Mary McTamaney

This week we will say goodbye to the month of April. The season shifts quickly from now on and vestiges of winter cold retreat as the ground firms up and folks spend increasing time outdoors. Recently, I was describing life in old Newburgh to some 10 year-olds and they were, as is common at their age, interested in each fact I told about the place of animals in our lives a century ago.

I showed on a map how many properties had small stables. Horses were everywhere in nineteenth century Newburgh as they were in every community. Individuals got around on horseback or in the seat of their carriage. I learned that clearly in the 1970’s, while helping a neighbor move her elderly aunt from an old Newburgh house. I saw the bridles and reins for the family’s long-ago horse stored in that attic, carefully hung on the wall with layers of protective newspaper tacked up to protect the plaster wall from oil stains, since leather was carefully oiled to stay flexible.

Often, if their Newburgh property couldn’t fit a horse shed, a person boarded their horse at a neighborhood stable since there were scores of those, just as there were neighborhood bays of auto garages for rent when I was young. At neighborhood stables, one could also rent a horse or a horse and carriage or wagon as needed. No UPS trucks pulled up to the curbs of Newburgh. A wagon did instead. Grocers and tradesmen moved around the city by wagon, some open wagons and some covered like early vans. Horses pulled city vehicles like garbage wagons and firetrucks. And, they pulled the city’s trolley system for a decade until electricity was installed along street after street. Until then, horses were the engines of Newburgh.

Exactly 130 years ago at the end of April 1894, Newburgh said farewell to its hard-working trolley horses. New electric poles were in and the maze of overhead wires was strung that allowed new trolleys with electric engines to begin service. They connected to those overhead wires by a long service pole poking out from the roof of each car that tracked along the live wires the way the horse hooves had once tracked along the steel trolley tracks. The rails remained along the streets of Newburgh but the power had shifted.

We can wonder how many people in 1894 liked the change and how many didn’t. Everyone would likely be happy that there was a little less horse dung to step around when crossing the streets. In the picture shown here, taken at the corner of Broadway and Dubois Street in 1890, it is plain that streets, including our wide central thoroughfare, Broadway, were unpaved. Long dresses and coats, and certainly shoes, would need drying and brushing, and often washing, when Newburghers got home each day. A little two-seat carriage can be seen in the picture turning from Broadway into Dubois pulled by one horse, and more carriages and wagons are traveling along the street in the downhill distance.

Yet, the two little boys standing in the center of the road are watching the faithful pair of trolley horses pulling their heavy load up the steep hill of Broadway toward them. Maybe they hope to pet the horses when they stop at the intersection to take on or discharge a passenger. Not easy to see in the hazy old photo is the trolley driver standing in the doorway of the car who also had his eyes on the boys and could call out to them and control his horses with a pull on the reins.

Newburgh transitioned to electric streetcars in April 1894. Then, it transitioned to gasoline powered buses 30 years after that. In the 1920’s we sold our streetcars to neighboring Beacon, who used them for a few more years.

What happened to our streetcar horses that summer of 1894? Did they have a “department transfer,” perhaps starting service pulling the wagon that sprayed water on the dusty dirt streets? Newburgh has a building, still standing, once called the “city stables” on Amity Street. There, many of the city’s horses were boarded together and set out in harness each morning for their various jobs. We can wonder if the little boys crossing Broadway got to see their friendly trolley horses again.