Conestoga Horse
by Greg Oden
The Stogie
“For horses England ought to come to us – she has nothing that can compare with our famous trotters, and our Pennsylvania Dutch wagon horses are far preferable to her boasted great cart horses.”
– British American Cultivator, November 20, 1841
The Conestoga horse was an early native North American breed of draft horse developed in the early 1700s. It was bred for farm labour and to pull the distinctive Conestoga freight wagon. Unfortunately the breed was absorbed through cross breeding and disappeared.
The Conestoga River in Ontario flows out of Wellington County above Arthur and joins the Grand River at the village of Conestogo in Waterloo Region. It was named by early settlers of German extraction who emigrated from along the Conestoga Creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA. They traveled to Canada by “Conestogas”; their unique wagons pulled by their unique horses.
Pennsylvania is the Latin translation for “Penn’s woods,” a colony beyond New Jersey founded by William Penn, for small land owners and self-sufficient farmers. Penn and his associates recruited scores of emigrants of various Germanic cultures of North West Europe in the late 1600s struggling to escape war, famine and religious persecution. Migrations from Bohemia, Palatine, Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland continued steadily for a century. In 1709, Penn’s agents sold 10,000 acres in isolated Lancaster County near Conestoga Creek for 500 pounds. Conestoga was the native American name for the valley that includes most of Lancaster county. Hundreds of converts to the Amish and Mennonite faiths trekked into this area during the next decades. Later settlers would include Lutherans, Huguenots and Dutch Reformed. Why anyone would settle such a remote heavily treed area with no navigable access to the larger settlements was puzzling to Penn’s operatives until they discovered the Amish believed that lands with the largest hardwood forests grew on land with the best soil. No waterways connected the Conestoga settlement with Philadelphia, and the adjacent rivers had too many rapids for freight traffic with other trade centres on Chesapeake Bay. A road had to be constructed. In 1718, the colony government at Philadelphia received “A Petition of Several of the Inhabitants of and near Conestoga setting forth the Great Necessity of a Road to be laid out from Conestogoeto Thomas Moores and Brandywine.” In 1733 the road was finally built. These dates surround the appearance of the Conestoga horse.
There is considerable speculation as to the origins of the Conestoga horse. It is alleged that William Penn had Flemish stallions imported to Pennsylvania. Their offspring crossed with Virginia horses purchased from that colony and brought up to the Conestoga Valley from the nearby Shenandoah Valley. By 1720, Amish settlers had found a plateau route to Virginia and were building barns for settlers there. There were some big horses among the feral Florida-Virginia hybrids that cracker crews herded in from the mountains. Being German pioneers, they may have sought stock comparable to that in their home countries. The Dutch had imported draft horses from Flanders during the early settlement of New York and early Quaker pioneers of Pennsylvania purchased their stock from them. Penn’s colleagues who settled Philadelphia and Chester County imported English draft horses from their ancestral shires. Regardless of its original bloodlines, a race of giant, patient, burden-bearing equines with sleek round bodies developed along the Conestoga River. The Conestoga horse, like the Conestoga wagon was created out of necessity; with the clearing of the land and the need to transport loads greater distances a new type of horse evolved.
The Conestoga resembled the Flemish horse in many attributes including colour; all the prevalent Flemish colours except black which was rare. They appeared taller than their often 17 hands because their limbs were light and muscular rather than fleshy. They were powerful in proportion to their weight. Their original purpose was to pull a Conestoga wagon down the Conestoga road to market as quickly as possible. They were also used as plow horses and for canal boats.
John Strohm, a Pennsylvania scholar, authored a report for the Commissioner of Agriculture in 1863 that described the horse’s probable origin and declined: “By selecting their best stock for the purpose, the horses of the Conestoga Valley arrived at a degree of beauty and perfection seldom found in any other country, and much surpassing the original stock.”
The Conestoga horse won the attention of Philadelphians for the dazzling wagons they drew. Like their Alpine ancestors, Contestoga wainrights fashioned freight wagons similar to those in Europe. Like Middle Ages caravans, the wagon bodies were painted Prussian blue, with scarlet wheels, topped with a white linen hood arched over the body. Humbler groups such as the Amish, Mennonite, Moravians, and Dunkards used plainer colours befitting their religious beliefs.
