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CARRIAGE HORSES
History
URBAN POLLUTION-Many long years ago
The old gray mare was not the ecological marvel, in American cities, that horse
lovers like to believe
By JOEL A. TARR - American Heritage Magazine – October 1971
To many urban Americans in the 1970’s, fighting their way through the
traffic’s din and gagging on air heavy with exhaust fumes, the automobile is a
major villain in the sad tale of atmospheric pollution. Yet they have forgotten,
or rather never knew, that the predecessor of the auto was also a major
polluter. The faithful, friendly horse was charged with creating the very
problems today attributed to the automobile: air contaminants harmful to health,
noxious odors, and noise. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in fact,
writers in popular and scientific periodicals were decrying the pollution of the
public streets and demanding “the banishment of the horse from American cities”
in vigorous terms. The presence of 120,000 horses in New York City, wrote one
1908 authority for example, is “an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness,
and a terrible tax upon human life.” The solution to the problem, agreed the
critics, was the adoption of the “horseless carriage.” (To enlarge the
photo, click
on the photo or link)
A concern with clean streets and with the horse as a principal obstacle to
them was nothing new. European cities had shown concern for the problem as early
as the fourteenth century, as had American cities from their beginnings. But it
required a more statistically minded age to measure the actual amount of manure
produced by the horse. Sanitary experts in the early part of the twentieth century agreed that the normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty
pounds of manure a day, with the average being something like twenty-two pounds.
Ina city like Milwaukee in 1907, for instance, with a human population of
350,000 and a horse population of 12,500, this meant 133 tons of manure a day,
for a daily average of nearly three-quarters of a pound of manure for each
resident. Or, as health officials
in Rochester, New York, calculated in 1900, the fifteen thousand horses
in that city produced enough manure in a year to make a pile 175 feet
high covering an acre of ground and breeding sixteen billion flies,
each one a potential spreader of germs. Milwaukee and Rochester resembled other American cities in 1900 in having
thousands of horses at work in their streets even after the automobile and
electric streetcar had been introduced. Chicago had 83,330, Detroit 12,000, and
Columbus 5,000. Overall, there were probably between three and three and a half
million horses in American cities as the century opened, compared with about
seventeen million living in more bucolic environments. (Today, at a time when
horseback riding for pleasure is on the rise, the total number of horses in the
United States is somewhat over seven million.) The ratio of horses to people was
much higher in cities where traction lines were not yet completely electrified.
In 1890, even after electrification had already begun, twenty-two thousand
horses and mules were still required simply for pulling streetcars in New York
City and in Brooklyn, with a total of ten thousand performing similarly in
Philadelphia and Chicago. Ten years earlier, when New York and Brooklyn had
counted no electric railways and 1,764,168 souls, they had a total equine
population of 150,000 to 175,000.
To a great extent nineteenth-century urban life moved at the pace of
horse-drawn transportation, and the evidence of the horse was everywhere—in the
piles of manure that littered the streets attracting swarms of flies and
creating stench, in the iron rings and hitching posts sunk into the pavements
for fastening horses’ reins, and in the numerous livery stables that gave off a
mingled smell of horse urine and manure, harness oil and hay. In 1880 New York
and Brooklyn were served by 427 blacksmith shops, 249 carriage and wagon
enterprises, 262 wheelwright shops, and 290 establishments dealing in saddles
and harnesses. They were eminently necessary. On a typical day in 1885 an
engineer, Francis V. Greene, making a study of urban traffic conditions, counted
7,811 horse-drawn vehicles, many with teams of two or more horses, passing the busy corner of Broadway and Pine Street. While some of these conveyances were fine carriages drawn by spirited teams,
the most common city horses were commercial or work animals. City streets were
crowded with large team-pulled drays guided by husky and colorfully profane
drivers and piled high with heavy freight. Among these, single-horse spring
wagons twisted their way, making deliveries of ice, milk, and goods of every
kind to residential areas. Their sides were often brightly decorated with
advertisements, catching the eyes of passers-by and of the riders in the many
omnibuses and hacks plying their routes. The horse remained essential in urban
civilization, even after the development of the steam engine. As the Nation
noted in 1872, though great improvements had been made in the development of
such “agents of progress” as the railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph,
modern society’s dependence on the horse had “grown almost pari passu with our
dependence on steam.” For it was the horse who fed the railroads and steamboats
with passengers and freight, and who provided transportation within the cities.
