The Chesapeake Region's First Horses Redux

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In sorting through all the material that I've been collecting for this blog, on a search for something entirely different, I came upon an extract I'd made several years ago from the Historic Jamestowne website.

"Featured find #11" describes an artifact, dated to 1610, that was recovered during the excavation of the Jamestowne fort. Labeled a "bridled horse pipe bowl," it looks like this:

The maker of this pipe gave each side of the rim and ear, added a bit of clay to the back of the bowl to suggest a horse's arched neck, and inscribed lines on the front to portray a horse: two bands across the forehead and chin and two down the nose to represent a bridle, with eyes on either side of the head below the upper strap.

The horses brought to Jamestown no later than the arrival of the 3rd Supply in 1609 would almost certainly have been the first horses ever seen by the Powhatan. Gabriel Archer, one of the colonists who traveled to Virginia on The Blessing, recorded that the vessel called in at Plymouth expressly to pick up "six Mares and two Horses [stallions]." John Smith, inventorying the settlement's resources in the fall of that year noted the presence of the six mares but only one of the two horses. By the following spring, all the horses were gone: "as for our Hogs, Hens, Goats, Sheepe, Horse, or what lived, our commanders, officers, and Salvages daily consumed them . . . till all was devoured."

Between the arrival in August 1609 of the surviving ships of the third supply (one was lost at sea and a second shipwrecked on the Bermuda Islands) and the fate of the horses as nourishment for starving settlers, the Powhatan made the acquaintance of these new arrivals in their territory. Smith wrote of the Powhatan reaction to horses that "All things that were able to do them hurt beyond their prevention, they adore with their kinde of divine worship; as the fire, water, lightning, thunder, our ordinance [cannon], peeces [muskets], horses, etc." Because the Powhatan used tobacco for religious purposes, the archaeologists describing the pipe bowl write that "it makes sense that they would use the image of something they feared on a tobacco pipe."

Archer quote from Philip L. Barbour, The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, p.278; first Smith quote from Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings, p.130; second Smith quote from Philip L. Barbour, The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), I, p.169.
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In 1642, Lion Gardener, at the time an official of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, observed the leader of a Native American group on Long Island explaining to his people the future that he foresaw for them if they did not take action to prevent it.

"For so are we all Indians as the English are and say brother to one another; so we must be one as they are, otherwise we shall be all gone shortly. For you know our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved."

From The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.
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The White Horse

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A couple of weeks ago, I was in New York for the weekend and took a break from a walk around Central Park to visit The Frick Collection. While in the museum, my eye was caught by a Constable landscape labelled "The White Horse." The horse in question is standing in the bow of a flatboat getting underway on the left side of the canvas. One man is busy coiling up an anchor line while two men are pushing the boat away from shore using long poles. A fourth man, smoking a pipe, sits in the stern with the tiller at hand. The catalog description of the painting describes it as showing "a tow-horse being ferried across the river Stour near Dedham."


The tow-horse will eventually be pulling a narrow boat on a nearby canal. His connection to the ferry is only as a passenger. The horse stands in a well between the bow and a low raised deck area that runs almost the length of the boat. Three of the ferrymen are standing on this raised deck while the fourth appears to be sitting on the side of a similar small well at the stern end. It is difficult to see how this vessel could carry much in the way of cargo except on calm days when passengers and baggage could rest securely on the elevated deck. Only the use of planking to cover the recessed space would allow the boat to carry any kind of wheeled vehicle.


What is certain, however, is that there is no cable, no provision for sails, and no arrangement for rowing. Is the river shallow enough at this point to pole the boat across? Does it drift with the current, steered by the tiller? That would seem to make crossings "on demand" unlikely and complicate the shuttle design of having a matched pair of ferry landings. Short of a time machine, an account by a very observant and obsessively detailed traveller, a manual for ferry operators, or some other contemporary description, the details remain unclear.

