The Lewis Doddlebug

The late Judge Lewis and his father, Willis I. Lewis, alongside the Lewis” Doodlebug”
in preparation for an afternoon of bird hunting. The location has been tentatively
identified as Seven Bridges on what was then known as the “Lewis Farm” and
probably took place sometime about 1905. The passenger has been identified as Archibald
Cushing Lewis (see Postscript).

The Lewis “Doodlebug”
Potter County’s Unique Contribution To Railroading

by Tom Dewey

Several months ago I embarked on a research project about one of Potter County’s landmarks, Camp Moxie, a place that has slipped away into obscurity over the past century. In the course of assembling documentation and photographs of the site, I was fortunate to befriend Wrean Lewis Fiebig, the grand daughter of the late President Judge, Robert Lewis. She very graciously put some 75 photographs taken by her grandfather at my disposal as most of them bore directly on the project at hand. In the collection, however, were eleven prints of a very curious vehicle, one that would elicit my curiosity and result in quite a few hours of research that had nothing to do with the original task. Even Bob Currin, Curator of the Potter County Historical Society, became excited when we first looked at these pictures. I gathered from his reaction that they were, indeed, quite remarkable, perhaps one-of-a-kind.

The vehicle was the Lewis Doodlebug, a personal railroad car, commissioned by Willis I. Lewis, a prominent Coudersport, Pa. attorney, and the father of the late Judge Lewis, sometime about the turn of the 20^th century. According to Currin, it was built by the Currier and Gordiner machine shop in Coudersport, Pa.completed about 1905. Lewis was a prominent local attorney who specialized in corporate legal work and was heavily involved in lumbering, railroads, wood chemical plants, natural gas exploration and transmission, local water authorities, ice making, and other interests. In 1895 the local railroad, the Coudersport and Port Allegany, extended their line to Ulysses, Pa., thereby providing a rail link between the Pennsylvania RR (in Port Allegany, Pa.) and the NYCRR (in Ulysses, Pa.). The next year Lewis bought a very large tract of land situated on the extension in the vicinity of Seven Bridges, Pa., about midway to Ulysses from Coudersport where the C&PA had their offices. On this tract he established an ice pond and business that furnished ice for the residents of Coudersport.

Lewis became chief legal counsel to the Goodyear Lumber Company and on November 21, 1901, was granted one of the twenty shares created to capitalize the new company. He arranged all of the many purchases of timberland and railroad matters that went into creating the “Goodyear Empire.” He also represented the Lackawanna Lumber Company. The two firms are reputed to have cut 47 percent of the six hundred million feet of Pennsylvania timber harvested in the year 1897. The Goodyear Lumber Company cut more timber than any other Pennsylvania company; its Galeton mill had the largest daily output of any mill in the state. [Taber -#5, preface]

A close reading of the local newspapers of the time shows clearly that Willis I. Lewis was an active, restless and creative local entrepreneur. At a time when paved highways between the nearby towns didn’t exist, it is assumed that Lewis built the doodlebug to facilitate his business interests along the railway, and, probably, as a personal vehicle for outings, especially hunting and fishing on his “farm” at Seven Bridges, as he was an avid outdoorsman. He did not purchase an automobile until 1904.

The concept of a motorized small vehicle running on standard gauge rails, something to replace the old manually-propelled “hand car” of railroad maintenance tasks must certainly have occurred to other railroad owners. Subsequent research has revealed that in 1904 Oldsmobile developed a gasoline powered inspection rail car and one might have ventured onto Potter County soil on the Slate Run Railroad (Lycoming County) to transport general superintendent H. P. Welch and woods superintendent Frank Hammond, of the tannery firm of J. B. Weed and Company. There is no evidence that it was referred to as a doodlebug. [Taber - #4, p. 466]. However, Lewis’s concept is quite different in that his vehicle appears to be designed as much for pleasure as work.

