Customer Reviews

Working Horses: Looking Back 100 Years to America's Horse Drawn-Days

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the days before motorized vehicles and tractors, city businesses and rural farms were powered by horses. Draft Horses, Light Horses and everything in between were harnessed to the plow, express wagons (think UPS with horses) and even houses. Charles ("Chappie") Fox sheds a spotlight on all aspects of the horses of yesteryear; from the building of the vehicles, the equipment and stables, to the hitches used for advertising to the circus, farm and fire horses. Take a nostalgic look back or discover a little bit of history with this Beautiful! book- full of illustrations, paintings and photographs, along with well written and informative captions and commentary from a man who knows the business inside and out. My copy is well worn and well cherished! A fantastic gift for any horseperson, regardless of their chosen discipline.

I gave this book a 4 star only because I bought my son and his wife this for Christmas and my son raved about it and said it was a fantastic book. So I have not personally seen the book.
They one day will have working horses.

I'm old enough to remember at least one horse-drawn vehicle on the streets of Detroit: Joe's Vegetable cart used to stop at our house every week. I have no idea what kind of vegetables Joe sold. I only remember the horse. Now that I'm living upstate near a small town, horses are back on the highways again pulling Amish rigs. I have it on good authority that the Amish are buying up the local farms and making a go of them with horse-power, after the more mechanized farmers went out of business. Perhaps we discarded the nutmeat with the husk when we fell in love with gasoline-powered vehicles at the beginning of the last century.

This book takes a nostalgic look back to those times when horses moved freight, delivered milk, ice, and coal, and clattered over city streets pulling six tons of fire equipment. It is filled with black-and-white photographs, drawings, and reproductions of ads for such items as the 'Studebaker Station Wagon' (horse-drawn, of course!). You could even hitch your horses to one of three different sizes of air calliope, and entertain your whole village in the days before boom boxes.

Even readers who do not love or own horses might be interested in how the vehicles were built and sold, how the horses were stabled in cities, or what rules the wagonmen were supposed to follow when delivering their freight.

For those of us who do love horses, this book is an absolute mine of details about the draft horses and mules that were used to haul the grapes from the vineyards, the circuses to towns, and ice, furniture, and food to householders.

One of the many interesting photographs shows over fifty draft horses lined up outside their four-story horse hotel in Charlottenburg, Germany. However, most of the other illustrations originated in America. The text is quite interesting, too. This bit of doggerel appeared in the August 16, 1899 issue of the "Breeders Gazette:" "One white foot - buy him/ Two white feet - try him/ Three white feet - deny him/ Four white feet - throw him to the crows."

Returning to the economics of horse-drawn versus gasoline-powered vehicles, the J.M. Horton Ice Cream Co. of New York had this to say: "We can run a two-horse rig at a cost of $15 a day including driver's wages. It costs us $25 a day to operate a truck."

Maybe the Amish have the right idea after all--and where is the gasoline-powered tractor that can reproduce itself?