Ordinaries, Ferries, and Horses

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Wishing to write one more blog post for 2011, I then, as per usual, decided to defer the agonies of writing in favor of the pleasures of organizing the material that I have been collecting over the past couple of years. I started with the real paper but that proved to be such a heterogeneous collection that the task seemed too demanding for the evening of Boxing Day. So I turned to the virtual paper instead.

One of the first files I found bore the name "Anne Arundel County," which told me very little. When I opened it to investigate further, it proved to be a file of extracts from county court records, all having some connection to ordinaries or ordinary keepers. The file had been generously shared with me by Rod Cofield, Director of Interpretation and Museum Programs at Historic London Town and Gardens. Because the colonial town of London was one terminus of a ferry over the South River, operated by the holder of an ordinary license, all aspects of colonial ordinaries in Anne Arundel are important to the interpretation of the site.


William Brown House, Historic London Town and Gardens
To digress just a bit, in 1755 an Englishman named George Fisher traveled north from Virginia, passing through London Town on his journey. In the narrative of his travels, Fisher wrote "London Town, (a great name) where I arrived about Three stands upon the S W side of South River; is composed of a few houses only. After Crossing this small river not more than half a mile in breadth, Two great Fellows in getting my Horse out of their (Browns) Boat, threw him upon his back in the water; and tho' he lay at least a minute on his side in the water, the Boat beating on him, he received no damage. [William and Mary Quarterly, January 1909, p.175]

Returning to the path on which I originally set out, the file is voluminous with much information that has little to do with the content of this blog. But it does contain scattered entries that help shed additional light on the operation of ferries as they pertained to travel through the county on horseback. Enough information so that I promise to put to rest with this blog the question of the power source for Anne Arundel's ferries. Not that I'm convinced all the evidence has been assembled, but only because I don't plan to go looking for any more. If it turns up, however...

The court record volumes begin in 1703. The county levy for that year, established at the November court session, authorized payment of 6000 pounds of tobacco to each of the county's publicly supported ferrymen. In the manner of colonial roads, which meandered around fields and obstacles, the June 1704 court record presents another digression, in the account of a suit by Joseph Addison against Capt. Edward Hunt. Addison charged that Hunt "at Lyons Creek in Anne Arundel County… stood justly indebted" for an itemized list of expenses that included "money lent you at the race" in the amount of 18 shillings. This serendipitous entry testifies to horse races being held at Lyons Creek (near Herring Bay) as early as 1702.

In the record of the January 1705 court session, the clerk included the rates set for food, drink, and accommodations at county ordinaries. Travelers paid six pence for "a night's lodging in a bed" and the same amount for "good pasturage for a horse". For two shillings the horse's master could purchase a peck of shelled corn or oats as feed for his horse and hay or oat straw bedding for the same amount. The August court further decreed that the ferrymen on the Severn and South Rivers had to be in attendance on Sundays between nine and eleven in the morning and two and four in the afternoon to provide passage for all persons, whether on foot or horseback, who were going to church services.

Horses continued to receive equal, if not superior, consideration in court directives concerning ordinaries and ferries. When the justices appointed Joseph Crouch and James Hoskins as ferry keepers for the Severn River in November 1710, for example, they directed the two men to "ply the [river] with a good boat for carry over of horses and other passengers inhabiting in this county." Edmund Rumney, in petitioning for the appointment as ferry keeper for the South River in November 1713, stated that he had spent at least £300 to built "conveniences . . . fit to give entertainment for man and horse by land or water and is also provided with two good boats and hands."

The first clue as to the means by which the ferry boats moved across the rivers can be found in an entry for November 1715: "Edward Rumney agrees to keep South River Ferry for the ensuing year . . . and to find two good boats and two hands to row in the said boats." This stipulation doesn't rule out the possibility that sails were also used in favorable conditions but would seem to indicate that the ferries did not use any form of cable crossing.