But the whole idea of operating a “personal” vehicle on a railroad – any railroad – boggles the mind. Clearly this could happen only at a time when state railroad regulations and laws were in their infancy, if they existed at all. One would most certainly have to be very well connected with the railroad’s management. And Lewis was. In fact, he was a major booster for the C & PA. Doodlebugs, obviously, could not be operated indiscriminately. Lewis would have had to coordinate with the railroad that he would be “on the rails” during a certain time period. All of which lends credence to the idea that this was, in fact, a very unique vehicle.

The photographs, none of which are labeled or dated, are very old and are used with Wrean Lewis Fiebig’s permission. I have been able to date them to within a year or two from a close examination of the railroad ties. In the original prints these ties appear to be in very good condition, practically new in appearance. On May 9, 1901, the local weekly newspaper, the Potter Enterprise announced that “oak ties will be laid the entire length of the Coudersport & Port Allegany railroad, greatly improving the road.” Therefore, the pictures were probably taken sometime between 1901 and 1906.

The pictures of Lewis’s “Doodlebug” are very rare. To the best of my knowledge they have never been seen by the public nor ever published. Outside of the immediate Lewis family, their existence was not known. Wrean Lewis “rescued” them from probable obscurity at the time of her aunt Margaret’s death in 1987. They were taken by Willis’s son, Robert R. Lewis, who took up photography as a young man. They show the fabrication of the Doodlebug in the Currier and Gordiner shop and the completed vehicle being used on the local C&PA during what appears to be a hunting trip, probably at Seven Bridges. My first impression was that this was a steam-powered vehicle, but subsequent study of the photos fails to reveal any ‘firebox.’

I am not a railroad buff, nor do I have an engineering background. Even so, I am impressed with the construction of this vehicle. It is an original design, not simply a production motor car adapted to rail by replacing the wheels with flanged railroad wheels. It appears to be patterned after the touring style motor vehicles of the day, and ruggedly constructed with ample braking power. It is hoped by publishing these photos that someone who is more familiar with the gasoline technology of that time might be able to identify what type of engine was used and how power was transmitted to the wheels. I don’t think this was a gas-electric system like those adopted later by coach manufacturers (Brill and General Motors, for example). On these production vehicles the gasoline engine powered a generator that in turn ran electric traction motors that were attached to the wheels.

According to Wrean Lewis, the family always referred to Willis’s vehicle as the “Doddlebug,” which means, at least locally, the word was in usage here in Potter County, Pa. as early as the first decade of the 20th century.

In an extended discussion of the passenger service on the C&PA between Coudersport and Port Allegany at about 1922, Paul Pietrak in his book on the C&PA, states that the C&PA purchased a gas motor car from the Brill Company of Philadelphia. He further makes the statement that “This gas car or rail bus was affectionately called the Doodlebug or by some the Hoodlebug, depending on which side of the tracks you came from.” Unfortunately, Pietrak does not document anything in his book, so we are left to ponder what, exactly, this statement means. [Pietrak, p.23]

I have, therefore, concluded that Lewis’s gas-powered railroad vehicle was one of the earliest, possibly the earliest, of its kind to be put into service. I have attempted to find another vehicle like this on the World Wide Web and other historical sources with no success. I am tempted to say that it is unique, but I cannot prove it conclusively. Furthermore, it seems to me that the term “Doodlebug” as applied and used in railroading might possibly have originated here and date from this vehicle. And given Willis Lewis’s extensive involvement with lumbering and railroad development at this time, the term might have passed out of Potter County into usage among railroad men in other places.

Subsequent gas-powered vehicles or “coaches,” designed to carry passengers on cash-strapped local railroads at a time when passenger services were in decline, were sometimes called “Hoodlebugs.” On May 9, 1935 the Potter Enterprise headlined a news report about Smethport, Pa.’s passenger vehicle thusly: “HOODELBUG FATE IN HANDS OF P.S.C., “ and explained that the Pittsburgh, Shawmut & Northern Railroad Company had applied to the state for permission to abandon its gasoline car passenger service through Smethport. Smethport’s proximity to Coudersport might help to explain the ambiguity of Pietrak’s statement about the two terms.

