beach wagon

beachwagon, beach-wagon

beach wagon (plural beach wagons)

1. (historical) A light open wagon with two or more seats, designed to transport people on sand.
   • 1869, Louisa M[ay] Alcott, chapter 26, in Little Women: […], part second, Boston, Mass.: Roberts Brothers, →OCLC:

     How many young ladies are there?" asked her mother, beginning to look sober.
     "Twelve or fourteen in the class, but I dare say they won't all come."
     "Bless me, child, you will have to charter an omnibus to carry them about."
     "Why, mother, how can you think of such a thing; not more than six or eight will probably come, so I shall hire a beach-wagon and borrow Mr. Laurence's cherry-bounce." (Hannah's pronunciation of char-a-banc.)

   • 1891, Frances Fuller Victor, Atlantis Arisen, Chapter 10:

     The Scottsburg road from Drain's was the one usually taken. At the former place the stage was abandoned for a small steamer to Gardiner, or to the mouth of the river (I took the mail-carrier's small boat from Gardiner to the coast), whence a beach-wagon conveyed passengers twenty miles to the north side of Coos Bay, where they were met by a steamer and taken across to Empire City. The beach ride is wearisome, with the perpetual roll of the broad-tire wheels over the unelastic wet sand, and the constant view of a restless waste of water on one hand, with dry, drifting sand between us and the mountains on the other, varied only with patches of marsh and groups of scraggy pines at intervals.

• “beach”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.