Horse History: Sidewalk Plowing in Rochester, NY

[00:00:00] You're listening to Rochester Trail Riders. I want to invite you today to go down a rabbit hole with me, all based off a photo I saw of a guy plowing the city streets using a team of horses. The date on that photo, it shocked me and I had to know more. So sit back, relax, and listen to a conversation Ray and I had all about the history of sidewalk plowing in Rochester, New York.

Hey everybody, I'm back here today with Ray. How you doing today, Ray? I am good. Just hanging out, you know. It's a wonderful Sunday morning. No, it's not beautiful. It's gray and pouring rain outside. Yeah, but it's wonderful in my house, so You're just, you're just gonna go with it. That's what I'm worried about.

Yeah. Well, at least it's not snow like we had. Um, I think you had more snow than I did [00:01:00] here, what, last week, week before? Yeah, yeah, at the barn we got like, I think my mom said a good like six inches. Oh, so worthy of shoveling at that point. Yeah, yeah, no, it was. For sure. I had nothing. I had like a dusting and then down at our camp, we had a foot and a half of snow.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Dang. Well, that just really went mostly south then, I guess. It was wherever that lake effect band hit, which can cause havoc on any location, which believe it or not brings me to our topic today. Oh, what is our topic today? Yeah, we have a topic. We're going to talk about what happened in Rochester, New York.

Back in the 1900s, we're talking turn of the 19, actually 20th century, and like, uh, what the snow actually do when a snow band would come, like what would happen if five to [00:02:00] six inches hit the city of Rochester, believe it or not, it was chaos and how the city actually had to handle clearing all the sidewalks.

So, uh, my first little, uh, foray into this is I was just kind of curious and then started doing some research and was. I was flabbergasted with how many articles, uh, the Democrat and Chronicle actually wrote about clearing sidewalk snow. This was like a thing. And it all started, I started researching because I wanted to figure out how they cleared them and then what happened when, um, motorized vehicles came into play.

So we're going to go talk about that history. And I started my research right around 1900 when the postal workers started complaining They refused to deliver mail unless the city of Rochester could clear the sidewalks. And so this whole saga begins. Ah, so I'm guessing then, uh, their catchphrase [00:03:00] of not rain, nor snow, nor dark of night, or whatever it is, must have come into play after that.

Apparently, right around the turn of the century, they're like, There's six inches of snow. I have to walk in it, and I'm unhappy. Clear the sidewalks. So, which Aaron Rochester said, Game on, we'll hire contractors versus having employees. So you actually can apply to be the sidewalk plow contractor for your, your ward.

So, okay, had its own contract crew. And what these folks would do is they'd have a horse. One single horse or a team hitched to a wedge plow that would ride along the sidewalk. It'd be about the same width of the sidewalk, and they would just draw the horse and, you know, push the snow off to either side.

Sounds exciting, right? I mean, not really. [00:04:00] Yeah. Uh, there's plenty of YouTube videos where people still do this today, but in a bigger scale. They'll get a big team. You'll even see the Amish doing that, where they'll have a, it's a big triangle wedge. And sometimes they'll put a seat where you don't have to walk behind so you add a little more weight.

And it just pushes the sidewalk to the side. Okay. Yeah, that was gonna be something I was gonna ask was, is it like something that you are ground driving or are you riding on? So okay. For the sidewalk. That's very interesting. Yeah. For the sidewalk plows, any photos that I could find, they were walking behind the team because, you know, a sidewalk's only about two, three foot wide at the widest.

So these are small little things. And, uh, they were pretty heavy. They would be a combination of wood and metal. And from the ones I saw, it depends. You either had one big draft horse. I even saw some saddle horses pulling it, you know, or a team. So it didn't matter. It was like, hey, I need money. I have a horse.

I'm willing to clear your streets. [00:05:00] Yeah. Okay. And in 1914, I guess, had a horrific snowstorm in Rochester. And bad enough that it made the city papers where they're like, oh my gosh, this one snowfall six inches, uh, is going to cost the city $15,000 to clear the streets back. Woo. I did the conversion on it.

