Suffolk County Sherriff Sleigh

The first urban mass transit vehicle was the omnibus – a horse-drawn road vehicle somewhat like a stagecoach. The first omnibus operation is believed to have been in Paris, France in 1819. Stagecoaches had doors on each side, carried six or eight passengers and usually did not pick up and drop off passengers en-route. An omnibus was larger and could carry about twelve passengers. Passengers boarded the omnibus through a door at the rear and sat on benches along each side. The driver’s seat was usually high outside the front and equipped with a hand brake. Baggage or additional passengers might be carried on top. Omnibuses boarded passengers at stops along a route. In the winter, wheels might be replaced with runners to create a sleigh. Omnibuses began running in New York City and Boston in the late 1820s and early 1830s. (Sources differ on the earliest dates.) By 1850, New York City had 500 omnibuses operated by 3,000 workers and 5,000 horses. In 1853, Boston had 30 omnibus routes. Omnibuses were succeeded by horsecars which were horse-drawn vehicles with flanged wheels on steel rails. Horsecars could carry 24 passengers and provide a much smoother ride than an omnibus. Boston’s first horsecar line was the Cambridge Railroad in 1856. By 1873, Boston was down to just two omnibus routes. The early history of Seashore’s sheriff’s sleigh is not documented. It is believed to have been built as early as the 1850s. It was pulled by two horses. When streets were not snow covered, the sleigh runners were probably replaced with wheels. Compared with many omnibuses, the driver’s seat on the sheriff’s sleigh is lower and has an overhead covering. The sleigh may have started life as a regular omnibus. Around the time that Seashore acquired the sleigh, along with a similar sheriff’s wagon, in the 1980s, Seashore members Frank Cheney and Jeffrey Sisson heard stories from a long time city employee who thought that both vehicles had been converted from regular omnibuses since the city of Boston had acquired a number of used omnibuses. The sheriff’s sleigh is of the type used in Boston in the late 1800’s by the Hathorne Line and the Hobbs Omnibus Company who later sold their vehicles to the Metropolitan Horse Railroad and the West End Street Railway who used them on special routes and for charter service. The Boston Elevated Railway acquired the West End Street Railway in 1897 and used some former omnibuses in work service. At some point Seashore’s sheriff’s sleigh was acquired by the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department. (Suffolk County includes Boston and some nearby towns.) The city employee said that the sleigh was last used to haul city workers to project work sites as well as moving mental patients to and from the Austen Farms asylum. It appears that windows have been boarded up. About 1945, the sleigh, along with the similar vehicle with wheels, was moved to the city Public Works Building at 650 Albany Street in Boston. In 1977, there was a plan to move the wagon and sleigh to the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, but that museum lacked space. After the Larz Anderson plan failed, the city of Boston loaned the sheriff’s wagon and sleigh to the Museum of Transportation at Museum Wharf in Boston. When this museum closed in 1982, the sleigh and wagon went into the Museum of Transportation’s warehouse in Cambridge. The sleigh came to Seashore in 1983 along with the similar wagon.