San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
AUTO-CAMPING WITH TEDDY ROOSEVELT.
Despite the uber-popular #vanlife imagery growing inside your social media streams, van dwelling is not a new trend. Today’s nomadic army of travelers in Westphalia campers and Sprinter Vans is sustaining, and updating, a lifestyle tradition that dates to Victorian times. “Van,’’ after all, is just an informal shorthand term for “caravan,’’ an old English term for a horse-pulled trailer or vacation wagon — basically the original recreational vehicles.
The age of the automobile transformed these road trips. Starting at the turn of the century, well-heeled “auto-tourists,” sick of relying on train schedules, and bored of hotel living, started driving cars up perilous mountain roads with no guardrails or speed limits and sleeping in fields. Responding to demand, manufacturers started expanding, and tricking out, cars with seats that pulled out so the passengers could sleep inside them.
Over the years, as RVs became longer and bulkier, with more amenities for travelers, road-trippers turned to the passenger van as a smaller and more convenient alternative. These were easier to drive and park than cumbersome motor homes. Besides, their unique bread box shape put a premium on usable space. It’s no wonder that the van became the preferred method of transport for 1960s hippies, or that a new generation of minimalist van dwellers has made these boxy homes-on-wheels fashionable once again. Here’s a brief historic overview of this burgeoning lifestyle movement.
2018
The number of #vanlife-tagged Instagram posts exceeds 3.5 million — and counting!
2012
American Foster Huntington pioneers the hashtag #vanlife on Instagram. Huntington, a former designer in New York’s competitive fashion industry, got widespread attention when he ditched his career, hit the road, and started documenting his road-trip adventures. He once said that he started the hashtag as a joke. “The van was breaking down a bunch and there wasn’t this crazy, hokey aspirational thing when I started it,’’ he told Huck magazine in 2016.
1993
In a now-legendary “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Chris Farley utters the immortal words: “My name is Matt Foley, and I am a motivational speaker. … I am 35 years old, I am divorced, and I live in a van down by the river.” To this day, this endlessly quoted sketch is a source of in-jokes and self-mocking humor for many van dwellers.
1969
Festooned with hand-painted flowers and swirling suns, the Volkswagen “hippie” van gets a major pop-culture boost at the Woodstock festival, held for three mud-splattered summer days at a 600acre dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. Originally, passenger vans were little more than “overgrown station wagons,” RV historian Al Hesselbart remarked at the time. He said that adventurous young travelers did their best to customize them in cheap and groovy ways. “Really, they were nothing but carpeted walls and ceiling and a whole floor full of mattresses where several people would sleep and cavort.”
1915
American financier and bus manufacturer Roland Conklin unveils his luxurious, 8-ton “Conklin Family Gypsy Van,” complete with an onboard hot-water shower, dance floor, observation deck and a retractable “bridge” for bypassing gaps in roads. Conklin and his family took the 13-foot-high, 25-footlong, 7½-foot-wide van on a crosscountry trip from Albany, N.Y., to Los Angeles. But bad roads and breakdowns forced the family to transport the clunky vehicle by train for a large portion of the journey.
1880
Englishman William Gordon Stables, a wealthy surgeon for the Royal Navy, hires Bristol Wagon Works to build a custom-made, 2-ton, horse-drawn van with polished-mahogany paneling for leisure travel. The resulting “land yacht,” as he called it, moved at 2 miles per hour; after taking several shorter journeys, he used it to travel 1,300 miles from Berkshire, England, to Scotland. After that trip, he took it on annual summer vacations to East Anglia. It was 20 feet long, 11 feet high and 6 feet wide. Inside was “a dainty little bookcase,” a Persian rug, stained glass windows, musical instruments and a cooking range, according to his memoir, “The Cruise of the Land Yacht ‘Wanderer.’ ” Strikingly, Stables used the terms “van” and “vandweller” repeatedly in his book.
2010
2001
Sprinter Vans, now a popular choice for high-end custom “van conversions’’ for van dwellers, first appear on the U.S. market. Originally, they were marketed as cargo vehicles, with plenty of room to haul loads. But the van dweller community has embraced them because, at roughly the size of a short bus, they are both mobile and spacious.
1978
Van living gets a stylish boost with the publication of Jane Lidz’s influential book, “Rolling Homes: Handmade Houses on Wheels.” The book features “Patience,” a lovingly refurbished 1949 International delivery van with sink, shower, toilets and walls of knotty pine, along with quilts, windows and a wrought-iron cook stove.
1915
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and tire magnate Harvey Firestone initiate their annual “auto-camping” trips, often in the company of celebrated naturalist John Burroughs. The lengthy trips took place annually between 1915 and 1924, at the Everglades and the Adirondacks of upstate New York, to name a couple of destinations. The men traveled in chauffeured Fords, with dozens of support vehicles — including a kitchen car — and slept in repurposed military tents. A century before Instagram, this rich and famous quartet, known as the “Four Vagabonds,” slummed it in America’s back roads and forests, posing for photos, taking meals, chatting up farmers, and warming themselves in front of a campfire. Guest campers included President Warren Harding, who spent a weekend shooting a rifle and chopping wood with the illustrious group in 1921. A press corps documented the group’s every move, publicizing Ford’s cars and Firestone’s tires, while helping to popularize the American “auto-camping vacation.”
1910
Buffalo, N.Y.-based Pierce-Arrow Motor Car Co. rolls out the Touring Landau, a fancy forerunner to the modern recreational vehicle, at Madison Square Garden. Long before high-end tricked-out vans became the subject of lifestyle stories for affluent subscribers of tony magazines, the Landau epitomized bohemian luxury, complete with a sleeping area, a Cordovan leather interior with luggage to match and onboard toilet. Owners reclined in the back while chauffeurs did the work of driving. The Landau cost a hefty $8,250 at a time when the average American worker made between $200 and $400 a year. The owners of this limited-edition vehicle included the cereal maven C.W. Post.