Appointment as ferry keeper for the South River was a sought-after plum, judging from the petitions submitted to the court. John Holland petitioned for the post in November 1716; in granting his request, the court ordered Holland to find "two good boats and five able men to keep the said ferry." Perhaps the experience of the previous year suggested that a ratio of five men to two boats was a better arrangement than two men for two boats.

Strength would seem a desirable attribute for the able hands to have possessed, a judgment confirmed in November 1719 when the Severn River post was requested by Thomas Williams. His petition argued that the incumbent, Robert Jubb, offered poor service because he had "for the most part no body to row in the boat but a couple of very weak boys whose strength is not sufficient very often to convey passengers over[,] especially in hard winds, when tis both dangerous and delaying to those that cross the river." Despite Jubb's deficiencies, however, Williams's petition was rejected. Passengers would continue to take their chances with the weak boys.

The extracted records do not record any significant additions to understanding the operation of the ferries until the 1740s. The November 1746 court directed that "nothing is to be paid for bags containing anything," a charge of "only six pence for any man & horse," and "three pence for a single man or horse." Jurymen attending court could cross after sunset for free. It is tempting to picture horses, without riders, showing up at the ferry landing with three shillings in hoof seeking passage across the river or creek, but more probable to infer that passengers sometimes traveled with extra horses.

The same court session agreed to keep Stephen West as the operator of the South River ferry for another year. As part of the new agreement, the justices granted West permission, when it was not safe for two boats to cross the river, each with a crew of only two men, "by means of hard winds . . . liberty to place all the hands in one Boat if he think proper." Again, the language supports the conclusion that the hands employed by the ferry keeper rowed the boats across the river.

A general order issued in November 1750 set forth the clearest description of the services ferries provided and of the cargoes they typically carried: Ordered that the Ferrymen set over all persons belonging to the County [i.e., county residents] from Sun rising to Sun setting for the allowance [i.e., annual salary] made by the County and also at all times the Justices, Sheriffs, Jurymen, and Evidences [i.e., witnesses summoned to court to testify] during their attending courts, and all other persons set over before Sun rise or after Sun set to pay at the rate of six pence man and horse and three pence for a single person and that the several ferrymen may charge and take for carrying over every chaise or chair or other wheel carriage at the rate of three shillings and six pence each and all ferrymen carry over bags, wallets, baskets, dead meat, and fowls, poultry, geese, and turkeys without charging any thing for the same.

The clerk's record of proceedings in August 1751 contained an unexpected description of the crew of the Magothy River ferry. William Kitely appeared "to answer a the complaint of John Gray of Magothy concerning his keeping Magothy Ferry, and that he should bring with him the girl named Linstead[?] that usually rows in the ferry boat." Evidently the able hands could be female, as well as male, as long as they were strong enough to pull the oars. Three years later, in June 1754, the justices exempted Thomas Barrel, "who rowed in South River Ferry Boat" from payment of the annual levy and granted him a stipend of 320 pounds of tobacco for his support until the next November's levy court, "he having fitts and [being] unable to work." Taxes were levied only on those adults able to work, and residents who could not work and lacked family to care for them received support from public funds.

The men like Thomas Barrel who did the work of loading and unloading the ferries, as well as rowing them, received some consideration for their well-being in a directive of the court issued in November 1754. "The ferrymen are to assist in getting the carriages [on and off the ferry] but shall not be obliged to wade in the water in the winter season." Left unclear is who would wade in the water if that were necessary to move a carriage or chaise safely between shore and ferry. Travel by horse-drawn vehicle entailed various kinds of discomfort but the savings in time must have made their use worth the hardships for inland trips that avoided long sails up and down the Chesapeake region's many rivers.

