On a cold winter day in 1919, passersby pausing to catch their breath amid the chaos of the holiday season encountered an unusual spectacle in Boston’s Post Office Square. A Christmas tree, decorated with corn, translucent ornaments and red banners, read “Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” (MSPCA). Apples rested in barrels nearby, and bushels of oats lined the square. Workhorses surrounded the tree, nibbling at the food as a man shouted at those nearby to help him unload his truck. Gesturing at the vehicle, he joked that he didn’t own a horse himself but still believed the animals had “their uses.” Shoppers pitched in, stacking 40 to 50 crates of carrots at the foot of the tree and helping to cut the carrots into bite-size pieces. “[A]ltogether,” the Rutland News reported on December 29, “it looked like a big day for the horses of the city.”
During this era, when horse-powered carts made way for motor vehicles, humane societies held equine-themed parties like this one in locales like Detroit, Kansas City, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Planned to heighten awareness of workhorses’ poor living conditions and offer the animals a holiday respite, the events offered the public an opportunity to interact with the creatures whose labor jumpstarted the urban economy while appreciating them as compatriots deserving of kindness.
“It is surprising what a unifying effect such a thing as the tree for horses has on men and women of all stations in life,” wrote the Rutland News reporter taking in the Boston scene in 1919. “... It is safe to venture that every [person] who snatched a few moments out of a busy day, to go down and take a share in seeing that the dumb animals were given added comfort, went home with a bit of extra warmth about the heart.”
According to Ann Norton Greene, author of the 2008 book Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America, horses were “the power source that drove urban America” between the 1850s and 1920s. She adds, “Upper-class and upper middle–class people are forming humane societies, and one primary focus of attention was workhorses. [People are] seeing horses pulling streetcars and wagons and getting a variety of treatment.”