That's half a million dollars that the city had to pay to clear the streets. Wow. 800 crew with shovels and, uh, almost 200 crew of horse. Horses taking care of the streets and when they were spending, that's wild to give you an idea. The average income for somebody during that timeframe was between a thousand to 1, 500 a year.

So my God, no storm [00:06:00] rippled the city and it was costing about 3, 000 a day and you know, you only could work so many hours. You only had some right. Yeah. I didn't have city streetlights. So. They would go as fast and as far as they could and just pray for a thaw. Yeah. Okay. And a hundred, well it was a hundred, I think I said 200, it was a hundred plow crews.

And they would work from break till 11 p. m. and it just took them forever to get through all that crazy stuff. Oh, I believe it. Well, I would have to guess if it crippled them that bad, but it was like a snowfall of I think you said about six inches. I'm wondering if it was like that really nasty, wet, heavy stuff.

It must have been. You know. So it was a December snowstorm, so that's possible. Like, it's raining right now. Right. Maybe it was a thing where, you know, they got some snow, and then it did like the warm up, cool down, and got snow on top of [00:07:00] that. I mean, we can obviously only speculate, but Because to think that six inches of snow would cripple a city To that degree where in today's money, it's costing them half a million dollars to go through and clean it up just sounds so bizarre, but I guess in the same breath, it's kind of hard for, you know, you and I to picture how that could cripple a city when You know, we live in a modern world where, okay, we do get a snowstorm, and by the time we wake up in the morning, typically, the roads are clear, sidewalks are clear, things like that.

There's salt on the roads, um, where they obviously did not have that sort of a luxury then. No, and I can, I'm just trying to imagine, you're, you're out there, it could be still coming down. I, I guess the only good. Thing of it is people were gonna stay inside. It's the crews that are gonna be out. But it's slow.

I mean, you're [00:08:00] talking two to three miles an hour maybe, and if it's heavy Oh yeah. You know, big snow. These horses. Right. The plow could, you know, it's possible for it not to even move or make an inch. You know? All it, all you got, yeah, a plow, poof. It pops up on top of snow and you're moving nothing. That's very true.

So the other, you know, problems they had with snow plowing is it was a complex task. There was a lot of issues that could have happened, uh, damage to the sidewalk. So if you've got a sidewalk that heaved and that plow catches, you could rip the sidewalk right up. Oh yeah, I thought of that. Where the crew's going out, they're clearing the sidewalks, property owners would come out and run off the plow driver and steal their horses because they were going to my gosh.

You know, same like our own city streets. You're like, Oh my gosh, you're going to cause damage to my property. Oh, you, you, you toughed up a blade of grass on my expensive lawn, you know? Oh, Kurt Evans, let me clutch my [00:09:00] pearls. And, oh, I was having a kick out of. Reading some of these because some of these people were like, they literally gang up on them and, and just rip them out and take their horses and, and, and call the police and the police are like, no, no, no, they're contractors.

If they damage something, you notice it by spring, you know, they have to make it right, which made it hard on these contractors too. I mean, just like any land person today, you're trying, you're placing a bid where you think you can do the work. The city's trying to get the lowest bid you're the city would pay, you know, per route.

Not perceived right type of thing. So you're you're trying to calculate all costs and then, you know, having get beat up Yeah, yeah, that's that's got to be incredibly stressful, you know, especially I'm sure that depending on What a lot of these people probably did for a [00:10:00] living in that time period, you know just like even today, you know winter rolls around and for some people, you know that maybe have like jobs that are predominantly outdoors.

Winter rolls around and they're like, uh, kay, like, we can't do anything now, so I'm sure some of those people are like, hey, have horses, we'll plow, sort of a thing, and then yeah, you've got that stress of, okay, now I have to Right, set up that bid, do all of this, like, calculating of, you know, how do I make probably enough money that I would need to kind of supplement during this time period, and then to have the added, like, uh, what's the word I'm looking for?

