Equipping Horses

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Although you can ride a horse bareback, it’s not a very practical way to travel, particularly if you need to carry anything with you. By the time Anne Arundel residents were traveling by horseback, equipping a horse entailed the services of an array of specialized craftsmen to produce the leather and metal articles that made for a comfortable trip.

A variety of sources are available to tell us about the equipment needed for a horse more than two hundred years ago. Philip Vickers Fithian’s account [p.16] of his trip from New Jersey to Virginia in October 1773 provides a list of the minimum purchases required for a long-distance trip on a horse. Store accounts and inventories of both store goods and decedents’ horse-related possessions provide other documentation. Visual images – paintings, lithographs, etc. – offer another look at the well-dressed horse.


More Mondays ago than I care to remember, I explored a different avenue for studying equipment when I visited Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum to spend some time with Sara Rivers-Cofield, Curator of Federal Collections. Sara and I discovered a mutual interest in colonial horses last fall when we both attended a one-day symposium at Belair Mansion (which shall figure more importantly in later posts). We decided then that we should get together to share information as soon as we found a mutually convenient date.

Mostly Sara provided information and I took pictures and notes. Because the MAC lab is a repository for collections from around the state, Sara is in the enviable position of having enough pieces of stirrup iron, bosses from bridles, nails from saddles, and other fragments to begin to put together a picture of what horses were wearing over time. One or two tacks or bosses don’t tell a researcher much, but when you have twenty or thirty, you can begin to compare and draw conclusions.


That’s not what I’m going to do here, though. Instead, I’ll start with Fithian’s account and try to provide some visual accompaniments for his notations of what he bought for his journey. Fithian started with a horse, of course, and that may be the hardest purchase to illustrate correctly. No need to include a Stubbs painting as Fithian certainly didn’t buy a Thoroughbred. But he did pay £25 for the animal, so he probably bought a relatively young horse bred for stamina rather than speed, the kind of “genuine country horse” described by Ruffian’s owner in his 1793 advertisement.


Two days before he bought the horse, Fithian set about acquiring the leather goods needed for his trip. He noted first the purchase of a “Saddle, Bridle, Spurrs, etc.,” and the “etc.” must have also included reins. The same day he also bought a “Pr of Sadle-Bags.” The day after buying his uncle’s horse, Fithian “Had my Boots altered & mended – Was measured for a Surtout-Coat.” Travelers covering long distances had to be sure they too were well-equipped; sturdy boots and a warm, heavy overcoat were necessities in October.

Fithian’s last step was to have shoes put on the horse. In New Jersey, where he lived, it is possible that a farrier did this work, if there were enough local customers to support such a specialized trade. A farrier not only made horseshoes and then shoed horses but also trimmed and balanced hooves. In Anne Arundel and the rest of the Chesapeake region, these tasks were carried out by blacksmiths as part of a broad array of services. Even at the end of the colonial period, there was not enough density of settlement to cause any smith to limit his trade to farrier’s work. [A google search today, however, of ‘farrier maryland’ will turn up 74,000 hits.]


When the Reverend Hugh Jones described traveling on horseback in the late seventeenth century, he wrote that “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.” This apparently was true, at least on the lower western shore, into the eighteenth century, for excavations at a 1715 stable, on the plantation of Richard Smith, Jr., found no horseshoes, despite the presence of other horse equipage artifacts. But Fithian was making a trip from New Jersey through Maryland to Virginia and his horse needed shoes. Judging from the assemblage of horseshoe fragments at the MAC lab, Fithian’s horse was not the only one, and of course the few surviving blacksmith’s accounts from the colonial period include shoeing horses among the charges found in customer’s records.