When the court renewed William Brown's appointment as keeper of the South River ferry in 1762, modifications to the standard terms indicate the growth of public business that was occurring during the third quarter of the century. The justices required that Brown keep two boats and four hands "constantly attending" year round, but "in all public times such as Provincial and County Courts, elections, and other public meetings[,] to keep three boats and six able hands attending." How seaworthy the third boat would be and how skilled the two extra hands (idle or employed in agricultural tasks the rest of the year?) were should perhaps have been a concern.

The August 1769 court proceedings included publication of the current "Rates of Liquors and Other Accomodations." Ordinary keepers could charge 8 pence per gallon for oats and corn. The array of provision for horses also included "Fresh water, hay, corn tops, or oat straw with stableage" at a charge of 1 shilling per night. If fodder consisted only of marsh hay, the cost was 8 pence, and good pasturage per night could be obtained for 6 pence.

With this last entry, the information available from the court records relating to travel on horseback in connection with ordinaries and ferries comes to an end. The references, coupled with the one account by Philip Vickers Fithian of his experience of being called upon to row during a difficult passage, generally indicate that the ferries operating in Anne Arundel relied upon able bodied men (and an occasional woman) to row the ferry boats with their human and equine passengers across the county's waterways.

From Scarcity to Nuisance

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The Jamestown colonists found it necessary to slaughter their horses for food during the starving time of the first winter. We can assume, although without documentation as proof, that subsequent supply ships brought replacements for those horses, but it wouldn’t have been until the 1610s, after the initial years of famine had receded, that the colony’s supply of horses began to grow through births of foals in Virginia.

The accounts of the arrival of the Ark and the Dove, carrying the first Maryland settlers in 1634, are similarly silent on the subject of horses, although early ships must have carried a few even if there were none on the first voyage to Maryland. By the late 1640s, there were definitely at least seven horses in the colony for they turn up several times in the Provincial Court records (vol. 4 of the Archives of Maryland Online). These horses were the property of Leonard Calvert, brother of Lord Baltimore and governor of Maryland. Tracing them through the records, it appears that five of the horses -- three mares, a "stone horse" (stallion) and a colt -- were originally the property of Lord Baltimore, then were acquired by John Lewger, secretary of the colony, and sold by him in 1644 to Calvert in exchange for Calvert's payment of £100 sterling to John Smith, a linen draper (cloth merchant) in London, on Lewger's behalf.

The mid-1640s were a turbulent time for the Maryland colony, when Richard Ingle, a ship captain who supported the Parliamentary cause attacked the colony and for a time took over its government -- a period later referred to as the "plundering time." Leonard Calvert and others defended proprietary interests for some months but eventually fled to Virginia. There Calvert recruited soldiers and returned with a force of both Virginians and Marylanders to retake control of the colony. He evidently took at least a few horses with him when he crossed the Potomac into Virginia. In June of 1647, Virginia's governor, William Berkeley, wrote to say that he was sending back to Calvert a mare and colt in the care of a Mr. Trussel. Calvert also received a claim from Edward Hill, who was acting as governor for a time after Ingle's departure, for "satisfaction for Colclough’s horse, offered me in exchange of your filly at Chicacoan."

Leonard Calvert died unexpectedly on 11 June 1647. On his deathbed he named Thomas Greene as governor and Margaret Brent as his executor. Legacies included a "mare colt" to his godson Leonard Greene and the next "mare colt" born to Mrs. Temperance Pippett of Virginia. The inventory of Calvert's estate, appraised on the 30th of June, listed "3 Stone-horses 3 mares, & one Ston-colt" valued at 8400 pounds of tobacco and a saddle and bridle worth 100 pounds. There is no further mention of horses until February 1649, when Margaret Brent sold one gray stone horse to Barnaby Jackson, a tailor, for 1700 pounds of tobacco. The bill of sale does not indicate that Brent acted as Calvert's exectuor, so it is possible that she sold one of her own horses.