Some modifications were made to withstand the punishment of the road from Conestoga. Large front wheels and even larger wide rear wheels were developed and a floor that was tilted downwards to the centre to stabilize the load over hills. Sixteen foot long and boat shaped they could even ford streams. Huge wagons, they could haul several tons with a six horse team. They were the blueprint for the later, lighter prairie schooner that crossed the west. A six horse team was the typical hitch for a Conestoga wagon. The front horses were called “leads,” the middle “swings” and the rear “wheelhorses.” When the British fought the French in Seven Year’s War, 150 Conestoga wagons formed the baggage train for General Braddock’s expedition attacking French forts along the Ohio and Niagara Rivers. The Lutherans, Huguenots, and other non-pacifist sects were active fighters. Throughout the American Revolution red, white and blue Conestoga wagons hauled supplies. They became popular for overland freight movement throughout the colonies.
Some of the Germanic settlers were pacifists and preferred to avoid politics entirely. Others preferred the former British rule. Small groups of Mennonites commenced emigrating to Canada in the 1790s. They sought out heavily treed land on the fringes of settlement. They journeyed to Niagara and then up the Grand River to the newly surveyed Waterloo and Wellington counties. Large hardwood forests topped rolling terrain punctuated with fast creeks in limestone river beds. The Mennonites brought their distinct Conestoga wagons and horses to upper Canada. They named the Conestoga River and founded the village of Conestoga. The lands must have resembled their Pennsylvania environs. Another sect settled in York near Markham.
Most livestock in Upper Canada then came from government importations from England or the German settlers. Dubbed “Pennsylvania Dutch,” these wealthy farmers paid cash for their large tracts of land and set about transforming the forest into a prosperous agrarian community. The Conestoga horse was popular in many districts of western Upper Canada and the Northern United States until the 1840s, when it declined due to crossbreeding with imported breeds from England. As agriculture prospered, wealthy stockmen imported breeds from their former homes in England. South of the border, the Civil war destroyed any good stock still in existence.
“Not many years ago this section of the Home District was noted from one end of Canada to the other for its valuable race of horses; and by the introduction of the small race of English blood horses from England to cross upon our large Pennsylvania mares [to produce a farm horse quicker in action than the Conestoga] the whole race is considerably run down and reduced in value.” wrote Eli Irwin in the British American Cultivator in April of 1846.
In a British horse book “The Horse, in the Stable and the Field” published in London in 1869, J.H. Walsh lists various American breeds such as the Mustang, the Indian Pony, the Canadian horse, the Morgan horse, the American trotter, the Narragansett pacer, the Vermont cart horse and the Conestoga draught horse, describing the latter as “a very large muscular horse, often reaching to seventeen hands and upwards, and closely resembling the heaviest breeds of German and Flemish cart horses.
John Gilmer Speed in “The Horse in America” published in New York in 1905 claims the paternal grandma of one of the United States most famous race horses, Rysdyk’s Hambletonian, was a Conestoga mare. Bred to Mambrino, she had foaled Abdallah, the sire of Rysdyk’s Hambletonian, progenitor of the American Standardbred.
Suffering the same fate as the Vermont Drafter and the Narragansett Pacer, the Conestoga was absorbed and replaced by the cross-bred progeny of Clydesdales, Shires and Percherons. They left few memorials. A village, shopping mall and a four lane expressway in Waterloo Region and a manmade lake and river in Wellington County still commemorate the name Conestoga.
Sources
- British American Cultivator, April 1846, p. 114, and November 1841
- Dunham, Mabel, “Grand River”, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1945
- Herbert, H.W., “Frank Forster’s Horse and Horsemanship of the United States and British Provinces of North America.” (vol. 2), New York, 1857
- Manning, J. Russell, “The Illustrated Stock Doctor”, World Publishing, Guelph, 1881
- Omwake, John, “Conestoga Six-Horse Bell Teams, 1750-1850”, Ebbert and Richardson, Cincinnati, 1930, pp. 82-83, 93
- Reaman, G. Elmore, “Trail of the Black Walnut”, McClelland and Steward, Toronto, 1957
- Rupp, Daniel, “The Complete Farmer’s Farrier”, Gilbert Hills, Lancaster, 1842
- Stevenson, Fletcher, “Pennsylvania Agriculture and County Life,” 1640-1840, Pennsylvania
- Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, 1950
- Strom, John, “The Conestoga Horse,” Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for 1863, #38th Congress, 1st Session, 1863-4, No. 91, pp. 175-80.
- Wallace, John, “The Horse in America,” New York, 1897
- Willoughby, David P., “The Empire of Equus,” Barnes, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1974