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(1885) New Orleans & Waterloo Unlisted Merchant Token Omnibus Maker Very Rare. Robinson & Hitt of Waterloo Iowa, manufacturer of streetcar and Omnibus'. Possibly made by S. D. Childs of Chicago. Au Unc. Plain Edge, 32mm, Brass.
Robinson & Hitt belongs to an interesting transitional period in American transportation: it began in the horse-drawn carriage era and developed into a builder of street railway cars, omnibuses, and complete street-railway systems.
The partner we can identify securely is Silvenus Hitt, born August 17, 1836. A family history records that he moved to Michigan in 1861 and then to Waterloo, Iowa, in 1870, where he became a member of Robinson & Hitt, “carriage and street car builders.” Hitt’s son-in-law, Edward C. Congdon, also worked in the business as a bookkeeper and carriage trimmer.
The company appears to have developed out of the traditional carriage-building trade. That is significant because early horse streetcars were essentially specialized carriage construction: woodworking, iron fittings, upholstery, wheels, springs and coach painting were all trades already present in a good carriage works.
By the middle 1880s, however, Robinson & Hitt had gone considerably beyond ordinary carriage building.
An 1886 advertisement in The Street Railway Journal identifies:
ROBINSON & HITT
WATERLOO, IOWA
as manufacturers of “all kinds of Street Cars AND OMNIBUSES.” The same advertisement says they were also contractors for building and furnishing street railways.
Another company advertisement gives us an unusually useful glimpse of the factory. It says Robinson & Hitt had:
“BEST OF FACILITIES. COMPLETE MACHINERY RUN BY WATER POWER.”
and again advertises both streetcars and omnibuses.