I guess just concern for the, the fact that, you know, somebody could just come out of their house or show up from nowhere and be like, I'm going to steal your, steal your pony here. So like, get off my lawn. Check [00:11:00] this out. You had to also be concerned with hidden dangers. I mean, you're plowing unseen terrain.

This is the early 1900s. It's not downtown right now that as we know it, you know. If there was a trap door, that trap door was not metal, that trap door is made out of wood. You're just running a, you know, 2, 000 pound animal over it. I found articles where the horses fell through trap doors and had to be euthanized, then extracted.

So, not only was he trying to make a living, he just lost, you know, his horse that allowed him to make that living. And then reading the uh, reading all the articles on there and how, you know, I was trying to sue the city or trying to sue the shop owner because they didn't, you know, keep up their trap door that led to their basement.

I had another ones where I was stuck in the old rail cars. So you know, the trolleys that they had going around and, [00:12:00] you know, went over and, and And it damages his plow, it damages his horse, just because, you know, it really wasn't kept up on. Tons of complexity to this. It was, this is not a tough one. Oh my god.

I was trying to go through my notes and I'm like, why isn't it? Swiping. Oh, the complexities of modern life. I know. It's so difficult. Clearly, we have it nowadays. Yeah, that is, wow, that's honestly, that's so bizarre, like, to even, you know, try to, I, I'm personally even having a hard time, like, picturing, like, okay, if that was me, which I'm guessing probably wouldn't be, because something tells me.

Women did not do this, but, you know, if that was myself with, like, one of my horses, like, I can't even imagine, yeah, [00:13:00] having that risk alone of, like, my horse could theoretically have to be euthanized if something happens to them trying to do this job. And given the conversion rates, to give you an idea, one horse and a buggy.

on low prices back then is like a 60, 000 car today. So, we're talking about that's an ex Well, losing that as your main mode of transportation and labor is huge. Yeah. But, I want Yeah. That one where I told you he hit the train tracks there, the trolley tracks. What year do you think that was? Yeah. What year?

Um, oh gosh. I'm figuring, you know, we're about probably early 19 hundreds. I don't, I don't know, maybe the twenties, 1948. [00:14:00] Oh my God. The city was still that late using snow. We for sidewalk snow removal in 1948. No kidding. Yeah. Wow. Oh my gosh. I honest to God, would've thought that that was like a, like that would've been.

History, kind of, at that point. Isn't that crazy? What? So, that's so wild. This city, let me go look through here a little more. I think it was 1910, I know I got somewhere in here. So, they started coming up with tractors, and if you've ever been around the streets of Rochester when they're actually clearing the sidewalks today.

Those original tractors are still in use, that they purchased in the early Really? They started purchasing them, I [00:15:00] think, 1923.

Okay. When they got their, nope, sorry, 1937. Oh, okay. They started getting the first, uh, Tractors for snow, the sidewalk removal or snow plowing by the mid 40s. They were really, really pushing to replace all the contractors with city workers and the city owned sidewalk tractors. Okay. So imagine now you have horse drawn power, tractor power, you have a mix of horse and carriage.

And automobile and all these city streets. That sounds dangerous. So chaotic. Yeah. Terrifying. And it's not like, well, it's kind of like today, the people that had the automobile, you know, if their vehicle spooked a horse and that horse took off and rammed into their vehicle, they blame [00:16:00] the horse and driver.

Like, you, you just were in that world. You know that horse gets spooked and it has a mind of its own. But it's a min Oh yeah. Fast. The automobile mentality took over.

Yeah, that's, that's nuts. Genuinely, that's, that's so crazy to, and honestly though, like, I can see where, how that would kind of be a little bit like the, the couple times that I've visited, um, New York City and right there, they're still doing carriage rides and stuff there, obviously not as a mode of transportation, but it's a, it's just kind of an attraction at that point and nerve wracking to see like, you know, obviously these drivers are clearly very skilled at what they do.

