Sewll Cushion Wheel Company

Detroit, MI

Sewell cushion wheels were a bridge between old-fashioned solid rubber tires and the later air-filled "pneumatic" tires. They provided a cushion between the tire and the wheel, to take out some of the bumpiness of the ride, but they did not offer as smooth a ride as pneumatic tires did, so they fell out of fashion before they were ever really in fashion.

Sewell seems to have found most of their sales in providing these cushion tires for big, heavy fire engines. But even in the fire engine industry, these tires were rare, because a fire department generally had to special-order these tires. They were not "standard" equipment on any make of fire engine. Most Sewell wheels were later replaced with pneumatic tires, or the fire engines so equipped were junked even before World War II. Today, only two antique fire engines are known to survive that still has the Sewell wheels on them. One of the two is the 1913 Seagrave ladder truck shown below, photographed when it belonged the Connecticut Fire Museum in Warehouse Point, CT.

The other is a 1913 Seagrave pumper that also served in South Manchester, CT. As of July, 2004, both of these Seagrave rigs on Sewell wheels belong to well-known Connecticut fire engine collector and restorer Ray Kehrhahn.

Two patents seem to have covered the unusual features of the Sewell wheels.