SIXTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VII. 535 



this history frcm a most patient aud careful investigation of the adver- 

 tisements in county papers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 

 gathering from these advertisments the heights and weights of horses 

 which were, so to speak, the natural expression of the different latitudes 

 and longitudes in the United States. 



Speaking of the size of the native horse, he tells us that in New Jer- 

 sey a law was passed in 1731 that all colts eighteen months old -and run- 

 ning at large, under eighteen hands, should be gelded. In Virginia, in 

 1724, a law was enacted that colts eighteen months old might run at 

 large if thirteen hands high, and if older than that they must be fourteen 

 hands. An advertisement in the South Carolina Gazette, in 1744 gives 

 the average of the horses of that state as thirteen and a half hands, and 

 fifteen hands was a very large horse. This with reference to the common 

 Stock of the country. He goes on to show t'hat the riding-horses of 



A team of imported stallions at work on farm of Will F. Hooker, Page Co., Iowa 



Pennsylvania, in the first half of the seventeenth century, were uniform 

 in size, and the exact average was thirteen hands one and a quarter inches 

 in height. Then, referring to the Conestoga or draft-horse of Penn- 

 sylvania, he says: 



"In that grand old repository of ancient, curious and valuable things 

 relating to colonial affairs, the New York Historical Society, to which I 

 am greatly indebted, I found a file of the Pennsylvania Gazette, commenc- 

 ing with the year 1792, published by 'B. Franklin, printer.' In that day 

 the term 'editor' or 'reporter' was not known in the vocabulary of any 

 well, regulated newspaper office, and for anything of local character you 

 had to look in the advertising columns. To these I resorted, as usual, 

 and they presented results that Vv^ere a great surprise to me. Penn- 

 sylvania has long been famous for the production of great, massive draft- 

 horses, and before the days of railroads just suited, with six or eight of 

 them in a team, for the transportation of freights from the seaboard to 