These horses are super desensitized to the traffic and everything like that at that [00:17:00] point, but even still, this is an animal with a mind of its own that. Can spook and not for nothing. No, I personally, I would trust the drivers a lot less than I trust. The horse and carriage because people don't know how to frickin drive and I can only imagine what that was like when, you know, cars first came out then and people literally did not know how to drive.

Not to mention, it's not like there were mufflers. So our cows are gone. Our cows, our cows, our cows are quiet. They fart stylistically. But our car, yeah. It's not like You know, you, you listen to a Model T go by, it's a lot louder than, you know, your, your sedan of today. So yeah. Oh yeah. But where they would actually use horsepower [00:18:00] to try to get through some of these deeper snows that, like the 1914 storm, which pretty much killed the city, uh, you know, the horses would give up, they get tired, they break down, they couldn't, you know, they can't get through.

So one of these tractors, right. So one of these tractors. On one gallon of gasoline could travel one mile pushing through six foot trips, or not one mile, one hour. Oh, okay. So, and they, and the town of Greece was one of the first ones to get a tractor, because hello, you've got nasty snows out in Greece.

Thank you, Lake Ontario. Oh, yeah. And, uh. Yup. They had an article here where all these horse teams are just dead tired, stuck on the side. And Carice sat there and said, Hey, no worries, we'll let you borrow our tractor. And they had to plow out Mount Hope Avenue. None of the horses actually go. It was, it was, it was very slow and gradual, [00:19:00] but you want to take a gander at what year the very last plow team.

What was the last, what year, the last team. Okay, well, we already said 1948, they were still using them. Um, I'm gonna say, and I'm probably getting, probably too, way too late on this, but maybe not. I'm gonna go with 1960. You're off by a decade. It was actually two years later. For a professor. For 1950. 1950.

It marked the era, the last, uh, photo I could find was in the Democrat and Chronicle, guy's name was John Berry of 5 Woodfield Street. And he had a team of Gray Percherons that he was using to clear out the 18th War. He was still in charge of it. He didn't do it for ever in a day, and that was his last contract year before.[00:20:00] 

They replaced it with a, uh, with one of those other sidewalk tractors that they had. Okay. Okay. So. Wow. I don't know. Alright. I wanted to see if I could find some more information on John Barry. I'm like, oh, maybe they did a little workup of him being the last guy. Yeah, well, I, I think he, There must have been a John Barry Jr.

at the same address. Cause I found out three years later that his, Uh, his son by the same name, uh, was arrested for stealing cars. Oh, I was like, Oh, man, dad, live up the family name on that one. So if you happen to be from the Berry family in Litchfield street area, my bad, that you were known for having the last team of horses plowing the streets of Rochester to the import part.

Yeah. That's all we care about.[00:21:00] 

We'll just, you know, we'll, we'll set aside the whole, you know, grand larceny thing. Like, it's okay. It's all right. We're not worried about that. You know what's funny though, is I was half tempted to do my own driveway plowing with horses for several years. I really contemplated and I researched a ton of making a V to cover the width of my driveway to plow it.

Because I have a gravel driveway and a regular plow and a snowblower just It rips up the gravel, and it shoots it all off the thing. Like, all I want is that the majority of the snow pushed off, and I, you know, snowpack actually is great to drive on. So I could actually do that for a while. So it doesn't need to scrape the street.

Okay. But, I don't know if an 800 pound I'm kidding. You know, Mork and Frisian Cross would have had enough oomph and power to be able to pull, not only the plow, but the weight of the plow pushing snow. So I kind of gave up on the [00:22:00] idea.

Yeah, that's fair. Oh yeah, absolutely. But there you go. There's my little story. I'm curious. You realize it, I had 15 citations to be able to even pull all those things together. That's how many articles I found. That's kind of sick though. I'll have them all in the, in the show notes so you can go, if you, you know, feel like you could go read up on them.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I think that's fascinating that there was as many, you know, articles that you were able to find regarding that, that this was clearly a newsworthy topic then. Oh, and we're not talking like buried either. I mean, these, a lot of these were, you know, page 16 and full spreads of photos and everything, you know, I'll, I'll throw as much as I can and, you know, and, you know, cite everything.

