Horses

For most of the period these pictures cover, the horse was the engine of American life. It pulled the streetcar, the delivery wagon, the plow, the fire engine and the family buggy. If you want to know how a city worked in 1890, look at the horses.

The numbers were enormous. Large cities kept tens of thousands of horses, and the problems that came with them were real ones. Manure piled up in the streets, stables crowded whole blocks, and a horse that died in harness might lie where it fell until the city cart came. When the automobile arrived, one of the arguments in its favor was that it was cleaner.

Horses also changed photography itself. In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge set up a row of cameras along a track in California and photographed a galloping horse in a quick series of frames. The pictures settled an old argument by showing that all 4 hooves leave the ground at once. They also showed that painters had been drawing the gallop wrong for centuries.

A collection like this tends to show horses at work and horses for sport. There are farm teams and draft horses, fire companies racing to a call, cavalry troops and artillery teams, mounted police, and horses with peddlers' carts. On the sporting side, harness racing was one of the most popular amusements in 19th century America, and Currier & Ives sold a great many prints of famous trotters. Thoroughbred racing and horse shows appear too.

The thing worth noticing is how often the horse is in the picture without being the subject. In almost any street scene from before 1915 there are horses at the curb, sometimes as a blur because they moved during the exposure. In the photographs from the 1910s and 1920s, look for the moment when horses and automobiles share the same street. It did not last long.