The Man Who Misses Horses

The Man Who Misses Horses

Horses can’t speak for themselves, so Carroll Stowe of Heath, Mass., speaks for them.

He recalls, for instance, the decline of the workhorse.

“Tractor salesmen found it easy to put the horse out of business,” says Stowe, 69. “One pitch went ‘When you shut this tractor off, you’ll be done for the day.’ Another was ‘Wouldn’t you like to get your work done before your neighbors?’

“There was a romance to a new tractor,” he says. “When you got done farming at night, you didn’t have to feed a tractor, bed it, or give it water. I was told that during the transition, beautiful horseflesh was turned into the stockyards, just to get rid of them.”

Today, Stowe talks vividly of a way of life before almost everyone abandoned workhorses. In his childhood, horses were part of the family farm and the family. Once, on a weekly picnic in the pasture, his father “sat, watched, and roared with laughter as one of the horses sauntered over, removed a chocolate cake from its waxed paper cover and ate the entire thing.”

In rural western Massachusetts, word has spread about Stowe’s gift for telling tales about horses. A former highway worker for Heath (pop. 805) and the neighboring town of Rowe, he speaks around campfires, at schools, churches, fund-raisers, and to scouting groups. Dressed in characteristic bib overalls and straw hat, he conducts wagon rides at local festivals, gives hayrides in summer and sleigh rides in winter, and in the fall, hosts a wagon train that winds through the hills of Heath, starting at the town’s fairgrounds. People from all over the Northeast bring wagons and teams to the ride.

For Stowe, it’s all about horses. He recalls how it was to walk into the barn in the morning on his family’s farm and have the horses “nicker” at him. “It wasn’t for food,” he says. “It was a greeting, a ‘good morning.’

“To cut ice in the winter, teams with scoops cleared the ice. I remember snow flying way up into the air as the horses pounded in, chest-deep, harnesses jingling, turning around, coming back, and doing it again and again.”

He recalls how “teams seemed to know where to go better than the driver.” Or when farmers used their teams to smooth dirt roads surrounding their land—and then got tax reductions from the town.

Stowe’s most satisfying job occurred after “an awful snowstorm in ’52 or ’53.” The town’s snow equipment had broken down, and his neighbors, who had a little antique “express sled,” needed to get feed to their cows. “I loaded up Danny and Dick Horse, used that sled, and got to them. It was three days before the town got the roads open. Those cows couldn’t have been fed any other way.”

His favorite story recalls his parents’ farm.

“Our barn was on a second floor. The manure got pushed out into a holding bin. The bin needed to be emptied, but we had just lost Dick, half our team, and there weren’t a lot of horses around anymore to borrow or buy. Our neighbor said we could borrow his horse, Duke. Dad took me there with a bridle, so I could ride him home.

“We always let Dan out of the barn in the morning to go wherever he wanted. Lately he just wandered around looking for Dick. When I rode Duke to within sight of our farm, Dan spotted us. Now, it was at least five years since these two had seen each other. When they came together, why I guarantee you’ve never seen two human beings have a reunion any more touching. Danny put us around and around, must have been for five minutes. I thought he would knock me off Duke’s back,” he laughs.

“I had never driven Duke before, but when I hitched them up, backed them into position to load, he and Dan stood together like posts. I climbed into the wagon, picked up the lines, spoke to them, and that was all there was to it. How Danny did strut when he was beside his old friend. I can tell that story by the hour and it’s still moving,” Stowe says.

And tell stories he does, to the delight of all who still love horses.

Ann Stanforth writes from her home in Colrain, Mass.

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