So I, yeah, the DNC doesn't yell at me, but thank you, DNC. I mean, they digitized their entire paper and it was, it's a [00:23:00] ride to read through. So maybe I'll be able to get a couple more of these. I found one where they highlighted women in horseback riding and, and the, that they are athletes too. And this is from like the early 1900s.

I'm like, yeah, you'd go, man, us chicks, we rocked. Let's go girl. And, uh, no, I think that's really cool that, yeah, that that was a newsworthy topic and especially to see. Something like that now where, you know, obviously most a majority of especially I'm sure people that do listen to this podcast, we have horses for fun or, you know, for petition, things like that, but, you know, go back 100 plus years and these horses, you know, they weren't just, you know, I guess pets, they weren't just an animal for enjoyment, they were beginning to Uh, you know, working member of the [00:24:00] family, they were somebody's livelihood, that horses were capable of doing so many different jobs.

I think it would be really interesting to kind of dive down a rabbit hole of sorts of kind of all of the different things that a lot of people, I guess, wouldn't even think that horses. It's, it's something to think about. It's not that far in our past. I mean, yeah, we have self driving Tesla cars nowadays, and my mom will still tell me about how she would chase down the ice wagon being pulled by a team of horses, jump on the back and you know, stab off a chunk of ice on a hot day because they still had ice boxes where you had to get ice in your refrigerator to keep your food cold.

Right. That's still within a tangible generation that, you know, my mom's still happily alive and she can tell me these stories. It's so cool. It's well, yeah, it's wild [00:25:00] how, you know, yes, in retrospect, like I said, it That was all over a hundred years ago, but at the same time, it really wasn't that long ago, like, if my grandma was still around, I'm sure she could tell me about that because she was, you know, she was born in 1926 and probably saw her fair share of that.

I'm sure. Well. That was my little story for today, and I think what I might do is go out and hug my ponies and pat them and say, You spoiled beasts, it's pouring rain outside, I just gave you deep bedding. Uh, a warm mash, uh, water that doesn't freeze in the winter. You don't. How could you have it? And like, oh my gosh, I rode you two miles today.

I feel so bad. Here, have some. Exactly. So, for as much as we think we're mean to these guys and, you know, oh, it was, it was a hard day. I actually had to do a full day horse show where he did [00:26:00] six classes. That's nothing. Just remember your snowplow horses. These poor guys had to work in some nasty conditions to make sure the mail carriers could walk up and deliver your mail.

This is true. So there you have it. Yeah, that was super interesting. I genuinely would not have really ever thought about, you know, the fact that, yeah, before vehicle snowplows, like the big ones that we see today, and The different ways that cities and towns have of plowing sidewalks, like, how did they do that before having Motorized vehicles.

And as I said, the uh, original tractors are still in use today, so if you ever see them going down, you can shake a fist at it and be like, you, you took away somebody's job. The horse is Yeah, they took away somebody's job, but the one thing that, you know, is kind of nice about that was they probably saved a lot of horses lives from, you know, those injuries that couldn't be predicted.

Oh, [00:27:00] no. We'll do another episode and Tell you the history of what happened to the person. I wouldn't fall a grace while I was researching this. A lot of that came up and that has a full episode to it's own. And you would be surprised. I think I'm going to focus on costs on that one because uh, yeah, we still show horses today and we have a buy sell trade on what a horse costs today.

You're going Shock at what we buy a horse for and complain about today versus what a horse cost back then. Oh boy. That's another episode. Yeah. I'm very curious. This is definitely a rabbit hole that I would like to just dive right into anytime. Well, thank you for joining me today so I could tell you a little story.

I think it made it a little more interesting than me just reading one of my scripts because I couldn't figure out how to make it an actual story story and I wanted to talk to somebody so I appreciate you coming on today. [00:28:00] Well, you know I'm always happy to You know, flap my gums anytime. Alright, thank you, Ray.

Of course, anytime. If

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Take care. Happy trails.

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