As just about everyone knows, Rochester is horse country. A significant amount of the town’s agricultural acreage is devoted to the care and feeding of horses. There are multiple horse farms in town providing everything from riding lessons, dressage training, biomechanics, showing teams, boarding, leasing, and selling of horses to birthday parties and equine laundry. One farm’s horses serve as therapy animals. In addition to these businesses, many residents own a horse or two or three.
When you travel back to Rochester in the 1700s, the use of horses, and how their owners thought of them was radically different. In the early days, the primary mode of transportation was your own two feet. People regularly walked distances that would amaze us today. Abraham Holmes tells about a boat trip that his father took when convalescing from an illness. He traveled as far as the “jerseys” but left the boat and walked back to Rochester, as he was feeling better. One young man walked to New Bedford with the hope of signing on with a whaling ship. When told he was too young and too small, he walked home until he was older and stronger. If you were lucky enough to have a horse, you rode it or used it when working on your farm. The only other way to get from here to there was in an oxcart or horse cart, but there were no wagons of any kind in town.
Abraham Holmes recalls that the horses in town in the late 1700s and early 1800s were “generally poor creatures, owing in great measure to poor keeping. In the summer, they lived on grass. In the winter on hay only; excepting when they were going on a journey when in the previous day, they would have a mess of bran with it.” He also writes that a horse was old and worn by nine years and that $40 would buy a high-priced horse.
Horse-drawn wagons were such a rarity that Holmes remembers the first to come through town caused “as much of a wonderment as a baboon would have done.” Someone in the know deemed it a ‘calash.’ As the years passed, there were more and more horses and horse-drawn vehicles. The mail wagon was pulled by a horse, as was the milk wagon, the iceman’s wagon, and others. Pretty much every family had a horse for farm work and some type of wagon to use as transportation. Even as people bought the early cars, they still used their horses and wagon (to save on gas) to attend social gatherings or visit on Sundays.
In the ’30s and ’40s, Rochester families boarded horses from Camp Cathedral, getting the free use of them from September to June. My mother told a story of being put on the mill horse and riding it to a blacksmith. He took her off; she visited with his family and then was put back on the horse to go home. My grandfather once had two ponies from Chincoteague Island when my mother was young. I always wanted him to get two more, but that didn’t happen. The Hillers at East Over Farm had Clydesdales, and for years you would see them in parades or roaming the pastures. It’s safe to say that Rochester’s 21st-century horses are healthier, costlier, and used for pleasure, not plowing.
By Connie Eshbach
