Prince Edward Island: First to the Automobile, Then First to Say No

When Prince Edward Island Banned the Automobile

A revealing counterpoint to the Wilby-Haney transcontinental motor journey of 1912

In the summer of 1912, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney set out from Halifax in a new REO touring car with an extraordinary objective: to travel across Canada by automobile and demonstrate that a motor route from the Atlantic to the Pacific was possible. Their expedition was part adventure, part publicity exercise, and part argument for a national road. Wilby hoped the journey would call attention to what he described as Canada's need for a "Trans-Canadian Highway."¹

Yet only a short distance from their route through the Maritime Provinces lay a place where the automobile meant something very different. On Prince Edward Island, motorcars had been effectively banned from Island roads in 1908. The Government of Prince Edward Island's historical chronology notes that, despite some loopholes, the prohibition remained in force in various forms until the final closed road, between Tracadie and Mount Stewart, was voted open in 1919.²

The historical irony is hard to miss. Prince Edward Island is often credited with introducing the first automobile to Canada, or, more precisely, the first automobile imported into British North America. In 1866, Father Georges-Antoine Belcourt, the parish priest at Rustico, acquired a Ware steam carriage from the United States. A Charlottetown newspaper reported in December 1866 that the unusual single-seat steam wagon had passed through the city on its way to Belcourt at Rustico. More than forty years later, the province that had witnessed this remarkably early experiment with horseless transportation became the Canadian jurisdiction most famous for trying to keep automobiles off its roads.⁶

The contrast is important because it reveals the Canada through which Wilby and Haney were traveling. Their adventure was not difficult merely because roads were poor. They were driving at the beginning of a transportation revolution, when many roads still served horses, wagons, farms, and railway stations rather than long-distance motorists. The automobile was not yet an unquestioned part of everyday life.³

Prince Edward Island was overwhelmingly rural, and the horse remained central to transportation and agriculture. Early motorcars were noisy, mechanically unfamiliar machines sharing narrow roads with horse-drawn traffic. Island resistance therefore had a practical foundation. Historical accounts of the controversy describe concerns that automobiles frightened horses and interfered with farmers traveling to market, shoppers going into town, and families traveling to church.⁴

There was also a social dimension. The first automobiles were expensive and accessible to relatively few people. To opponents, it could appear that a small number of affluent motorists were asking the larger horse-dependent population to accept new risks and disruptions for a machine that many Islanders neither owned nor needed. The dispute was therefore about more than technology. It was also about who had the right to define the purpose of the public road.⁴

Wilby understood the hostility toward the new machine. In the introduction to A Motor Tour Through Canada, he observed that "the car is not yet a welcome dictator" on Canadian roads. He complained that in some places, the touring automobile was still treated as one of those infernal "contraptions" to be endured rather than welcomed.¹

Prince Edward Island perhaps offered the clearest expression of the attitude Wilby described. While he saw the automobile as an instrument capable of changing communities, encouraging travel, and binding distant regions together, the Island's political debate was still focused on whether the automobile should be permitted to use the road in the first place.

Wilby and Haney did not drive across Prince Edward Island. Their REO traveled from Halifax through Nova Scotia and into New Brunswick before continuing toward Quebec. That geographical fact makes the comparison even more striking. As their car struggled along the Maritime roads in an attempt to demonstrate the future of Canadian motoring, a neighboring province remained deeply suspicious of that future.¹

The Island's restrictions began to ease after the Wilby-Haney journey. In 1913, a new Automobile Act permitted cars to use Island roads on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The remaining days were reserved for established patterns of Island life: market traffic, shopping, and Sunday travel. The compromise illustrates how governments sought to ensure that two transportation systems could coexist.⁴

The result was a remarkable transitional period. The automobile had arrived, but the road had not yet fully surrendered to it. In some districts motorists could proceed; in others, local restrictions remained. The struggle between horse and motorcar was being settled road by road and community by community.²

Beginning in 1917, communities on P.E.I. were formally allowed to vote on whether to lift restrictions on their stretches of road. Two years later, in 1919, the last closed road, from Tracadie to Mount Stewart, was opened. Within a little more than a decade, the political question had changed fundamentally. The automobile was no longer something Canadian governments could realistically exclude from the road; increasingly, the challenge was how to improve roads to accommodate it.²

That is why the Prince Edward Island automobile ban belongs in the Wilby-Haney story. It shows that the barriers early motorists faced were cultural, political, and geographical. Today, the drama of the 1912 expedition is easy to understand in terms of mud, broken bridges, wilderness, mountain passes, and the absence of a continuous road. But beneath those physical obstacles lay a deeper transformation in Canadian life.

