pg 28 A Peep into the Past Vol. II, Gordon and Belle Hall 1990
When you visit Heritage Park and you stand in front of the Cochrane firehall, you read on the sign how the fire horses pulled the Cochrane fireman’s rig to fires around the village. It makes an exciting story but it never happened, not in Cochrane anyway, because at no time did horses pull the Cochrane outfit. In the first place the village was too small; you could run around the whole village in about 10 minutes. The rig was pulled by manpower and so was the ladder wagon. In later years a hitch was put on the rig so it could be pulled behind a car or truck.
Chas. Grayson, the Imperial Oil agent, had a big white horse he hooked to a dray with shafts; on the dray would be 100 gallon tank loaded with gasoline. Chas. would be heading for the garages to replenish their supply (not much gas used in those days). Ed Raby worked for Grayson and Ed got his start in the oil business when Charles retired. Then I remember George Bunney delivering milk and cream around town. He had a white horse also. The horse was almost human. As George would take a carrier load of milk and service two or three houses, the horse would bring the buggy around to the other street and stop and wait. The buggy was painted black and had a box built on the back to hold the milk. The dairy at that time was where the Franciscan Retreat is now.
The school barn was part of th school system in the 1920s and ’30s. The barn at the Cochrane School held about 20 head of horses. Some kids came by horse and cart, but most rode saddlehorse. Big and small, bronco and quiet horses, they brought the kids to school and for the most part stayed tied up in the barn for about eight hours. Sometimes the barn didn’t get cleaned out regularly and some of the horses were nearly standing on their heads.
“Rattlesnake” Pete Dixon, the local poundkeeper, had a big buckskin saddlehorse. The horse was kept in a barn on Powell Street. The buckskin was used more than once to pull cars up the muddy hill, and he was used to round up stray cattle and horses that found their way into town. Billy Johnson, the mail delivery man for rural route number one to the north and also Bottrel mail, had a small fast team. A democrat for the summer and a cutter for when there was snow on the ground, you could set your watch by his schedule; Billy was nearly always on time. Besides the mail he would bring any medicines from the drugstore in a desperate situation groceries. Billy’s outfit was used at funerals to get a coffin up to the graveyard when the snow was two feet deep and drifting.
