MTFCA Forum

Are you thinking of trading in your Dobbin
For A Model T ....

Well ..... Think Again



FJ

Let's see..
5 gallon tank of gasoline, doing 25mph at 20 mpg is 100 miles in 4 hours.
I wonder how much the farm horse is worth then?

He also eats when parked all through a pandemic. The T only eats when you use him. And think about the pollution! He leaves more mess on the road than the worst leaking T.
Norm

I was advised to use horse manure on my strawberries. I tried it but I'm going back to whipped cream.

Better Have if you have a Dobbin



FJ

My "dobbin" sixty years ago this spring. I certainly would have traded her for a T.


Dad always said "let her know who's boss."

She already knew.........

My mother fed her horse apples. I tried that with My Model T, but the apple was too large to go into the tank. Mother road her horse to school, I drove a Model T to school. My mothers horse was related to Dan Patch, the famous horse from Minnesota. My 1910 T Touring is related to Kim Dobbin's 1910 T (made the same week in 1910).

My dad was a true horseman.... as a kid I spent many enjoyable hours on horseback or in a buckboard, cart or sleigh. My recollection is that with a carriage we could travel about six miles per hour....a mix of walking and trotting. Compare that to a Model T which on a good gravel road can comfortable roll along at 25-30. While travel behind a horse is pleasant, it isn't efficient or we'd still be doing it. When they say Henry Ford changed the world they aren't kidding!

One thing most T's do better than horses. They actually ride more smoothly! And when you get old and creaky they are also a bit easier to mount. And they are easier to break in than a horse. They, with TLC also live much longer! However, when you get lost, sometimes the horse knows the way home!
Norm

One of the old members of the Tucson Touring T's that I knew, always hated horses.
I once asked him why, and he said it was because a horse tried to kill him once.
He was somewhere remote, like North Dakota, in the middle of the depression. He was trying to get home from somewhere, riding his horse, and it had been a long trip. he hadn't eaten for a couple of days.
At one point, about 2-3 miles from home, he had to get off the horse and open a gate. He did that, but then the horse wouldn't let him get back on. It was the middle of a blizzard, with heavy blowing wind and snow. He couldn't afford to argue any longer with the horse, and he was too cold to be able to wrassle the horse into submission and get back on. He said he was half-frozen and could hardly move. He walked and led the horse the last couple of miles to home. He was pretty certain he was going to die out there, but he finally made it home. His father got him in the house, and took the horse to the barn and put him away.
He said the next morning, he was going to shoot the horse, but his father talked him out of it, as they had no money to replace it, and a horse was too valuable to just kill.
He said he never cared much for horses anyway, and after that he had as little to do with them as possible.
For him, there was no romance in horses. He liked his Model T's much better, once he finally got one. Model T's never let him down.

I went on a site called "GenDisasters" and found out that it was VERY common for people to die during blizzards or hard winters, before automobiles. I saw one entry that had 12 people killed in one area during a single un-anticipated blizzard. One parent lost 3 kids just coming home from school. Men on horses, and sheepherders working out on the prairie, were reported as missing, and later, bodies found frozen to death. Up to when I started looking into it, I had no idea how dangerous it was just to be caught in bad weather without an automobile to get you home.
Life before the Model T was not only hard, it was dangerous.

Following on from Norm's post, above, I grew up in Amish country in Ohio. One day there was an article in the local paper about a 70-year-old Amish man who died of a heart attack while driving home in the buggy. The horse knew they way, delivered buggy and corpse to the house. A poignant story, but we believe no Model T ever did the same. Not entirely certain that even a totally modern self-driven car could do it quite so well, either.

I've only been on a horse twice. In between those two times, I was in the air because it bucked.

I was a kid, maybe 7 or 8, close friends of our family (called them Grandpa Tony and Gramma Annie) had horses, someone got the idea to put me on the back of Grandpa's docile, older, totally loving quarter working gelding, Tequila... the horse had NEVER done anything to question it's utter vanilla disposition, EVERY kid was taught to ride on Tequila, so of course, it was my turn... I was thrilled...

Until it tried to make me a freaking junior grand national bronc rider. I didn't KNOW to let go of the saddle horn and get off until someone got that damned 4 legged tasmanian devil slowed down enough to get me off that thing.

Sure, I like horses... well tenderized, a little on the medium side of rare.