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  • The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century
  • Jeffrey S. Adler
The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. By Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) 242 pp. $50.00

According to McShane and Tarr, the horse shaped the nineteenth-century American city. By increasing the speed of urban transportation, these "living machines" facilitated land-use specialization, including the expansion of suburbs and the development of parks. The urban economy also depended on horses; their muscle sustained commerce, powered engines, and provided the energy for earth-moving machinery. These beasts of burden, literally, did the heavy lifting in the city, hauling, pulling, and carrying people, goods, and even snow. During epizootics, urban commerce slowed to a crawl; commuters struggled to reach their destinations; food rotted in railyards and on docks; and firefighting was hamstrung. Yet, despite their central role in daily life during the nineteenth century, the urban horse has received little attention from historians, until now. In The Horse in the City, McShane and Tarr fill this lacuna in the scholarly literature with an engaging analysis.

The authors define the topic expansively. In wide-ranging chapters, they recreate the urban world that the horse forged and that developed around the horse. Thus, portions of the book deal with the effects of the horse more than the animal itself, such as the growth of a workforce that catered to horses, improvements in hay production, and the professionalization of veterinary medicine.

As a consequence of this integrated framework, McShane and Tarr emphasize feedback loops and economic linkages. The increasing dependence on urban horse power, for example, reduced travel time and therefore spurred land-use specialization, which, in turn, reinforced demand for horses and necessitated larger stables and more hostlers, teamsters, hacks, blacksmiths, and harness makers. In response, wealthier residents moved further from working-class neighborhoods and downtown, ill-smelling stables, thereby heightening dependence on horse-based transportation and accelerating social and spatial sorting. The economic impact of the urban horse also extended beyond the city itself, as hinter-land farmers responded to the growing needs of the animals by devoting [End Page 136] more land to hay and oats production. Horse manure became an important fertilizer. Suggesting both the cultural and the economic effects of this reciprocal relationship, hinterland farmers termed Manhattan a "veritable manure factory" (132).

McShane and Tarr conclude that most nineteenth-century city dwellers viewed horses in utilitarian terms; they treated the animals as machines and replaced them when they became less productive. Since old, sick, and weak horses held more value dead than alive, owners routinely destroyed horses that showed signs of lameness or heat stroke and dispatched their carcasses to rendering plants. Ironically, anti-cruelty reformers played an integral role in this process, assuming responsibility for euthanizing injured animals.

McShane and Tarr draw from an impressive array of sources, ranging from trade journals to novels. Perhaps because The Horse in the City is written more as a collection of inter-connected essays than a traditional monograph, it contains some repetition–a few anecdotes, for instance, are retold in multiple chapters. But this is a minor shortcoming in an otherwise valuable contribution not only to urban history but also to nineteenth-century economic, business, environmental, and social history.

Jeffrey S. Adler
University of Florida
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