Edited to add: Jane Fonda was interviewed on Armchair Expert and mentioned that she rode a horse to school.
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Well, of course some places had stables, and there were shorter term hitching posts for shorter stops, but the real answer is that in large part, people didn’t usually ride horses to work or school.
You lived close enough to walk where you needed to be.
The specific arrangements varied based on individual circumstances, it wasn’t 100% common to go to work on a horse, because the distances were very short. A few centuries ago it was common to leave your horse in a public stable or hitching post, they were everywhere, or hiring a private stable for them to take care of the horse. It was normal to leave them free too in a designated pasture or field, this was an open area with fences around it. In the big cities carriages were pretty normal too, specially from the wealthiest, but overall horses were just tied to a post that had some grass an water. Keep in mind that jobs and schools where pretty different back in those days. Children in rural areas were home schooled or attend to schools with less hours compared to modern standars, and in urban areas schools were closed to residential neighborhoods, so walking was the most common method of transportation, and carriages in the wealthier areas.
The hitching post… literally invented for that reason.
However if we are looking back into a “movie type western” when people rode horses and there were steam trains and the wooden schoolhouse was a thing was probably only an era of 40/50 years from 1865 to about 1908 when the model T Ford arrived.
Many people who lived in towns in the 1860’s didn’t have horses of their own they travelled on foot, if they needed a horse they would rent one from a livery stable because horses were really expensive to own… before the 1860’s there wasn’t any form of compulsory education or much in the way of factories outside of towns.
If you are thinking about how people who lived on farms got to the school house every day it was 1918 before all American children had to go to an elementary school and the horse was already fading into history by then.
I’m not sure the idea of people turning up to work/school and parking their horse in a “horse park” was ever a real part of history.
The number of horses in use is greatly exaggerated. Remember the stories of having to walk miles to school through snow both ways. Yeah they walked, not rode.
Iirc. There are far more horses today than back then.
Travelers. Locals coming to town for business normally stopped at the stables on the edge of town. (And have their guns checked in too)
Teamsters was the job of hauling goods and people on wagons and carriages.
My school had a pony paddock that students could turn their horses loose in during the day, and a shed for stashing saddles, most kids would just ride in bare back with a lead rope rather than a bridle though.
Might not count as back in the day though, this was rural New Zealand in the 90s lol
For most of history, a horse was the equivalent of either an RV, a large work truck or a sports car. So the situation of riding one to work or school wouldn’t come up.
For nomadic cultures (e.g. native Americans, Huns), life revolved around the horse. It was used for war, for hunting, to transport the family tent, but not as a personal transport for things like workplaces and schools that didn’t even exist.
In Europe, horses were used on farms to pull plow and wagons, or by breweries and merchants to pull heavy transport wagons, not for riding. As a riding horse, it would be used by messengers or wealthy people who had servants. One wouldn’t use a draw horse for daily personal transport, and rich people didn’t go to work or school on horseback.
Horses also were used in the military. But war horses also don’t make good school busses 😉
Until the invention of the railroad, common people simply walked. Even long distances were travelled on foot. For a time, it wasn’t too uncommon for English people to walk all the way to Spain for a pilgrimage. If you had some money to waste…um…spend, there were postal coaches you could buy seats on.
But life also was organised in a way that minimised daily travel. People lived where they worked, often literally in the same house. Master were expected to provide journeymen and apprentices with accommodations, farmhands lived on the farm they worked on, and servants had the servants’ quarters in their employer’s house.
One common travel that involved horses was market day. There, farmers from the town surrounding a city would transport their wares to the city…on horse-drawn wagons. If there was space, people would hitch a ride to get to the city and buy stuff that wasn’t available locally. If not, they would walk.
The US in the 1800s may be a bit of an exception. There the land was settled in a uniquely spread-out way that made walking impractical. But still, daily personal transport wasn’t a thing there either. The daily commute is very distinctly an invention that came with trains and cars.
You can leave a horse hobbled in a field. Basically tie a rope around their front legs. You have to train horse to stand and move a little while hobbled. They can move a little but they can’t get very far nor over any obstacles. This way they can graze while secured and its a little more free than in a stable or ties to a tree.
My mum said in rural Australia in the 50s, they just parked their horse at school.
I am not able to ask, but that was how I remember it. There was somewhere for the horses. A rack, or paddock, or whatever. It was common place for students to ride their horses to and from school.
Gramdma’s story about riding a horse to school in 1930s-40s Sask. Saddle the animal with dads help until she could on her own, then ride to school and hitch to hitching post. Ride back at the end of the day. Very much like having a car.
I assume there was water for the horse. She couldn’t remember the details.
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