Throughout their domesticated history, horses have been used primarily for transportation. When your neighbor built a new home, you hitched the horse up to the buggy and made the trip out, relying on the horse to pull the carriage with you and your things in it. Though cars have taken over as our primary means of ground transportation these days, you can still find some uses for a horse and buggy (or a horse and carriage, if you're English). This article will introduce you to them.

Anyone who runs a horse barn knows that people love to experience quaint connections with their ancestor's way of life. To that end, purchasing a buggy for your stables can help your business, because then you can offer buggy rides to children and adults. In fact hay rides are one of the most popular rural fall pastimes, especially around Thanksgiving and Halloween when families are looking for new and fun ways to celebrate and enjoy the last gasp of outdoor weather before winter hits.

You can also give your stable appeal for vacationing adventurers by offering trail rides and camping in the old pioneer style. The guests to your ranch will be able to travel the trails like their ancestors did - by horse and buggy - camping out under the stars and enjoying old school methods of cooking. This has tremendous appeal to people who live in busy cities and feel stifled by technology and their sterile environments. And best of all, with the guests riding in buggies not much horse handling skill is required except on the guide's part.

If you don't want to get that elaborate with your buggy, you can still make money off of it by hiring yourself out to do buggy rides. You might hang around near a park and offer romantic buggy rides to couples by moonlight or pick up brides and grooms from their home and take them to the church where they're getting married as part of a themed wedding or just as a different element to incorporate into the ceremony. A popular event you might have heard of is a horse drawn carriage ride through Central Park. Just be prepared to clean up after your own horse if you take it on the road, and make sure it's permitted under city ordinances.

For the Amish and Mennonite communities in the United States, the horse and buggy is not a quaint connection with the past but an essential method of transportation. Since they have eschewed all modern technology, these people need their horses and buggies to pick up horse fencing supplies, deliver crops, take them to church and the neighbors' houses, and drive them into town for additional supplies. For this reason, the Amish and Mennonites usually have the most historically accurate buggies and tack.




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