In My Garage: Some Real Horsepower
BY NORM POWERSPHOTO BY MATT ROSE
When Sandy Taylor decides to go for a Sunday drive through Tryon’s Hunting Country, it’s a bit more complicated than getting in the car and starting the engine. Her horsepower is exactly that — Clancy and Mona, her two Arabians. And she has a choice of two or four wheels to carry her, depending on which of her four carriages Clancy, Mona, or both, will be pulling.“I was always fascinated by carriage driving while I was riding and showing Paso Finos,” Sandy says. When she and her husband began visiting the area regularly in the 1980s, Sandy discovered the Carolina Carriage Club, a Tryon-based group of carriage driving enthusiasts, which organizes and runs driving events throughout Western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina. By 1989, she had her first carriage and pair, soon joined by other rigs when she settled permanently in Tryon in 1993.
“People think carriage driving must be easier than riding astride, but it’s actually a lot harder,” Sandy says. “Astride, you have your weight, hands, legs and voice to control one horse. Driving, you only have your hands and your voice to control as many as four horses at once.”
Although carriages gradually disappeared from daily life during the first half of the 20th century, shoved aside by America’s fascination with the automobile, they re-emerged in the latter half as objects of historical interest and leisure activity, attracting enough attention that the Carriage Association of America was formed in 1960 to provide a national forum for the preservation, collecting and display of antique carriages.
The American Driving Society came along in the 1970s as the sporting aspects of driving came to the fore, and today ADS oversees the rules and regulations governing competition in events ranging from pleasure driving to harnessed dressage on cross-country courses.
Sandy’s carriages are housed in a shed that forms part of a 70-year-old stable complex in the heart of hunting country, its cedar shake siding weathered to a timeless patina. The stables were built when Carter Brown’s Tryon Hounds could still be heard in hot pursuit of their quarry through the woods and trails that lay just beyond Brown’s Pine Crest Inn, back when wagons and carriages were a still a common means of transport.
Today, carriage driving preserves the more measured pace of those times and a reminder that horsepower once referred to a close relationship between man and animal, not man and machine.
Pride of place among Sandy’s carriages is held by a restored Park Phaeton, an elegant four-wheeled, four-passenger carriage sporting a lustrous, highly lacquered maroon body and matching maroon broadcloth upholstery. “It was made in New York in the late 1800s and would have been considered an owner-driven carriage,” Sandy explains. “In the old days, the owner would have taken the reins, rather than someone who worked for the family as a coachman. This was considered a luxury vehicle.”
The Phaeton, with its leather top that can be raised or lowered according to weather or whim, would have been a status symbol for the proud owner. “It’s the most comfortable of all the carriages I have here,” Sandy notes. “It has a system of springs that make it ride like a Cadillac.”
Nearby sits an 1885 Austrian wagonette, black with dark green striping and hideaway rear seats concealing a storage trunk for tack and other accessories. It was a popular family wagon, used for everyday transport and for casual outings. The two carriages Sandy uses most often, however, are a four-wheeled, single shaft competition wagon and a smaller, two-wheeled road cart.
The competition wagon’s central shaft makes it nimble enough for the sharp turns required by competitive driving or for maneuvering on narrow trails. The road cart, for two passengers, sports a sturdy oak framework under its leather seat and highly lacquered ash shafts for a single horse. “The road cart was custom made for me by an Amish carriage maker in Ohio,” Sandy says. “It was a little hard communicating with him because telephones weren’t part of his household. But the result was perfect.”
And so is the setting, a place hardly changed since the days when a carriage wasn’t such an unusual sight. A graveled path leads away from the barn, beckoning as it disappears into sun-dappled forest. Time to hitch up the team and go for a spin.