On the other hand, other railroads during the period of the mid 20^th century that used self-propelled coach-style vehicles called them “Doodlebugs.” The question becomes: Why? I have found references to several of these vehicles on the Web: “Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio (1940),” “Erie Railroad at Rutherford, NJ in February of 1949,” “The Santa Fe ‘doodle bug’ was a one-car train…between Pekin and Chicago (1955),” “the doodlebug that used to connect Albuquerque with Belen until 40 years ago,” etc. Why would these railroads use the term “Doodlebug”? Why not “Grasshopper,” or “Mini-Tram,” or “Galloping Gertie,” or … “(your choice)”?

Is it conceivable that a term used in a small, obscure rural community in the northern mountains of Pennsylvania, well over one hundred years ago, came to be applied to a special type of railroad car throughout the nation? Unfortunately no correspondence or other documentation survives from the Lewis family during the period of the “Doodlebug’s” fabrication or use. Nor, sadly, is there any direct mention of the Lewis vehicle in the local newspapers of the time. The Enterprise did, however, on June 11, 1925 refer to the “gasoline car put on the C. & P. A. Railroad…”as the “Doodlebug,” indicating, perhaps, that the term had by then slipped into more or less universal local usage. Pietrak, to the best of my knowledge, the only published authority on the local C&PA railroad, apparently was unaware of the Lewis vehicle at the time he penned his book in 1972.

Furthermore, none of the many sources (traditional dictionaries and encyclopedias and online reference works such as Wikipedia) I have been able to consult on the etymology (origin) of the term “doodlebug” have provided any substantial help. Along with a more or less standard explanation “of uncertain origin,” I have found only a few bone fide meanings:

* Antlion larva

* Woodlouse

* Armadillidiidae

* V-1 flying bomb

* Dowsing rod to find minerals

* Doodlebug, a 1997 short film written and directed by Christopher Nolan

* Ciara Brady, a character on Days of our Lives, originally called “Doodlebug”

The New Shorter Oxford Disctionary (1993 edition, page 728), arguably one of the best resources for chasing down the age of words, lists the following: "...4. Any of various kinds of small vehicles. U. S. colloq. M20." M20 is defined as from 1930 - 1969.

It’s entirely possible that a trained etymologist might be able to come up with a more meaningful derivation. One source, thefreedictionary.com even goes so far as to state that a doodlebug “does not run on rails”!

All of which simply reinforces my theory that the term, while obscure and specialized to railroading, was first put into use here in Potter County.

Postscript (July, 2008)

In an Email dated Jan 23, 2008, Col. Robert C. Lewis, USMC (ret.) informed me that "The large photo of the Lewis doddlebug has Robert to the left and Willis (Irving) Lewis on the right with an unidentified man on the bug. He would be Archibald Cushing Lewis, then aged 24, and 1st cousin, once-removed, to Willis. Robert was his 2nd cousin, but they were the same age and grew up together in Potter County. Arch's brother was Irving, named for Willis Irving." Col. Lewis, it turns out, is a long lost descendant of the Lewis family in Ulysses, Pa. That branch came south in WWII, married, stayed, and have lost touch with cousins in the family home in Potter County. As a result of the Doodlebug post, the family has been re-united.
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When I submitted the story to the Oxford English Dictionary I was pleased to receive this response: "Thank you for your message, and the information you attached. I shall add this evidence of a specialized sense of DOODLEBUG to the OED's files, to ensure that it is considered by the editors when they come to rewrite the entry. It was kind of you to send this material.
Margot Charlton
Oxford English Dictionary"
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In late January, 2008, J. Richmond of Wellsville, NY forwarded an article, "The Question of Where the Term 'Hoodlebug' Came From," from the March 2005 newsletter of the Pittsburg, Shawmut and Northern Railroad Company Historical Society. In it the writer, Lynn, whose aunt's father was an engineer, explains via email that the gas-powered Doodlebugs had a notorious reputation for being noisy and breaking down. "This bad luck was called "hoodoo" 100 years ago. Doodle means to waste time on an aimless activity." The writer concludes that "when you are regularly working a train (gas-car) that has trouble with breakdowns and derailments the Doodlebug itself becomes a Hoodlebug."
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Additional digging around unearthed still another photo of the vehicle (mistakenly archived under automobiles). It was included in a CD released by the Potter County Historical Society in 2004 and was annotated with information "believed" to be from the local Currier family.

