Horse-Drawn Implements in Small Scale

Looking forward, looking back

Though John doesn’t want to sell his implements, he was forced to part with some after his wife died and he moved from the family home to a much smaller space. He keeps several – like the horses with the side-delivery rake and the gang plow with five horses – in his apartment in Mountain Lake, Minn. “I used to have them all on a 16-inch-wide board in the basement of our house, so I could go down and look at them any time I wanted, but not any more.”

John has ample opportunity to sell his creations when he exhibits them, but he has no desire to. “I like to see people marvel at how things were done in the years past,” he says. “I’m one of the last of that generation that still worked with horses, and younger generations simply don’t know how horses were able to work. But when they see in miniature how they are hitched up, they can see what it was really like, and it gives them a lot of background information about how our grandfathers and great-grandfathers did things.”

With that in mind, he has a project lined up for the 2012 Butterfield (Minn.) Thresherman’s Assn. Steam and Gas Engine show. “A grain binder would be interesting,” he says. “A lot of people wouldn’t know how to use the binder to cut grain and make bundles before the self-propelled swather came in.”

The binder would require four horses, a daunting prospect in that the Breyer horses John favors are no longer being made. “The demand for Belgian draft horses isn’t there,” he says, “because everyone wants riding or jumping or race horses, and that puts a handicap on my hobby.” He’s hoping he can find stray Breyer horses for sale. “Sometimes people are getting out of the hobby,” he says, “and they might have some horses they would be glad to get rid of.”

“I get a big satisfaction out of being able to show and display the implements and horse harnesses, to show how they used to do the work, plowing, discing, cultivating corn,” he says. “Locally you never see that any more, so that gives people a little review of what it used to be like. Our forefathers all farmed in that way years back.” FC 

Bill Vossler is a freelance writer and author of several books on antique farm tractors and toys. Contact him at Box 372, 400 Caroline Ln., Rockville, MN 56369; email: bvossler@juno.com.