Thus equipped and prepared, Fithian was ready to begin his journey on 20 October 1773.
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[The stable was located on the Smith St. Leonard Site, 18CV91. Members of the public can volunteer and help dig the site through the Park's public archaeology program.]
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Jasper Danckaerts Might Have Preferred a Horse

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A Labadist minister, Jasper Danckaerts, traveled from New Amsterdam to northern Maryland in December 1679 to assess the possibility of establishing a Labadist settlement in northeastern Maryland. Danckaerts and his companion traveled mainly on foot, but were very grateful for the few occasions when they had the opportunity to ride a horse, even if meant sharing one horse among three men.

In the journal that Danckaerts kept of his travels, he described the difficulties of crossing the region’s many creeks and rivers. On Monday the 4th of December, the group crossed the “creek, or Bohemia River, in a canoe.” [116] The following day, they were more fortunate, arriving at the court house on the Sassafras River, where a ferry carried them to the other side for a charge of one English shilling per man. Following the course of the river, they came to a small creek, “which runs very shallow over the strand into the river. Here we had to take off our shoes and stockings in order to cross over although it was piercing cold. We continued some distance further . . . to the Great Bay (the Chesapeake) when we came to another creek and called out to be taken across, which was done.” [116]

“The next morning we crossed a creek, and were shown the way to another plantation, where would be set over still another [creek]. . . . The people excused themselves from taking us over, saying that their canoe was not at home, and sent us to another plantation on the right. We crossed there [and went] a long distance along the road until we reached a plantation . . . where no one was at home except a woman, who nevertheless lent us a canoe with which we might not only cross over, but go a considerable distance down the creek, trusting her canoe to us.” [117]
At a later crossing, Danckaerts and his party reached the bank of the creek as another traveler was already crossing in a canoe. Fortunately for Danckaerts there was a second canoe, in which he and his companion crossed, giving the canoe to a woman waiting on the other shore who paddled it back across the creek.

On Danckaerts’s return trip, the ferry at the Sassafras courthouse proved not be as accommodating as he’d found it on his first encounter. “We wished to be put across the Sassafras River here, but could not accomplish it, although we were upon the bank of the river. We were directed to the ferry at the court house, . . . where we arrived about two o’clock and called over to them to come and take us over. Although the weather was perfectly still and they could easily hear us, we were not taken over, though we continued calling out to them until sundown.” [124]

One of Danckaert’s final crossings involved enlisting the help of an enterprising indentured servant. “We therefore promised this servant if he would put us across we would give him the money, which we would otherwise have had to pay at the ferry. The master made some objections on account of the servant’s work and the distance from the river, and also because they had no canoe.” One would think any of these objections would be a serious obstacle to the plan, but apparently not. “The servant satisfied him on these points, and he [the master] consented. We breakfasted on what we could get, not knowing how or where we would obtain anything again. We three, accordingly, went about two miles to the strand, where we found a canoe, but it was almost entirely full of water, and what was the worst of it, we had nothing with which to bale it out. However, by one means and another we emptied it and launched the canoe. We stepped in and paddled over the river to a plantation of a Mr. Frisby.” [126]

What can we learn from Danckaerts’s account of his journey that sheds light on the use of horses for personal travel in seventeenth-century Maryland? Had the party been traveling on horseback, it would not have been able to use the many crossings where canoes carried the men from one side of the creek to another. But these journeys by canoe, as the above excerpts show, were not without their own complications: no canoe at a convenient crossing point could mean a long detour in search of another; a crossing too shallow for a canoe meant wading across frigid winter streams; canoes could leak or be so weighted down by their passengers as to have little margin of safety. On horseback, the party could have made faster use of the ferries available (assuming the ferry hands wished to heed their summons, but that was a hazard whether on foot or horseback) and could traverse creeks at natural fords or shallow headwaters, options that required no more of a detour than did the hunt for a canoe and would take far less time using horsepower than to find the canoe on foot.

The journal of Jasper Danckaerts is available online at http://books.google.com/books?id=_cgBAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=journal+of+jasper&hl=en&ei=VwT1TOG5FsL78Abw5dXTBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
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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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