Yet this hard-working animal, so vital to the functioning of urban society,
posed problems that were recognized by even the earliest American city dwellers.
The question of clean streets was most obvious. In eighteenth-century Boston and
New York, money was allocated by the city fathers for street cleaning, and
householders were required to sweep the road in front of their doorways. Cities
made sporadic attempts during the mid-nineteenth century to mechanize the tasks
of sanitation. In 1855 New York introduced street-sweeping machines and
self-loading carts, and in 1865 urban entrepreneurs formed the New York Sanitary
and Chemical Compost Manufacturing Company for the purpose of “cleansing cities,
towns, and villages in the United States” with
several varieties of mechanical devices adapted to the task. By
1880 almost all cities over thirty thousand in population employed
street-cleaners. American cities made their most sustained efforts to clean the streets under
the stimulus of the fear induced by epidemics of cholera, smallpox, yellow
fever, or typhoid. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical authorities
believed that such diseases were caused by “a combination of certain atmospheric
conditions and putrefying filth,” among which horse manure was a chief offender. In
1752 Boston selectmen allocated extra funds to clean the streets
because of the fear that street dirt might contain smallpox infection,
and in 1795, during the yellow-fever season, town officials invited
neighboring farmers to collect the manure from the streets free of
charge. The city fathers of New York, faced by the threat of cholera in
1832, made special efforts to cleanse the cobblestones, thereby
divesting the city "of that foul ailment on which pestilence delights
to feed." But unless jolted by rampant disease, city authorities and citizens tolerated
a great deal of “that foul aliment” in their streets. One reason, perhaps, was a
reluctance to spend money on such an unsatisfying, if crucial, municipal effort.
Some cities tried to cover the cost of street cleaning by selling the manure for
fertilizer. In 1803 the New York superintendent of scavengers expended about twenty-six
thousand dollars for street cleaning and realized over twenty-nine
thousand dollars from the sale of the manure collected. Despite this
instance of profitable purifying, however, paid scavenging did not
generally achieve great results. In those cases where private
contractors were responsible for cleaning the streets, citizens often
complained that they neglected other forms of rubbish and only
collected the salable manure. Nor did a shift to public sanitation
service improve things. Officials of post-Civil War years often
reported that street dirt was becoming too mixed with other forms of
litter to be sold as fertilizer. Moreover, whatever salable
quality of the street refuse, urban sanitation departments during the nineteenth century were
notoriously inefficient. Vexed by graft and corruption, they were staffed by
“old and indigent men,” “prisoners who don’t like to work,” and “persons on
relief.”
Street cleaning, therefore, remained largely inadequate, and one is thus not
surprised to discover that newspapers, diaries, and governmental reports abound
with complaints about the problems created in the city by horse manure left in
the public thoroughfares. Manure collected into unattended piles by the street
cleaners bred huge numbers of flies and created “pestilential vapours.”
Offal was sometimes carried from wealthy residential neighborhoods and
dumped in poor neighborhoods, where it was left to rot. Streets turned
into virtual cesspools when it rained, and long-skirted ladies suffered
the indignity of trailing their
hems in liquefied manure. In London, ladies and gentlemen were aided in their
navigation through a sea of horse droppings by “crossing-sweepers,” but no such
group appeared in more democratic American cities. Yet dry weather was no great
improvement, for then there were complaints of the “pulverized horse dung” that
blew into people’s faces and the windows of their homes, and over the outdoor
displays of merchants’ wares. The coming of paved streets accelerated this
problem, as wheels and hoofs ground the sun-dried manure against the hard
surfaces and amplified the amount of dust. And then there was noise. In many American cities, early paving consisted
largely of cobblestones, on which the clopping and clanking of horses’ iron
shoes and the iron-tired wheels of carts and wagons created an immense din.
Benjamin Franklin complained in the late eighteenth century of the “thundering
of coaches, chariots, chaises, waggons, drays and the whole fraternity of noise”
that assailed the ears of Philadelphians. Similar comments about urban noise
were made by travelers in other cities. Attempts were made quite early to quiet
the clamor. In 1747, in Boston, the town council banned
traffic from King Street so that the noise would not distract the
deliberations of the General Court. In 1785 New York City passed
an ordinance forbidding teams and wagons with iron-shod wheels from the
streets. In London good medical management required
the putting of straw on the pavement outside sick people’s houses to muffle the
sounds of traffic, a practice undoubtedly followed in
America. Yet the problem
grew with the growing nation. As late as the 1890’s a writer in Scientific
American noted that the sounds of traffic on busy New York streets made
conversation nearly impossible, while the author William Dean Howells complained
that “the sharp clatter of the horses’ iron shoes” on the pavement tormented his
ear.
If the horse, by his biological necessities, created problems for the city,
the city, in turn, was a harsh environment for the animals whose possession had
once been the mark and privilege of nobility. The horse belonged to the open
spaces and the battlefield. In an urban setting he was, with rare exception, a
drudge. City horses were notoriously overworked. The average streetcar nag had a
life expectancy of barely two years, and it was a common sight to see drivers
and teamsters savagely lashing their overburdened animals. The mistreatment of
city horses was a key factor in moving Henry Bergh to found the American Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866. When released from harness,
the working steed usually was led to a crowded and unsanitary stable without
adequate light or air. Only the pleasure horses kept by the city’s “swells” to
drive handsome rigs in the park had access to the green fields enjoyed by their country cousins.
Many overworked, mistreated urban horses simply died in the city streets.
Moreover, since asphalt-paved or cobbled streets were slipperier than dirt
roads, horses often stumbled and fell. An unfortunate beast who broke a leg in
this way was destroyed where it lay. (In order to minimize the risk of stumbles,
some veterinarians recommended that city draft horses be shod with rubber-padded
horseshoes, but few owners followed this advice.) A description of Broadway
appearing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1866 spoke of the street as being clogged
with “dead horses and vehicular entanglements.” The equine carcasses added
fearsomely to the smells and flies already rising in clouds from stables and
manure piles. In 1880 New York City removed fifteen thousand dead horses from
its streets, and as late as 1912 Chicago carted away nearly ten thousand horse
carcasses. A contemporary book on the collection of municipal refuse advised
that, since the average weight of a dead horse was thirteen hundred pounds,
“trucks for the removal of dead horses should be hung low, to avoid an excessive
lift.” The complaint of one horse lover that “in the city the working horse is
treated worse than a steam-engine or sewing machine,” was well justified. (To
enlarge the photo,
click on the photo or link)
By the 1880’s and 90’s the immense population growth of American cities, the
need for improved urban transportation to keep up with the geographic spread of
communities, and a growing awareness of the need for better sanitation in the
interest of public health, all emphasized the drawbacks of the horse as the
chief form of urban locomotion and spurred a search for alternatives. The first
major breakthrough came with the development of the cable car and the electric
trolley car in the late 1880’s. Traction companies were quick to substitute
mechanical power for animal power on their streetcar lines. Writing in Popular
Science Monthly in 1892, United States Commissioner of Labor Carroll D. Wright
maintained that electric power was not only cheaper than horsepower, but also
far more beneficial to the city from the perspective of health and safety. “The
presence of so many horses constantly moving through the streets,” wrote Wright
somewhat ponderously, “is a very serious matter. The vitiation of the air by the
presence of so many animals is alone a sufficient reason for their removal,
while the clogged condition of the streets impedes business, and involves the
safety of life and limb.” While
electric-powered transportation began to make inroads on the horse’s
domain, improvements in the gasoline engine made it clear that the
automobile would soon be a viable alternative. Even the bicycle
craze of the nineties reminded many that horseless commuting was
possible over reasonable distances. Horse lovers became defensive about the future of that quadruped. Writing in
the Chautauquan in 1895, Robert L. Seymour maintained that while the “cheap
horse” might be doomed, the “costly, good-looking horse, the horse of history,
the heroic horse in action, will probably last long.” Can you imagine, asked
Seymour, “Napoleon crossing the Alps in a blinding snow storm on a bicycle or
Alexander riding heroically at the head of his armies in a horseless carriage?”
