Earlier today I was thinking about horses working with people as teams. Horses were the original autonomous vehicles. Remembered a couple of items I did many years ago.
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One was about the Spokane Postal Chariots. Until 1945, the mail was delivered in specially made horse-drawn carts.
Before we lost our industry and skills, Spokane was a clever place. The city snow removal dept had creative mechanics. They invented and built a hydraulic ‘gate’ that mounted on the end of a plow blade, so the driver could drop the gate to avoid pushing snow into driveways. Other cities copied the idea, then Spokane abandoned it in the 90s when the city “government” turned grotesquely and insanely Gaian. All money must serve the whims of the Climate Goddess. A few years ago the city re-adopted the gates, now copying the idea from the copiers.
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About 20 years ago I read a book of Ernie Pyle’s wartime columns. In a column about Spokane, Pyle mentioned that Spokane was still using horse-drawn carts for mail delivery. Probably the last ‘real city’ to use horses, though rural and wilderness areas still use mules. The carts resembled chariots, and were supposedly called Postal Chariots. I finally found some pictures. It does look vaguely like a chariot. Not really what I’d imagined from Pyle’s description. The two types of Chariots had different equipment. One appears to have a sorting tray on top, and the other has a cabinet or box.
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Earlier I had found some pictures of Toronto’s unique streamlined milk wagons:
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Ran into this strange scene in a site with old Toronto-area pictures.
Horses were still quite common in dairy service until 1950, but there’s a jarring dissonance here. Horse-drawn streamliners???!!!! Nonsense from an aerodynamic viewpoint, because a dairy horse never goes faster than walking speed. (Streamlining makes no real difference below 30 MPH.) Yet it was apparently worth the expense in terms of esthetics and advertising, because streamlining was the latest thing in 1940.
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Today I noticed a random comment bemoaning the abandonment of Toronto’s cherished milk bags. Huh? Turns out the web is full of pictures and discussions of the practice. The bags are soft plastic, and need to be scrunched into a standardized plastic pitcher before pouring the milk.
Quebec has the French language, the east coast has seafood. Who are Ontarians if our milk doesn’t come in bags?
So Toronto is the place that delivers milk in horse-drawn streamliners and drinks it from bags.
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I can’t think of an equally strange beverage tradtion in the US. We bought milk in bottles until 1960, then switched to cartons.
Some of our cities did have unique baggy approaches to trash.
Pittsburgh used to pick up trash on big canvas blankets. The trashmen would dump it from your container onto the blanket, then fold it carefully and dump from the blanket into their truck. I have no idea why they did this; it seems impractical and wasteful.
Before 1960, Stillwater required each house to have an open-weave bag for trash, which was hung on a hook by the alley. The bag would drain out all liquids on the ground, which seems outright dangerous. I remember taking out the trash into the bag when I visited the grandparents.
The hanger resembled railway mail pouches:
Polistra's Mill 