The final reference to the governor's horses comes in 1650, when Thomas Thornborough submitted a petition to the court, asking that it enforce a commitment made by the deceased governor, Leonard Calvert, to give Thornborough a horse as compensation for his service at St. Inigoe’s fort. The horse in question was being held by Cuthbert Fenwick, who had bought it from Margaret Brent, Calvert’s executrix, who had sold it out of Calvert’s estate. When Jane Fenwick, Cuthbert's widow, died in 1661, the inventory of her estate included one horse, but there is no way to know whether or not it was the horse Thornborough claimed as his.


From the above evidence, or lack thereof, we could reasonably conclude that there were not many horses in the province through the 1650s. But other documents suggest that might not have been the case. By 1659, the Maryland legislature was enacting a law requiring “That all fences for Corne fields within this Province shall be five foote in height round the said field sufficient and strongly made in the Judgemt of two Indifferent men viewing the same in case of trespass[,] And in case any horse or horses or other cattle^[1] shall happen to leape over such fence as aforesaid or breake it downe it being sufficient and strongly made as aforesaid That then the Owners of such horse or horses or other Cattle shall be lyable to pay the trespass[,] And in case the said Fence be not soe high that then the Owner or owners of such Corne feilds shall beare their owne losse comitted by the horse[,] horses or Cattle as aforesaid.” In other words, all corn fields had to enclosed by strong fences at least 5’ in height. If any horse managed to get into the field despite the fence the animal's owner had to pay damages, but if the fencing was inadequate, then the planter suffered the loss. Apparently there were enough horses on the loose by the late 1650s to be a threat to fields of corn.


Five years later, the legislative records indicate another recognition of the importance of horses for travel within the colony. An Act for Ferrys stipulated that ferries over the St. George’s River in St. Mary’s County and the Wicomoco River in Charles County must have boats with a 14’ keel to carry “any person traveling on foot” but that an 18’ boat was required to provide for “men and horses[,] for the passinge or conveyinge over [the Patuxent River] all passengers whatsoever wth their horses travelinge either on foote or on horse back.”

The first law attempting to limit the importation of horses was passed in 1671. By the early 1680s, the legislature was considering several measures to control the number of horses in the colony, including not only limitations on importation, but also prohibition of ownership by non-landowners and a ban on stallions running loose that were not at least fourteen hands high to prevent any deterioration of the colony’s stock of horses. The general aim was “to lessen the Number of them that now are grown a Common Nusance.” This was to some degree a measure of social control – with the upper house arguing in favor of legislation to restrict ownership by the lesser sort while the lower house raised objections to the proposals. In the October 1683 session, the lower house did respond to a request for a proposal when “Mr Clement Hill and Mr Hutchins from the Lower house [came in] with a Bill for Lessening the Number of Horses” but after the first reading there is no further mention of the act.

In 1694, the assembly, distressed that earlier laws had not been effective, passed “An Act to prevent the greate Evill occasioned by the multiplicity of horses within this Province.” The law argued that “the small stature of Stallions running wild doth both Lessen & spoyle the whole breed and Streyne of all horses” but then noted “that which is most grievious and intollerable is the utter Ruine & destruccon of Corne Feilds, Pastures, and other Inclosures, which otherwise would produce great store of good & usefull provisions.” The remedy was a requirement that “yearly & every year all Owners of any horse horses Mares Colts and Geldings shall & are hereby obliged to keep all or any such Horse or Horses Mares Colts and Geldings withingood and sufficient Inclosures fenced grounds or pastures from the first day of May till the tenth day of November yearly for prevention of the greate Mischeife and Evills aforesaid.” The proliferation of wild horses had become enough of a problem to reverse the usual practice of letting animals roam freely while fields had to be fenced to keep them out. Horses now had to be enclosed in fenced pastures to protect crops from damage.