I was able, with the help of Joy Currier and other descendants of William C. Currier, to identify the family members pictured, but was not able to confirm any patent application. From local newspaper accounts of the period I learned that Currier vacated his one-term (1904-08) position as County Treasurer at the behest of Willis I. Lewis, who was General Solicitor of the Tidewater Pipe Company, to accept a position with that firm in Virginia to supervise their lumber operations [Potter Enterprise, 9/14/07]. Other newspaper accounts clearly indicate that Currier and the Lewis family were business associates. One item suggests that Willis's son, Robert, and William Currier planned to establish an automobile sales business [Potter Enterprise, 1/4/06]. It is possible that Currier shipped the Doodlebug to Virginia where the above photo is believed to have been taken.
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I also submitted the story, including photographs, to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania thinking that perhaps, since it was already in html format, they might like to share it with visitors to their website. However, I have had no indication that they cared enough about it to include it in their collection of Pennsylvania railroad history. A similar offer to the Editor of Trains Magazine elicited no response whatsoever.

View of “dashboard” and foot pedals.	A side view showing what appears to be a rather large transmission connected to the rear wheels with a drive shaft.
The doodlebug in the Currier and Gordinier shop with the engine hood removed. It would appear that the fuel tank was between the engine and the driver!	No traction motors appear to be attached to the wheels
Doodlebug hunting party, about 1905	This appears to be a special occasion. The passengers in the locomotive, businessmen by all appearances, seem to be appraising the performance of the doodlebug. My guess is that it is a demonstration staged by Willis Lewis. Note the good condition of the railroad ties.
	Apparently the doodlebug has just rendezvoused with a railroad engine and now the Lewis father and son team is off to the hunt.
W. I. Lewis with “Mutt,” his favorite hunting dog. This photo shows the recently installed oak ties to good effect – they appear to be practically new.

The Doodlebug at work. This appears to be a railside conference between Willis Lewis and the operators of a lumber train. Because of the limitations of the doodlebug it is probably at nearby Mina, Pa. where the very large Lackawanna Lumber Mill was located. A larger mystery is why a Heisler locomotive would be on the tracks here locally as none of the Potter County lumber companies ever owned a Heisler engine.

Sources:
Taber, Thomas T., III, The Goodyears – An Empire in the Hemlocks, Book #5, Lycoming Printing Company, Inc. Williamsport, Pa., 1971, preface

Taber, Thomas T., III Sunset Along Susquehanna Waters, Book #4, page 466

Pietrak, Paul, Coudersport & Port Allegany New York & Pennsylvania, North Boston, NY (self-published), 1972, page 23]

Potter Enterprise, weekly newspaper, Coudersport, Pa, 1894 - 1941

Further Reading:

McCall, John B. The Doodelbugs. Dallas, TX: Kachina Press, 1977

Pittsburgh, Shawmut & Northern Railroad Company (Smethport, Pa.):

http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3468

Perkin & Chicago:

http://www.minonktalk.com/doodle.htm

New Mexico:

http://www.dukecityfix.com/index.php?itemid=2528

http://www.news-bulletin.com/lavida/39163-03-20-04.html

Cuyahoga Falls, OH:

http://cuyahogafallshistory.com/Crimes/doodlebug.htm

Rutherford, NJ: