By Regena Handy

Honest John. Nellie. Kate. Brownie. Though there were others before them, these names are the ones that quickly come to mind and roll easily off my lips. They were horses, working animals of my youth, once a fixture in Patrick County and on every small farm.

Work horses are big and muscular built, broad short backs with powerful hindquarters, originally bred for farm labor.  Often referred to as draft horses, they range in height from 16 to 19 hands and weigh as much as 2000 pounds. The work horse is not a thorough bred nor any of the light riding sport horses.

My purpose in giving you this little tutorial about the work horse is to clarify its size. Which, as I’ve already said, was immense. Probably we as children should have been frightened of them. But nothing thrilled us more than a ride on one of these powerful giants.

I have a wonderful picture of my brother and cousin when they were kids riding Honest John. Straddling the large horse’s broad back, their legs and bare feet stretched out on each side.  They were shirtless and suntanned, poster children of summer.

My daddy and uncle owned and operated a small sawmill almost all their adult lives. For the majority of that time, they used work horses to pull the logs out of the woods to the mill, declining the use of mechanical help until their later years.

The sawmill setup was not stationery, but intentionally mobile for convenient location from one stand of woods to another. If situated some distance from home, the horse was loaded onto the truck on Monday morning, corralled in a make-shift fence on site, and hauled back home at the end of the week.

On Friday afternoons, my dad would back the truck into an old road bed near our house and easily lead the horse up the bank. By the time he was unloaded I would be waiting. I’d climb up onto his back — brave as could be — and off we’d go, headed to the barn.  (By the way, I’ve only been on a horse few times since my teens after a friend’s riding horse spooked and ran away with me. You know what they say about getting right back on the horse. Obviously, didn’t work for me. I wouldn’t do so now for love or money.)

One night while we were eating supper, we heard a terrible commotion. My dad ran to the barn and found Honest John dead, the vet said later of an apparent heart attack. Kate and Nellie went to other homes when the tractor became part of the sawmill operation. Brownie was the only remaining horse when my dad died suddenly at age 54. Since the animal wouldn’t allow anyone else to catch him, he contentedly lived out the rest of his life in the pastureland surrounding my parents’ home.

I asked my mom once about young men’s passions before the invention of fast cars. She said they loved fast horses. I can see why because we certainly loved those old horses that plodded their way through our younger years.