2 May 1754
Similar laws remained in effect for much of the colonial period but failed to remedy the problem. Issues of the Maryland Gazette in the 1750s and 1760s often have as many or more notices asking owners to collect lost or strayed horses as there are advertisements seeking the return of runaway servants and slaves.
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^[1] The OED defines ‘cattle,’ in the language of the stable, as applying to horses, in the way it is used in Georgette Heyer novels by aristocrats referring to the matched pairs they purchased for their carriages. As the likelihood of a cow or bull leaping over a colonial fence seems remote, this is perhaps also the legislative use of the word.

The Modern Horse

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Modern horses belong to the species E. caballus within the genus Equus, the only extant genus of the family Equidae. Within the genus Equus, horses, asses, and zebras are the only surviving species.

The genus Equus evolved into its present form on the North American continent, as documented in continent’s fossil record. During a period of major glaciation during the Pliocene epoch (2.6 million years ago), some Equus species crossed from North America to the eastern hemisphere.

In Africa, they diversified into modern zebras; those who spread to Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa developed as desert-adapted asses, both domesticated and wild (onagers). True horses, E. caballus, spread through Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

In the western hemisphere, horses became extinct about 10,000 years ago, at a time in the late Pleistocene when a series of extinctions eradicated most of the large mammals, including not only all of the horses in North and South America, but also mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. A combination of climatic changes and overhunting by H. sapiens, a recent arrival in the hemisphere, is believed to have been responsible.

Extant species within the genus Equus are E. burchelli, the Plains zebra of Africa; E. zebra, the Mountain zebra of South Africa; E. grevyi, Grevy’s zebra; E. caballus, the true horse; E. hemionus, the desert-adapted onagers; and E. asinus, the true asses and donkeys of north Africa.

Horses were reintroduced into the western hemisphere by European explorers, conquerors, and settlers. Juan Ponce de Leon brought horses, as well as cattle and hogs, to the Gulf Coast of Florida in 1521. Nineteen years later, Francisco Coronado carried horses into the southwestern part of what is now the United States.

Native Americans in this area acquired horses from breeding stocks that developed from the horses that had originally been brought by the Spanish. But there were no horses in the eastern part of the continent north of Florida when the first settlers arrived at Roanoke(1584)and at Jamestown(1607).

The wild ponies of Assateague and Chincoteague may be descendants of survivors of a wrecked Spanish ship. Spanish fleets traveled to the new world carrying horses for the armies that conquered Mexico, Peru, and other parts of the Caribbean, Central, and South America; these fleets returned home by a route that took them along the coast of North America. While they would not have carried many horses on this part of their journey, some could have been aboard a ship that was wrecked.




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A Boat or A Horse?

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The common perception is that Chesapeake colonists traveled primarily by boat, a generalization that is probably valid for the earliest days of settlement, when anyone who needed to travel any distance wouldn't have had much of an alternative.

A person who didn't have access to some form of water transportation – whether a canoe, skiff, raft, or small boat like a shallop – would most likely have had to walk to travel anywhere beyond his own plantation.

Nevertheless, there were practical incentives to acquire a horse as soon as possible to carry one to court, to a neighbor's, to church. Horses were expensive, but so were boats. Horses were uncommon, but so were boats. Roads may have been poor, bisected by creeks and rivers, impassable in periods of bad weather, but rivers and the Chesapeake Bay could be dangerous in storms or impassable because of unfavorable winds or tides, and require circuitous routes to move from one neck of land to another.


Although horses were not widely owned until the second half of the seventeenth century, boat ownership was not common either. Moreover, boat ownership remained limited to a small segment of the population, while ownership of horses became more widely dispersed over the seventeenth century, as the following table shows [all estates inventoried in Anne Arundel County, 1660-1699; not corrected for gender, age, wealth, or householder status]:


Thus, in a later-settled county like Anne Arundel, residents had widespread access to horses for transportation and other purposes within just a decade after the first settlers arrived to take up land.

The most thoughtful and evidence-based consideration of the "boats v. horses" question appears in a study of All Hallow's Parish (the settlement of London Town and the surrounding area) by geographer Carville Earle. Earle noted the oft-quoted statement of the Reverend Hugh Jones, that "the number of navigable rivers, creeks, and inletts, render it soe convenient for exporting and importing goods into any part thereof by water carriage."

