As the days get longer, the farmer’s work increases proportionately. It’s plowing and planting time, which, in the good old days, meant a team of horses. It was high praise from my grandfather to call someone a “good horseman.” He should know — he was one himself. It wasn’t about riding, but knowing how to skillfully drive them, treat their ailments and judge their abilities. He loved working with a team and had one of the last ones in our part of New York state, Dick and Fawn — I can just barely remember them. Grandpa loved everything about horses: working with them, taking care of them or just being around them.
His uncle ran a hotel in the small town of DeRuyter, where he would rent out rigs to traveling salesmen, usually called simply “agents” but sometimes “drummers,” especially in the South. They would arrive by train, rent a rig and then go “drum up business” for companies selling and supplying all kinds of goods to the general stores that were the heart of every village. As a boy, Grandpa could always be found in the hotel stables, feeding the horses, rubbing them down when the agents returned them, keeping an eye on everything. It was in this hotel one night in 1906 that Chester Gillette, the notorious subject of Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” rented a room before running off with Grace Brown to the Adirondacks, where he murdered her. She was good friends with my grandfather’s whole family and he was none too pleased to find out we had to read that book for 11th-grade English. As I think back on it, what a strange choice from our teacher, this sordid story of drowning a woman and her unborn child! But then she also assigned Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” — a nightmarish tale if ever there was one. But I’m getting off the subject.
Grandpa’s grandfather made a living as a harness maker, and if horses were the engines of the economy in those days, then the harness was the key part of the infrastructure that made that economy hum. There is more to a harness than you might think, and the parts all have names that only a few people know anymore. For those among us who take great pleasure in teasing newcomers on the job, asking them, for example, to go find a left-handed monkey wrench, another task might be to go get a branch from a “whiffletree.” This was a common enough word in 19th-century New England, but would baffle 99% of the population today. A “whiffletree” is the horizontal wooden bar whose ends are attached to the traces of the harness, and whose center is attached to the tongue of whatever you’re pulling. It hangs behind the horse and allows turns to the right or left. Using “whiffletree” would mark you as being from New England or its settlement areas in New York state. It is sometimes also called a “whippletree” in this area, but everywhere else in the country it’s usually a “singletree,” a word derived from “swingletree” — its name in the Mother Country. The W fell overboard crossing the Atlantic in stormy weather.
It would seem that “whippletree” was the original word because another word for this wooden bar a few centuries ago was a “whippin.” F replaced P, perhaps having something to do with the fact that, back then, a lot of people had lost their front teeth, creating a mouthful of consonantal confusion.
With a team of horses, you would have a “doubletree” or, to use its more descriptive name in New England, the “evener.” This “evened out” the pull of the two horses, an important feature because inevitably one was stronger than the other. It’s used in the same northern range as whiffletree, from New England to the Great Lakes. More rarely, it’s called the “equalizer” in this area or a “double whiffletree.”
I was excited to write about all this, because whenever I have passed the DoubleTree Hotel in Nashua I’ve thought, “I bet they don’t know what a doubletree is,” imagining they had found an old, buried evener when they dug the foundation of the first hotel, but a quick look at Wikipedia revealed my mistake: the hotel chain was born in Arizona, where the first one had two palm trees in front of it. It’s on their logo. Live and learn.
There is more to say about the language of harnesses, but I’ll save that for later.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.