It is hard to blame Seymour for not having the prophetic gift to foresee tank
commanders dashing ahead of their squadrons. A more fundamental error seems to
have been made by a writer in Lippincott’s Magazine who insisted that since
“Americans are a horse-loving nation … the wide-spread adoption of the
motor-driven vehicle in this country is open to serious doubt.” Less romantic
observers, however, embraced the possibility of the elimination of the horse
with enthusiasm. When William Dean Howells’ fictional traveler from the
nonexistent, Utopian land of Altruria visited Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893, he
noted with pleasure that this metropolis of the future had “little of the filth
resulting in all other American cities from the use of the horse.”
During the opening years of the twentieth century the movement toward
salvation by internal combustion continued to gather headway. Such popular
journals as Harper’s Weekly, Lippincott’s Magazine, and the Forum, as well as
more specialized periodicals like American City, Horseless Age, Motor, and
Scientific American, were filled with articles extolling the automobile and the
motor truck and disparaging the horse. There were several lines of attack. One
of the most common was economic analysis, which argued, as did one writer in
Munsey’s Magazine, that “the horse has become unprofitable. He is too costly to
buy and too costly to keep.” Articles such as these computed the expense of the
“horse cost of living” and compared it unfavorably to the expense of automobile upkeep. Other articles pointed out the advantages the motor truck had over the
horse in hauling freight and in preventing traffic tie-ups by moving faster. One
writer in American City noted that the good motor truck, which was immune to
fatigue and to weather, did on the average of two and a half times as much work
in the same time as the horse and with one-quarter the amount of street
congestion.
“It is all a question of dollars and cents, this gasoline or oats
proposition. The automobile is no longer c;classed as a luxury.
It is acknowledged to one of the great time-savers in the world."
But a second and equally—if not more—convincing argument for the superiority
of the motor vehicle over the horse rested on the testimony that the automobile
was a better bet from the perspective of public medicine. “The horse in the city
is bound to be a menace to a condition of perfect health,” warned Dr. Arthur R.
Reynolds, superintendent of the Chicago health department in 1901. Public health
officials in various cities charged that windblown dust from ground-up manure
damaged eyes and irritated respiratory organs, while the “noise and clatter” of
city traffic aggravated nervous diseases. Since, noted Scientific American, the
motor vehicle left no litter and was “always noiseless or nearly so” (a judgment
hard to understand if one has heard a primitive auto engine), the exit of the
horse would “benefit the public health to an almost incalculable degree.”
Also blamed on the horse were such familiar plagues as cholera and typhoid
fever and intestinal diseases like dysentery and infant diarrhea. The reason why
faithful dobbin was adjudged guilty was that such diseases were often
transmitted by the housefly, and the favorite breeding place of the fly was the
manure heap. In the late 1890’s insurance company actuaries discovered that
employees in livery stables and those living near stables had a higher rate of
infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, than the general public. Sanitation
specialists pursued the question, and the first decade of the twentieth century
saw a large outpouring of material warning of the danger of the
infection-carrying “queen of the dung-heap,” Musca domestica. The most obvious
way to eradicate the “typhoid fly,” as the
carrier was called by L. O. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology
of the Department of Agriculture and a leader of a campaign to stamp
out flies, was to eliminate the horse.
