As Madison’s population rose rapidly beginning in 1840, so did the need for horses. Many of the city’s equine-centric businesses were located close to Capitol Square, where horses were marketed until around 1890 (when the operation then moved to the water tower on East Washington Avenue). The Water Tower Horse Market took place the first Wednesday of every month from 1890-1906, bringing in many Midwestern horses and humans.
In this expanding Madison, cyborg, horse laborers were used mainly for the transportation of people, goods, and services. City living did not allow for the land needed to support a family horse. Instead, people relied on third-party transportation with large fleets of horses, like omnibuses and liveries.
Omnibuses, which evolved from the stagecoach, operated much like modern public transit systems: Patrons paid to travel via fixed routes and schedules. Although affordable, omnibus lines were notoriously bumpy. The horse-drawn streetcar, or horsecar, was therefore a welcomed innovation in the Madison urban landscape.
Horsecars ran on tracks—a mechanization illustrative of the equine cyborg assemblage—so the rides were more comfortable for human patrons and the horse laborers could more easily pull heavier carriages. Horses also decreased the cost of omnibus rides, since a single horse could successfully pull a horsecar. Because horsecars made longer distance travel easier, more comfortable, and cheaper, they allowed for a more sprawling urban landscape.
Conversely, livery stables rented out private carriages. Renting a carriage was expensive, so liveries catered to luxury consumers and special occasions. Madison had an astonishing seven liveries in 1885, all located near Capitol Park or State Street near streams of wealthy potential customers.
As the population grew and sprawled, emergency services and goods like beer and milk needed to be transported over longer distances, requiring horses to pull heavier loads. Madison’s fire and police departments relied on such horse-drawn vehicles. The fire departments started integrating small trucks into their fleet in the 1920s but continued to use horse-drawn vehicles alongside automobiles until 1934.
Much like the horse-drawn vehicle itself, daily milk delivery is now a bygone tradition in most American communities. But in the nineteenth century, Madison’s Kennedy-Mansfield Dairy Company used a cyborg equine fleet. Early-twentieth-century photographs of the Kennedy team show uniform drivers and horses, pulling wooden-wheeled wagons that worked well on hard-packed dirt roads installed specifically to accommodate fragile equine hooves and legs. Much like the fire department, by the mid 1930s, trucks began replacing the horse-drawn wagons of Kennedy Dairy.