With the high cost of new (or new “used”) vehicles continually rising, the price of gas so high, expensive insurance, and clogged freeways, I sometimes think it might be nice to go back to the simple days of horse and buggy. But then I wonder: How much does a horse cost? What about the price of hay and oats? Then there is the daily care of the animals. And what does one do with all that manure the roses produce? I guess each age has its pros and cons.
This all came to mind when I looked at the list of some of Wallace J. Miller’s paintings of Riverside businesses from the late 1890s. One of those businesses was the Glenwood Stables operated by Edward E. Miller. Edward was not related to the artist Wallace, but he was the younger brother of Frank A. Miller, the owner of the Glenwood Mission Inn.
Edward E. Miller was born in 1863 in Tomah, Wisconsin, the youngest of Christopher Columbus and Mary Ann Miller’s four children. He was ten years old when the family left Tomah to join C. C. Miller in Riverside, where he had found employment as a surveyor. Ed and his brother Frank helped build the family home, an old adobe structure that grew into the Glenwood Inn when Albert White became the first paying guest in November 1876. Ed accompanied his father and helped him on some of his surveying trips.
As a young man, he drove the old four-horse stage from the Glenwood to the Southern Pacific train station in Colton to carry passengers back to Riverside. At the time of his death, a reporter stated that the stage was still in existence and that Ed had driven it just a few years ago in a parade using his old whip…