D-ring Harness Origins

[mitchmaine]

hello all,
for the record, i have a photo of d-ring harness on teams of horses in ft. fairfield, me. in the winter of 1894. so its at least that old. ft. fairfield is aroostook and potato country, and the teams are in town with sleds on celebrating selling 4000 barrels of potatos for $1.50 each. a good price i guess. the teams are nice and snug in their harness suggesting that they might have been engineered for that purpose and the teamsters knew it. so maybe andys theory about the harness and the jigger wagon though maybe not invented together, could be related.
oddly, the woods teams in “stump to ship” use side backer in the 1930’s. and most of the photos i find of the teams fitted to sidebacker show long poles and split neckyokes with the yoke hung from the collars by chain and heavy strap. teams of four up show a pole hanging a foot off the ground. presumably for the draft of the leaders and the comfort of the wheelers. stage horses showed ribs deep enough to hold a good sized apple.
there is one photograph of 5 teams pulling a 10 ton boiler to a sawmill on a jiggerwagon and the heavy chain from the load passes through the neckyoke ring of each team and the eveners are hooked of course to the same chain, with two teams behind as a brake.

when any one is showing a picture of their farm and family, usually its in the dooryard and the horses are cleaned brushed and in the center of the picture. showing how important a part they played in the family.

[Carl Russell]

I found this article as I was digging. It post dates Mitch’s photo, and it doesn’t describe our D-ring harness, but it shows the type of deep thought that some were putting to the development of harnesses to make the use of horse-power efficient….. a little reminiscent of Andy 😉

Carl

http://www.militaryhorse.org/studies/artillery/yule.php

[Michel Boulay]

Mitch, sent an e-mail to the harness shop in Sackville NB. They’ve been in business since the early 1900’s. In there catalogue they have a tug with a ring in the middle, so is it common around here? I’m not sure but hoping somebody there can answer me there. If they have them in the catalogue there has to be some teamsters using them?? We’ll see.
Mike

[Carl Russell]

Boston Backer style, date unknown.

D-ring in Vermont circa 1941…… I think they miss the point….

[Carl Russell]

Here are a couple of photos from a book Geoff (Near Horse) gave me called The Horse Interlude.

These are described as “Wheat Harnesses”, with no date range specified. You can see the ring attached to the trace. In neither example are there back-pads present. There is however a type pf britchen for the “Wheeler” harness. It appears that some of the components are present, but the strap is still bearing pole-weight on the collar. It isn’t described why there is a ring on the trace. It seems to be just there as an attachment for the belly band. It might have lead someone to new ideas….

[Carl Russell]

Sorry, I completely missed this pic…… here is the next iteration (from the same book). It attributes the design to “Shows and Circuses”….. perhaps this style change had some extra scrutiny as it moved from one area to another, and somebody in New England saw a way to combine this with the Boston Backer, and started making it available to farmers and loggers in this region.????

Carl

[mitchmaine]

hey carl, your photos are similar to the one i’m seeing. the fellow with the d-ring has no jack saddle and his pole runs out of the picture, and the ones with the side backers are holding up the pole with their necks. the drawings show no jack saddles either, but appear more like belly backer than d-ring. maybe mike can find something over his way. hope so. les barden seems to be our connection to the past. glad we still have him. i remembered an old picture we have of my great great grandfather and my great grandfather plowing ground on our old farm in north yarmouth. hadn’t seen it in a long long time so i went scurrying around and found it this morning. sidebacker of course. with an old wooden beam plow. i am guessing that my great great grandfather would be 50 in the photo making it around 1880. no luck there, but fun looking at the picture.

[Carl Russell]

@mitchmaine 31802 wrote:

hello all,
for the record, i have a photo of d-ring harness on teams of horses in ft. fairfield, me. in the winter of 1894. ….

Mitch, is this a “true” d-ring harness? Are you certain of the date?

I only ask because I have spent a few hours going through the US Patent records, and I have found a lot of variations of traces and attachments that come close, but none that are reasonably similar to what we have now that I could call them D-ring harnesses.

If the d-ring was common as early as 1894 then the trace style, and/or d-ring hardware doesn’t seem to have been patented.

Carl

[Ira]

Does anyone in or around Concord N.H. know if the sales records of the J.R. Hill Harness Co. still exist? They made harness for the Abbot and Downing coaches. I have seen pictures of stage coaches in Vt. with the horses wearing D-ring harness that I would say were taken in the 1800’s.