But Jones also recognized what less clear-eyed observers have not, that what was useful for transporting heavy cargoes was not necessarily equally suited to personal movement. Earle found that the adaptations colonists made to their new-world environment included adopting "the horse and the road as the main means of travel" and a willingness to travel longer distances on horseback, in a region of dispersed settlement, than was the practice in England. [1]

Earle's analysis documented the low incidence of boat ownership compared with access to horses and identified their disadvantages in contrast to horses. As settlement spread away from the estuaries, fewer and fewer plantations had direct access to water; boats required more skill and more work in the absence of favorable winds or tides; and maintenance costs were greater.


Initially boats were cheaper to acquire – £1.5 to £3 for an 8-to-12 foot boat with sails and oars versus £5.5 to £7 for a horse – but by the 1690s purchase prices were comparable, giving the horse a decided advantage overall.

"Horseback riding became the main way of getting about in the parish and in tidewater Maryland." Jones, whose observation about the use of boats applied to imports and exports, not people, had a different assessment when it came to his own movements: "Our soil is generally sandy, free from stone, which makes itt verry convenient for travelling. And we have noe occasion for shoeing our horses except in frosty weather. And what with the goodnesse of our little horses and with the smoothnesse of the roads, we can travell upon occasion fifty miles in a summer afternoon, and sometimes a hundred miles in a day." [2]

[1] Carville V. Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System: All Hallow's Parish, Maryland, 1650-1783, (1975), 23, 142.

[2] Earle, Tidewater Settlement, 143-144.








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The First Modern Horses in the Chesapeake Region

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Modern horses arrived in the Chesapeake region with the first Virginia colonists. Although scenes of Indians mounted on horseback attacking a wagon train or battling cavalry troops are a staple of westerns, these were nineteenth-century experiences. Native Americans in this area did not raise or have access to horses.

As was the case with many of the new human arrivals, the horses brought in as part of the earliest expeditions did not survive the "starving time" of 1609-1610.[1] Archaeological evidence indicates that all were consumed as food by the desperate colonists. The ships that arrived in subsequent years to resupply the Jamestown colonists carried more horses; these horses survived, and as they reproduced horses became a permanent part of the Chesapeake landscape.[2]


S. D. Rager

It is interesting to note that the lists of needed supplies, prepared both for the Virginia Company and for Maryland settlers, never mentioned livestock of any kind. Ships making ocean passages carried live animals as a source of food during the voyage, and successful settlement required domesticated animals for food, transportation, and labor. But the few accounts that we have of the early years of colonization make no mention of horses.

Father Andrew White notes in his journal that the first Maryland colonists bought cattle and hogs when they stopped in Virginia before sailing up the Potomac River to their landing at St. Clement's Island, but he doesn't say anything about horses. Nor is there any indication that the Ark and the Dove carried horses, something that was a possibility but very unlikely. Nevertheless, the first settlers must have purchased horses in Virginia within a short time of arriving in Maryland and later-arriving ships may well have carried at least a few horses.

Both artifacts recovered on archaeological digs and a variety of documents provide evidence about the presence of horses in early Virginia. Archaeologists working on the site of Martin's Hundred, first settled in 1618, recovered both horse shoes and a stirrup during their excavations of the site. The "Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall", promulgated in 1612 to bring order and discipline to the Virginia colony, included the following order:

Now know yee therefore, these promises carefully considered, that it is our will and pleasure, that every one, of what quality or condition soever hee bee, in this present Colony, to take due notice of this our Edict, whereby wee do strictly charge and command, that no man shall dare to kill, or destroy any Bull, Cow, Calfe, Mare, Horse, Colt, Goate, Swine, Cocke, Henne, Chicken, Dogge, Turkie, or any tame Cattel, or Poultry, of what condition soever; whether his owne, or appertaining to another man, without leave from the Generall, upon paine of death in the Principall, and in the accessary, burning in the Hand, and losse of his eares, and unto the concealer of the same foure and twenty houres whipping, with addition of further punishment, as shall be thought fitte by the censure, and verdict of a Martiall Court.

