar as a quaint step on the way to something better. For the people who worked the lines, and for the animals, it was hard daily labor that built the shape of the city. The routes horses pulled became the routes cable cars and streetcars followed. Market Street's role as the spine of San Francisco transit dates from those first tracks.

The horse did not leave the city's streets in 1913. Delivery wagons, fire engines and police mounts were still at work, and the fire department kept horses in service until 1921. But the mayor's drive up Market Street marked the moment the city stopped depending on horses to move its people. From then on, the horse in San Francisco would be a partner by choice. That tradition continues at the stables that remain on the edge of the city, including Ocean View Stables in Daly City, home of Leyden Horsemanship.