[Andy Carson]

It’s hard to know the exact year the d-ring began, but at most of the times we are discussing, it seems the d-ring coexisted for a long while as a minority with side backer (and other) harnesses in new England. It seems the d-ring was not patented and not advertized (or at least not advertized early on). This would seem to indicate to me that the d-ring was a modification to existing harnesses. Inventers and engineers would want some return on thier investment. Carl makes a good point, though, that the modifications to a side backer harness would have to be extensive to get to a d-ring, and it is probably unlikely. What if, however, the “base” harness was not a side backer? What if the “base” harness was a swedish harness??? If you look at the third picture in the link below, you could find some suprizing similarities between the Swedish harness and the d-ring. Some of John Plowdens logging equipment also illustrates the similarities between the Swedish harness and the d-ring. I think that if you had a swedish harness and needed to hitch to a piece of equipment meant for a side backer harness, you may have little choice but to attach a line between the d-ring (if that’s what you call it) on the Swedish harness and yoke for the sidebacker and another line from the d-ring to the single tree. Do that and you have a d-ring. There was a swedish colony in new Sweden Maine in aroostook county in potato country. It looks like some potato harvesting and planting equipment would be tongue heavy, which might make a d-ring precurser catch on. The sloven wagon would also be especially well suited to lift heavy barrels of potatoes. Maybe this could explain a link between sloven wagons and d-rings, even if there is no specific advantage of the d-ring for this type of wagon. I wonder if anyone has some old photos of harnesses in or around new Sweden. Mitch?

http://www.theequinest.com/breeds/north-swedish/

Here’s a link to another photo of a swedish harness from Simon’s website. You can tell that any type of yoke or other connection to a pole that would provide braking would have to be connected to the ring if you weren’t using solid poles to provide braking. Easy to imagine this getting modified, but did a swedish type harness make it to new England? If a smallist emigrant population was keeping this local, it could explain some coexistance and the lack of advertising, but it doesn’t explain how the d-ring got distubuted throughout new england later.

http://www.celtichorselogging.com/?Harness

[mitchmaine]

hope the photo made it. it is a portion of the original pic. the team above the grey horse is in d-ring, i beleive. the date of the photo is mar.10, 1894

[Andy Carson]

Sure looks like a d-ring to me. Such an early photo seems like a big clue to me. I looked at a map and see that Ft Fairfield is about 15 miles from new Sweden and less than two miles to new Brunswick. I bet swedes growing potatos in new sweden would haul them to ft fairfield for shipping out on the railroad. Perhaps the d-ring (or early versions) was in this area first, then arrived in other parts of new England a couple decades later through some other mechanism. Any other clues outside of the portion of the photo that might indicate why the streets are so crowded? It looks like a cooler time of the year (fall?) and the wagons are empty (already unloaded?). Maybe everyone was unloading some good or farm products of some sort, but there are a few old guys standing around showing off thier pocket watches or holding what looks like a clipboard and looking important. I’m not sure they would be the ones to go to town to move tonnage by hand, but maybe they had an automated way to unload wagons… the guy in the back by the poles looks like he’s got his hand on a bag of something. It might be grain, but it looks kinda small. It they were hauling grain in, they had to be local. Any chance this was this an event that might have brought people from further away? I can’t quite make out the sign on the building, but it looks like “wampum c…” it’s probably not important, but I was just curious… if we know everyone in the photo is local, it’s an even bigger clue.

[Carl Russell]

Here is the link to the USPO showing results for harness. I must have looked at a few hundred today, and found a few that had some hardware that resembled the D-ring, and some that showed other hitching set-ups that feature centralized attachment of side, saddle, belly straps and traces, but none that take it to the level that we know as the D-ring Harness.

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/def/054.htm

I like the idea that Andy floats about the Scandinavian harness. The harness wouldn’t even need to make it here, just the harness maker.

The mystery is that somewhere a black smith, or foundry, started making D-rings in a distinctive design specifically for the harness makers, and I can hardly believe they didn’t patent it.

Carl

[mitchmaine]

hey andy,
that photo is in march, and as stated above, the day of a big sale of potatos. the locals are all there at the railhead and sold 4000 bu. potatos for $6000. big day, seeing the rest of the country in a recession.

i like your sweden/new sweden harness connection. maybe the clue is in scandanavia?
however it caught on, the maine state prison in thomaston started making d-ring harness, and lots of it, and it may have been cheap, and abundant, therefore the popularity not counting the benefits of the harness. there could be a clue at the prison archives that i might rundown. or maybe the new sweden historical society??????? a few more leads to follow up.

[Andy Carson]

sorry I missed the previous description of the photo. I looked up that the railroad extended it’s line up to new Sweden/Stockholm in 1899 in response to the growing population and goods coming out of the area. So, I bet alot of those people in the picture are from the new Sweden area. Speaking of new Sweden, I read in the link below that the historical society purchased the Lars Noak(sson) blacksmith shop (circa 1900) and show it by appointment. Maybe there is a tell-tale d-ring sitting in that shop…

http://www.maineswedishcolony.info/mscinc/mscinc.html

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