A History of RVs: From Covered Wagons and Tin Can Tourists to Slide-Outs

The history of RVs is longer than the automobile industry that made them possible. Long before anyone bolted a cabin onto a chassis, Americans were living out of covered wagons, and the modern RV — the motorhomes and trailers listed on RV Frontier today — is the direct descendant of that habit. This is the whole arc in one read: wagon trains and auto camps, the Tin Can Tourists, the aluminum trailers of the 1930s, the postwar boom, the first true motorhomes, and the slide-out era that produced the rigs on the road now.

Before engines: the covered wagon habit

The recreational vehicle did not start as a product. It started as a practice. Through the nineteenth century, Conestoga wagons and lighter prairie schooners carried families west with their beds, kitchens and furniture aboard — a house that moved, drawn at walking pace. Nobody called it recreation, but the template was set: shelter, storage and transport in one vehicle.

By the late 1800s, wealthy sportsmen were commissioning horse-drawn camping wagons for hunting and touring holidays, and when the automobile arrived, early motorists simply transferred the idea. Tents were strapped to running boards, folding cots and camp kitchens were sold by outfitters, and by the 1910s a few makers were building purpose-designed camping cars. Pierce-Arrow's Touring Landau, shown in 1910, is often cited as one of the first production camping vehicles — a luxury car with a fold-down bed and a sink, built for a market of perhaps a few hundred rich tourists.

The mass version of the idea waited for cheap cars, paved roads and paid vacations. All three arrived in the 1920s.

The Tin Can Tourists and the auto camp era

The defining organisation of early RVing was the Tin Can Tourists of the World, founded in 1919 and holding its first conventions at DeSoto Park in Tampa, Florida. The name is usually traced to the members' habits — eating from tin cans and carrying a tin can of water on the radiator cap — and the club's tin can emblem became the badge of the auto camper. At its pre-Depression peak, the Tin Can Tourists counted members in the tens of thousands.

Towns across America built municipal auto camps to attract them: free or cheap plots with water, fireplaces and wash houses, on the theory that campers bought petrol, groceries and supplies locally. Some camps later became the trailer parks and campgrounds of the postwar era.

The trailers themselves were mostly homemade in the 1920s — plywood boxes on car chassis, built from magazine plans. But a commercial industry was forming. In Detroit, Arthur Sherman, who by the standard account built his first hard-sided trailer in 1929 after one rained-out camping trip too many, founded the Covered Wagon Company in 1929 and became one of the largest trailer builders of the decade. The lesson of the 1930s was that a factory trailer, sold through dealers, beat a homemade one — and dozens of makers followed him into the business.

The 1930s: the trailer becomes a product

The decade's landmark was aerodynamic and made of aluminum. Hawley Bowlus — an aircraft engineer who had supervised construction of Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis — applied aircraft methods to a trailer, and his riveted-aluminum Road Chief appeared in 1934. When the Bowlus company failed in 1936, Wally Byam's young Airstream company took up the design, and the 1936 Airstream Clipper, priced at about $1,200, established the riveted aluminum trailer as the industry's prestige object. That story has its own chapter in our history of Airstream.

By the late 1930s there were hundreds of trailer manufacturers in the United States — trade counts of the era put the number above 300 — concentrated in southern California, the Midwest and, increasingly, around Elkhart, Indiana, where a cluster of suppliers, frame builders and trailer factories was forming that still dominates the industry today. The makers had a trade association, national trailer shows and dealer networks; an industry, not a hobby.

The Second World War killed most of them: aluminum and factory capacity were diverted to the war effort, civilian trailer production largely stopped, and the survivors were the companies with real dealer networks and balance sheets.

War, then the great postwar boom

The postwar years created the modern industry. Returning servicemen, a housing shortage and cheap credit filled trailer parks across the country — many people lived in travel trailers full-time out of necessity before they did it for pleasure. Through the 1950s, trailers grew longer, gained bathrooms and full kitchens, and split into two industries: mobile homes, built to be parked more or less permanently, and travel trailers, built to move.

The word itself settled in this period — "recreational vehicle", shortened to RV, came into wide use in the 1960s as the industry organised. The truck-bed hitch story of the same era, which produced the fifth wheel class, is told in our history of fifth wheel trailers.

The motorhome arrives

Putting the engine and the living quarters in one vehicle was the obvious next step, and early attempts were mostly bus conversions and one-off custom coaches. The breakthrough was industrial, not technical. Winnebago, an Iowa trailer maker founded in 1958, applied assembly-line methods to motorhomes and in 1966 launched its first motorhome at roughly $5,000 — about half the price of competing coaches. Motorhomes stopped being rich men's toys.

Through the 1970s the category filled out: the sleek, front-wheel-drive GMC MotorHome (1973–1978, about 13,000 built) showed how car-like a coach could be, and the industry settled on the Class A, Class B and Class C classification still used today — coaches on purpose-built or stripped chassis, van conversions, and coaches on van cutaway chassis respectively. The Class C became the decade's volume story: a factory coach body on a Ford, Dodge or Chevrolet cutaway cab, sold at prices a Winnebago-shaped market had been trained to expect. Truck campers, pop-up folding trailers and the first big fifth wheels rounded out a market that now had a type for every tow vehicle and budget.

The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 battered the industry, killing weaker makers and whole nameplates, but the classes survived intact — and the 1980s recovery added diesel pusher coaches at the top of the Class A range and the basement-storage, wide-body designs that set the template for the modern luxury coach.

Slide-outs and the modern RV

Two institutions from this era still frame the industry. The RV Industry Association (RVIA), which sets the standards most builders certify to, was founded in 1974; the RV/MH Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana — the manufacturing heartland of the industry — dates to 1972 and preserves the early trailers this article describes.

The last great structural change was the slide-out room. Slide-outs appeared on production RVs in the late 1980s and spread through the 1990s; by the 2000s, multiple slides, residential appliances and full paint had turned the big fifth wheel and Class A into rolling apartments. Trailers and coaches grew wider inside without growing longer outside, and floorplan — for decades a footnote — became the thing buyers shopped for first.

The record boom and what came after

The final chapter so far is the surge of 2020–21. Pandemic-era demand for self-contained travel pushed US wholesale RV shipments to roughly 600,000 units in 2021 — an industry record by a wide margin, per the RVIA figures that track it. Full-time RV living, camper vans and remote-work rigs moved from subcultures to the mainstream, and the used market filled with every era of RV described above, from restored 1960s trailers to three-year-old slide-out coaches.

That is the real use of the history: today's listings are a cross-section of it. Browse current RV listings and you are looking at a century of camping ideas, all still in service.