I’m having fun swopping photos of wagons with Liz at “Exploring Colour,” here’s two photos I took years ago.
An old wagon in Logan, Utah, and a surrey made in Waterloo, NY.
Here’s the link to Liz’s post https://exploringcolour.wordpress.com/2023/01/15/way-out-west/
I know I’ve got shots of a Conestoga, the big freight haulers of their day in the northeast U.S. and Canada, I’ll add ’em when I find ’em.
old wagon in Logan, Utah
Surrey (yes it probably had a fringe on top) made by the Waterloo Wagon Co. in my hometown
A pretty classy rig, right?!
I kinda like a bright golden haze on the meadow…But there will be no singing of songs from Oklahoma! allowed in this blog!!
(And enough with the exclamation points already!!)
UpState & Away - - - - Waterlooseneca.com 
With all those exclamation marks, I can feel the day gettin’ older, feel a sleepy head on my shoulder, noddin’, droopin’ close to my shoulder, till it falls kerplop!
Arrgh, stop that. I think the original lyric was “…’til it falls in a cow flop.”
I’m trying to write a white paper with this tune in my head!
No sympathy, serves you right. 🙂 Just kidding. Yesterday I heard on a radio program that chewing gum is supposed to help with that, getting rid of tunes stuck in your head.
The wagon in the second is deluxe. The leather seats were meant for wealthy people.
Thank you, Peter, yes, I think it was used by one of the big resorts in the Adirondacks, definitely a well-to-do clientele.
I remember the old Wagon Train television series with Ward Bond.
The word wagon is related to weigh (which originally meant ‘carry’) and way (which is the road a wagon travels on). It’s a good idea to weigh our words before they get away from our lips.
I’ve never seen that series, but just looked it up and see it ran eight years, and wow, it had a lot of famous actors appear on it. Do you remember it as a good show?
I don’t know how discerning the teenage me was. I think the show might have been better than the average of the zillions of television westerns that were the rage back then.
I love those old wagons, Robert!
Thanks, Pit, me too!
👍
You’ve taken this pretty surreyously.
I note that your “related” post group shows a b/w version of one of your wagons, featured in Zen Stone Stacking. I seem to recall that’s the post that introduced me to your quirky style, and the blogiverse hasn’t been the same since. 😉
Excellent pun, Dave!
And thanks for “quirky,” I feel like I’ve made real progress from “?????” and “unhinged.”
These wagons are high above the ground. I guess that’s because they might have had to cross streams.
That makes sense, streams and stumps sometimes I’d guess. For the really weighty stuff, sometimes they’d wait for winter and use sledges, like when Henry Knox dragged tons of cannons during the Revolution, from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, 300 miles on heavy-duty sleds. He also avoided all those tolls on the Mass Turnpike doing it that way.
Wow Robert.. wonderful wagon at the top.. three hoops! It was such a rare find to see my one-hoop wagon 😀
The surrey looks amazingly plush, very classy. Great fun to find this post just now, and thanks also for the mention! It’d be super if you manage to ferret out the Conestoga shots 🙂
A hill country friend had a wagon very much like the one you’ve shown here sitting among her flowers. Time took its toll, but I still have a couple of photos of it: one with cat, one without.
When I was following a portion of the Santa Fe trail, one of the most remarkable sights I came across were the wagon tracks. The largest, sometimes called ‘freighters,’ had to be enormously heavy. I suppose the fact that their tracks still can be seen attests to that.
It’s amazing the tracks are still visible, but I guess persistence is the very nature of being in a rut! One of my cousins lived for a time in a new city south of Salt Lake City called Eagle Mountain, and the pony express route ran through there. He told us the same thing, the ruts on that trail were still visible, but we never got a chance to go off and walk along there so I haven’t seen them.
I’ve seen articles saying that the reason Americans drive on the right hand side of the road is because that’s the way the Conestoga wagons liked it, and they were the biggest thing on the road in their day. (Don’t know if that’s true.)
I’d be happy to ride in either one – after all, one’s for everyday chores, and the other one is for Sundays. 😉 But I think my back would be screaming within minutes…
Yes I cannot imagine the settlers going a thousand miles or more on a wooden wagon seat. I’d wait for them to invent shock absorbers and Sirius radio. GPS would probably be a good idea too.
🙂