CN
III ARCHIVES
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
O
n a recent vacation to New
England, I happened to be
in Hartford, Connecticut, and in
reading about local attractions
I noticed an entry about Pope
Park. I read about the park and
discovered the land was donated
to the city by Colonel Albert
Pope, who was the head of the
Pope Manufacturing Company.
I knew about Pope motorcycles,
one of the most collectable
marques of the early American
makers, and sure enough the
same Pope who donated the
park was also the motorcycle
maker. Pope became one of the
most technologically advanced
motorcycles of the 1910s and
developed overhead valves and
full suspension well ahead of
most other American motorcycle
manufacturers.
The origins of Pope can be
traced to Boston just after the
Civil War. Colonel Pope came
back from the war looking to
invest the money he'd saved
during his service to start a busi-
ness. Pope formed his business
with other family members and
the company was, according to
Boston corporation records, "to
make, manufacture and sell and
license to others to make, manu-
facture and sell air pistols and
guns, darning machines, amateur
lathes, cigarette rollers and other
patented articles and to own, sell
and deal in patents and patent
rights for the manufacture."
Colonel Pope made an amaz-
ingly forward-looking decision to
buy the patents for the bicycle
from its French inventor Pierre
Lallement (interestingly Lalle-
ment actually came to work for
Pope and his bicycle company
for a time). Owning the patents
to the bicycle when the bicy-
cling craze took over America in
the 1890s proved very profit-
able for Pope. His company
also became the leading bicycle
maker in America during the late
1890s, with the factory located
in Hartford.
Always looking to expand and
diversify, with the profits from
bicycling, Pope began making
battery-powered automobiles in
1897. The electric vehicle divi-
sion was spun off that year as the
independent company Columbia
Automobile Company and was
acquired by the Electric Vehicle
Company by the end of 1898.
Pope tried to re-enter the auto-
mobile manufacturing market in
1901 by acquiring a number of
small firms, but the process was
expensive and many other mak-
ers were entering the market.
Between the years 1903 and
1915, the company operated a
P102
POPE MOTORCYCLES
