December 12, 2012
Here’s the second vintage Christmas postcard from my collection of six (hey, I said it was a small collection) …
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The text on the back reads, “Here we come in Essex Coach, to wish you a Merry Xmas.” The postcard was sent to Mrs. Harris in Louisville, Kentucky, and postmarked December 22, 1925.
December 11, 2012
I have a few paper-based collections, not counting shelves full of old books: a few original nineteenth-century coaching prints (which are framed and hanging in our living room), quite a number of original orange-crate labels (some of which are framed and hanging in our kitchen, and the rest of which are destined for the walls of another room), and a small but growing collection of old Christmas postcards with pictures of horse-drawn vehicles.
My plan for these postcards is to put them in small frames and use them as Christmas decorations. But that hasn’t happened yet, which means they’re still easily scan-able … so I’m going to share them with you here. And today is a good day to start this project, I figure, as we’re ONLY TWO WEEKS away from Christmas!
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This first one is actually an undated card, not a postcard, but it does feature of lovely pair of Art Deco horses.
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December 2, 2012
About a week ago, A.J. and I were in an antique store in Georgia, where I found a couple of stereoscope cards with horses and carriages. This brightly colored one shows a line-up of the participants at a horse show, with a fat, furry pony in the foreground.
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I believe the CMA has a few of these cards in its collection as well.
Obviously, I can’t give you the proper 3-D effect here on the blog, nor can you see it by looking at these in person. Clearly, the next thing we’ll need to find is an old handheld viewer.* I know I’ve seen them in various antique stores here in Lexington, so I’ll be on the lookout the next time we’re browsing!
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* For a brief history of the earliest forms of 3-D, and a photo of a handheld stereoscopic viewer, click here. If you happen to watch the video (about a Canadian museum exhibition on early 3-D methods) embedded in this article, it also has some nice old stereoscopic photos of horses and carriages.
November 30, 2012
Did you notice the new addition to the blog’s banner / header photo, above?
When I first started this blog, it was meant simply as a place to share stories and photos from CAA trips and events. So we just called it “the CAA blog.”
Over the past couple of years, however, the blog’s scope has expanded so much that I thought it needed a more all-encompassing name; something we could all refer to in conversation. Nearly everything on the blog is somehow related to traveling at the speed of horses walking or trotting: carriage driving then and now, horse-drawn transportation, and travel on early roads … hence “The Slower Road.”
The blog’s official name, as far as WordPress and the various Internet search engines are concerned, is still “The Carriage Association of America.” And the address, of course, remains www.carriageassociation.wordpress.com. But while we’re all zooming around the Internet, I hope you’ll join me in a daily drive down The Slower Road as well.
November 26, 2012
… to recuperate from my holiday!
We’ve returned from our whirlwind Thanksgiving-weekend tour of three southern states. And I think we need a(nother) vacation to rest up from our over-stuffed long weekend.
We visited with family, ate LOTS of good food, played miniature golf, raced go-karts, helped put furniture together and move it into the nursery for our niece and nephew (due soon!), enjoyed dinner with friends, and drove for nearly twenty hours over the four days (including, unfortunately, two rounds of massive traffic jams and a flat tire). Whew!
The Slower Road 