Writing in Appleton’s Magazine in 1908, Harold Bolce entitled his article
“The Horse Vs. Health.” In a thoroughgoing assault he blamed most of the
sanitary and economic problems of the modern city on the horse and essayed to
calculate the savings if all horses were replaced by automobiles and motor
trucks. His figures were arrived at by an intriguing formula. According to Bolce,
twenty thousand New Yorkers died each year from “maladies that fly in the dust”
created mainly by horse manure. He estimated the monetary value to the community
of these people’s lives, plus the cost of maintaining hospitals to treat them,
and laid the entire bill on the withers of the inoffensive horse. To this sum he
added the cost of street cleaning and rubbish disposal. He also attributed a
higher urban cost of living to the failure to use speedy motor trucks, instead
of horses, in transporting goods. Finally he computed and added the costs of
traffic congestion and reached a total of approximately one hundred million dollars as the price that New York City paid for not banning the horse from its
streets. What fed Bolce’s indignation was not so much hate of horses, perhaps,
as dedication to progress. The horse, he maintained, represented one of the last
stands of brute animal strength over applied science and, as such, had to go - Americans could no longer afford "the absurdities of a horse-infected city." While no city ever took such drastic action as banning horses completely from
its boundaries, many cities did eventually forbid them the use of certain
streets and highways. But in the long run the horse’s opponents triumphed
without recourse to legislation. The number of horses in cities dropped sharply
as the automobile and the motor truck rapidly gained popularity, although the
number of horses in the nation stayed high until the 1920’s (there were
20,091,000 horses reported in the 1920 census). As this happened, the benefits
promised by motor-vehicle enthusiasts seemed to be initially realized. Streets
were cleaner, particle pollution resulting from ground-up manure and the
diseases thereby produced were diminished, the number of flies was greatly
reduced, goods were transported more cheaply and efficiently, traffic traveled
at a faster rate, and the movement of people from crowded
cities to suburbs was accelerated by the automobile. Events appeared to
justify the spokesmen for the advantages of the motor vehicle over the
horse. And yet, as current difficulties resulting from the massive use of the
automobile attest, the motor vehicle’s proponents were extremely shortsighted in
their optimistic faith that their innovation would not only eradicate the urban
health problems created by the horse but would also avoid the formation of new ones. As the number of automobiles proliferated and such cities as New York and
Los Angeles experienced smog conditions that were a serious hazard to public
comfort and health, it became apparent that the automobile, too, was a major obstacle to humane metropolitan existence. Are the problems of noise and air pollution created by thousands of cars and
trucks “worse” than those for which the horse was responsible? It is impossible
to answer flatly. Altered environmental and demographic conditions in the city
today, when judged beside those of a century or so ago, make specific
comparisons between the horse and the automobile as polluters difficult at best.
Aside from the disagreeable aesthetic effect created by horse manure, its chief
impact upon public health seemed to come from wind-blown manure particles that
irritated respiratory organs; from the reservoir furnished by the manure for
disease spores, such as those of tetanus; and, most critically, from the fact
that horse dung provided a breeding ground for the fly, proven by medical
science to be the carrier
of thirty different diseases, many of them acute. The pollution created
by the automobile, on the other hand, is also aesthetically
displeasing; and while it has not yet been firmly linked to any
specific disease, it has primarily a chronic effect on health.
The pollutants released by the internal-combustion engine
irritate people's eyes and lungs, weakening their resistance to disease
and worsening already present
health problems. The immense number of automobiles in cities today has
produced environmental difficulties that, unless soon dealt with, will
generate problems that will dwarf those produced by horses in the
cities of the past.
But the narrowness of vision of the early automobile advocates and their
conviction that their machines would make urban life more tolerable, can be
understood not as their failing alone. Most Americans, when informed of some
technological advance that promises to alter their lives for the better without
social cost, rush to embrace it. Second thoughts come later. Witness the
apprehensions voiced presently over nuclear power plants after an
initial
flush of enthusiasm based on the hope that this cleaner and more
efficient method of generating electricity would free us from
dependence on dirty fossil fuels. We are only now learning to weigh the
biological and other costs of new inventions with some caution.
The career of the automobile has been one element in our education.
Horses may be gone from city street, but the unforeseen problems
created by their successors still beset us.
Professor Joel Tarr, of Carnegie-Mellon University, is an expert on the
problems of America’s emerging urban centers in the early 1900’s.
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