Later Virginia records include a report made in 1616 that noted only six horses in the colony; a request that twenty mares be shipped in 1620 (but no evidence either way about their arrival), and the notation of only one horse in the 1625 muster for Martin's Hundred.

On the other hand, the Virginia Council in June 1620 described the colony's horses as "more beautifull, and fuller of courage" than the English horses from which they descended. The massacre that occurred in 1622 may well have wiped out many of those horses, resulting in the low number reported in 1625.

A proclamation issued in 1622 imposing the death penalty for anyone convicted of stealing "beasts & Birds of Domesticall & tame nature," placed horses, mares, and colts at the top of the list of protected animals, indicating both their importance and the fact that there were horses that might be stolen.[3]

While this evidence is mixed as to the presence of horses in Virginia's first decades, it is unambiguous about the value attached to them.[4]



[1] A recent study of colonial diet, based on archaeological investigations of early Virginia sites, notes that fish, wild fowl, turtles, and small mammals represented the "mainstay" of the early Virginia settlers' diet. Faunal remains from the winter of 1609 reveal the extent of the colonists' hunger, as they included vipers, black rats, dogs, cats, and horses. Archaeologists do not normally find horse bones in kitchen middens -- only the very poor ate horse meat, and then only when they had access to it, horses normally being too valuable and too scarce to be butchered for food. Yet the biomass recovered from early deposits at Jamestown included heavily butchered horse bones from heads and feet as well as carcasses. Cary Carson, Joanne Bowen, Willie Graham, Martha McCartney, and Lorena Walsh, "New World, Real World: Improvising English Culture in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," The Journal of Southern History, LXXIV (February 2008), 40.

[2] Nor was their adaptation to the Chesapeake in any way unusual. The Narragansett sachem Miantonomi, speaking to a local tribe on Long Island in 1642, despaired that "these English have gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved." Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates, (2008), 203.

[3] Ivor Noël Hume, Martin's Hundred, (1982), 147-48.


[4] Equally signficant, perhaps, is the choice of a cover illustration for Hume's book: Gerard Terborch's "Cavalier in the Saddle."

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Why Horses? Why Anne Arundel?

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Until fairly recently, both of these questions would have been unnecessary. But most 21st-century residents of Anne Arundel County probably don't encounter living horses very often.

Children may enjoy an occasional pony ride; families may attend the annual joust at St. Margaret's Church; or horses may be seen grazing in the fields along Route 2 in south county or up in the Pasadena area.

Photo from St. Margaret's Joust.
Photographs, paintings, and television shows might be the closest contact with horses that most of us have today -- even the westerns that were once a common experience for movie-goers are now a dwindling part of our culture. But for three hundred years after the settlement of Maryland, horses would have been an integral part of everyday life for most county residents.

Horse power provided a major source of energy and one of the primary means of transportation. Racing and riding were more than entertainment, recreation, and exercise; breeding and racing have been economically important since the 18th century. Armies relied on mounted cavalry as an important element of their fighting power and law enforcement used horses for mobility and crowd control.


As we begin to look around us and to look back at our past, we can see that although their role has changed over the last four centuries, horses have always been a vital part of life in Anne Arundel, across the state, and in our region.

Because this blog is appearing on the Four Rivers Heritage Area website, our focus necessarily will be on local history and local activities. But because the subject is so vast, with tentacles stretching in all directions, temporally and spatially, the subjects that we talk about and the evidence that we use will be drawn from Maryland and occasionally from Virginia, our Chesapeake neighbor, with whom we share a common heritage.
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