Horse and Buggy Time

Fall, 1910: Schinook the family horse has been hitched up to escort Eleanor, Clara and baby Ferris to town for a Saturday afternoon’s shopping. Clip-clop, clip-clop. There they go, leaving three tracks in the grass…the middle one made by the horse’s hooves, of course!

In 1910 cars were just starting to outnumber horse and buggies. Ford produced the famous Model-T in 1908 but he wouldn’t set up his factory in Highland Park, Michigan until 1913. Cars were no longer just a rich man’s toy as in 1900, but neither had they yet taken over as in the next 5-10 years.

Horses were still doing lots of jobs in 1910: they delivered groceries, they served as taxis, they pulled steam and pumpers to fires and harvesters over the farms. New York City had plenty of stables and carriage houses for horses. Rows of these stables, called mews, have now converted into expensive pieces of real estate.

There were certainly downsides to this mode of transportation, however, quite aside from the welfare of the animal itself. Allow me to fill you in!

5 Horse and Buggy Drawbacks

1. Dead Horses: While the well-to-do took care of their animals, many city horses were overworked to the point that they dropped dead in the street. The cost and difficulty of removing a 1,000+ pound beast meant that their carcasses were often left to rot, attracting flies and breeding disease.
   
2. Manure: The average horse produced 15-30 pounds of manure per day. PER DAY. In a city like New York with 100,000 horses, the Sanitation Department could not keep up with these…deposits. Again, flies, disease, stink and great expense for the manure removal.
   
3. Runaway Horses: Though, certainly, horses went much slower than automobiles (10-15 miles per hour) they could get spooked and cause accidents, too. I reviewed articles from the Middletown Times Press from 1906, searching by the keyword “runaway”. From just April 18-25, I came up with three separate incidents:
   
   • April 18: Barber Shops Peril: Runaway Horse Tries to Enter Through a Window (You can’t make this stuff up.)
     
     April 24: Killed by a Runaway (58 year old man dies of injuries sustained in a runaway on Thursday, on the Cocheton turnpike).
     
     April 25: Lively Runaway: A horse ran away on West Main Street…the wagon was smashed .
4. Crossing the Street: Electric traffic lights had not yet been invented. Policemen helped direct traffic, around 1910, with the help of sempahores. (A semaphore was a tower with moving arms to signal “go” and stop”).
   
   Prior to that, in an “age of numerous vehicles which constantly imperil innocent childhood”, according to the Buffalo Enquirer from September 1897, “the following from an English magazine seems very pertinent, and worth teaching to the nursery folk:
   

Look up the street, look down the street,
Before you leave the gate;
If horses’ feet the cobbles beat,
Stand very still and wait.

Look up the street, look down the street,
If nothing there you see; 
With footsteps fleet, my toddler sweet,
Cross over carefully.”

And last but not least…#5:

Isolated communities: At this time in history, when telephones were still scarce and there were no radio or televisions, communities were far-removed from one another. Each community had to depend on its own food, entertainment and civil society.

Depending who you were and where you found yourself, that could certainly be seen as a drawback. Notes Frederick Lewis Allen in The Big Change, “a trip to see friends ten miles away was likely to be an all-day expedition, for the horse had to be given a chance to rest and be fed.”

You’d have less friends. You’d also, necessarily, have a smaller view of the world at large. Things were already starting to change though.

The World’s Fair was held in St. Louis in 1904. Among its displays were an Alaskan tribe, a Japanese pavilion and a Congolese Pygmy. The success of the fair (an estimated 20 million visitors…”Meet Me in Saint Louis“, anyone?) attested to the fact that people had an interest in different communities and cultures.

Then in 1907, Theodore Roosevelt decided to send sixteen battleships and 14,000 men on a voyage around the world. In addition to showing off our Navy, the Great White Fleet improved international relations, making 20 stops across six continents. Again, the public enthusiasm for that trip seems to indicate that people in the U.S. were increasingly curious about the world beyond our borders.

In short, there’s a reason that people use the phrase “horse and buggy” to refer to things that are out-of date. It’s a mode of transportation that was too limiting for the country we were quickly becoming.

Since Eleanor couldn’t take a picture of the kids pretending to drive the car, here they are pretending to steer the horse. I might call that questionable parenting. Then again, I may be helping my grandchildren on to a driverless school bus some day so no judgement here!