Gilbert Vanderwerken
American businessman (1810-1894)
Gilbert Vanderwerken (5 February 1810 – 22 January 1894) was a businessman and manufacturer of omnibuses in the 19th century.
Biography
Vanderwerken was born in 1810 in Waterford, New York. He left home at the age of 17 to become an apprentice to a stagecoach builder in Newark, New Jersey. In 1830, he opened his own coach-building business in Newark, but it went bankrupt during the financial depression of 1837.
Vanderwerken relocated to Washington, D.C., between 1848 and 1850 to take personal control of Washington's first successful omnibus line. The Vanderwerken Company line, closely following the horse-drawn coach routes of the early 19th century, traveled from Georgetown to the Navy Yard via M Street and Pennsylvania Avenue for a one-way fare of 12.5 cents. The omnibus, seating twelve passengers, bore the names of persons, historical events, or pictures of other fashionable modes of transportation on the side panels. The stables were located in a former tobacco warehouse at 3222 M Street in Georgetown. The Washington and Georgetown Railroad leased the omnibus line on July 1, 1862, and soon replaced it, donating the vehicles to the Army Medical Department.
Living in Washington, D.C., Vanderwerken purchased 1,316 acres (5.33 km2) of Virginia property as pastureland for the horses.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gilbert Vanderwerken” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.