The nineteenth-century road was primarily local. It connected farms to markets, homes to churches, and communities to railway stations. Railways carried people and freight over long distances. The automobile threatened to upend that hierarchy. A continuous highway would allow travelers to move independently across provincial boundaries and eventually across the country.³

Wilby was advocating precisely that future. His 1914 account argued that a Trans-Canadian Highway would link the confusing trails in the center of the country with the roads of the Maritimes and British Columbia, encourage better road building, and help give Canada a greater sense of physical cohesion.¹

Prince Edward Island shows how revolutionary that argument still was in 1912. While Wilby and Haney were attempting to demonstrate that an automobile could cross Canada, another Canadian province was still protecting many of its roads from automobiles.

The horse had defined the nineteenth-century road. The automobile would define the twentieth. In 1912, the outcome was becoming clear—but it was not yet settled.

Sources and Notes

1. Thomas W. Wilby, A Motor Tour Through Canada (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company; Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914), Introduction, especially pp. x–xii, and Chapter II. Wilby states that the automobile was “not yet a welcome dictator,” describes it as an “infernal ‘contraption’” in some quarters, and argues for a Trans-Canadian Highway. Project reference copy supplied for the Canada Cross Country Project.

2. Government of Prince Edward Island, “Historic Milestones,” entry for 1919. The provincial government states that automobiles were effectively banned from Island roads in 1908, that communities had the right from 1917 to vote on lifting the ban on particular stretches of road, and that the last closed road, Tracadie to Mount Stewart, was voted open in 1919 and accessed August 14, 2026.

3. Mark Richardson, The Drive Across Canada, prologue, project reference copy. Richardson provides broader context for the Canadian road system in 1912, noting the dominance of railways for long-distance travel and the local character of most roads before the development of a national highway system.

4. Library and Archives Canada, archived web exhibit, “Roads,” Prince Edward Island. The exhibit describes the 1913 Automobile Act, under which cars could travel on Island roads on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with other days reserved as automobile-free days for market, shopping and church travel. Archived Canadian web content, accessed August 14, 2026.

5. Deborah Stewart, “The Island Meets the Auto,” The Island Magazine, no. 5 (Fall/Winter 1978): 9–14. A frequently cited historical treatment of Prince Edward Island’s early encounter with the automobile and the public controversy surrounding the ban.

6. Farmers’ Bank of Rustico & Doucet House Museums, “The Belcourt Automobile.” The museum identifies Father Georges-Antoine Belcourt’s Ware Steam Carriage as the first automobile brought to Prince Edward Island and Canada. It cites a December 19, 1866 Charlottetown Herald report documenting the steam wagon passing through the city on its way to Belcourt at Rustico. Accessed August 14, 2026.

7. Canada Science and Technology Museum (Ingenium), “Henry Seth Taylor Steam Carriage” and “Science Alive! Episode 10: Canada’s First Car.” Ingenium identifies Henry Seth Taylor’s 1867 steam carriage as the first automobile built in Canada. This distinction helps separate Belcourt’s earlier imported Ware steam carriage from the first Canadian-built automobile. Accessed August 14, 2026.

Online Source Locations

Government of Prince Edward Island, Historic Milestones: princeedwardisland.ca — Historic Milestones

Library and Archives Canada archived exhibit, Roads: epe.lac-bac.gc.ca — Roads.

Farmers’ Bank of Rustico & Doucet House Museums, The Belcourt Automobile: https://farmersbank.ca/discover-rustico/the-belcourt-automobile/

Canada Science and Technology Museum (Ingenium), Henry Seth Taylor Steam Carriage: https://ingeniumcanada.org/channel/innovation/henry-seth-taylor-steam-carriage