Wagons, without them, the West would never have been won. No one knows when the first wagon as we know it today was invented but when some cave man figured out the wheel we were on our way. Wagons, horses, and mules were the only means of transportation for thousands of years. Wagons I guess you could say were the modern day equivalent of pickup trucks. Wagon manufacturing came into its own in the 1700’s as this country really started its western expansion. Wagons were manufactured in the east and shipped west to such points as St. Louis where they were used on the Santa Fe Trail. In the 1800’s wagon manufacturers began springing up further west eliminating shipping cost. At first wagons were built in small shops and then sent to a Blacksmith to be “ironed”. But as production increased all the steps of manufacturing a wagon was incorporated into one place. There were small wagon shops that never turned out more than one wagon a week to large companies like Studebaker that advertised that they could turn out a complete wagon every seven minutes. In 1904 the Ft. Smith Wagon Company in Ft. Smith, Ark. built 10,000 wagons. 

At lot of folks call any wagon a Conestogo wagon, which is incorrect. The name Conestogo originated from wagons that were made in the Conestogo Valley of Pennsylvania beginning in 1725. As far as we’ve been able to determine there was never a wagon made with the name Conestogo on the side of it although the style of wagon construction is referred to as Conestogo.