Happy Birthday, America! In honor of 250 years since 1776, the Ohio Commission for the U.S. Semi quincentennial (America 250) has chosen a different theme each month to highlight and celebrate Ohio’s rich history. Each month, The Dawes Arboretum’s History Team will be dropping a new collection to our archives that align with America and Ohio’s 250th anniversary monthly theme! This month, we’re celebrating Ohio Moves: Transportation.
Through the decades, there have been many forms of transportation at Dawes. From horses to bikes to cross country skiing people have traveled around The Arboretum to enjoy the peaceful landscape.
Wagon tours at The Arboretum were offered sporadically in the late 1960s, but the first wagon tours that were advertised were found in the May 1970 Arboretum Newsletter. You can find our newsletter collection here.
On Sundays, the tours in the “carry-all” wagon were offered twice a day. In the late 1980s, the “carry-all” wagon was replaced by a two-cart wagon pulled by an orange K-4 Kubota tractor. Visitors in the 1990s rode on top of bench seating or hay bales. Wagons are still available today.
Another traditional mode still available is biking. Between 1998 and 2002, Dawes hosted Tour de Trees – a bike tour throughout The Arboretum. Although the tour is no longer, visitors are welcome to safely ride around on bicycles around our grounds.
As for cross-country skiing, Dorothy Dawes Young, the only daughter of Beman and Bertie Dawes, often took her family skiing at The Arboretum. For the safety of our collections, cross-country skiing is no longer allowed.
Those are just a few of the mechanical modes of transportation that have been around The Arboretum, but there’s a mode of transportation without wheels and gears but with soft fur and strong neighs.
Max and Punch, two Belgian draft horses that weighed 1700 pounds each, were purchased by The Arboretum in 1979. They pulled sleighs, hayrides and a mud sled on trails and roads
Several letters from Dorothy Dawes Young to Bertie Dawes about skiing at Dawes, photos of the carry-all, horse-carts, biking and skiing have been digitized and are now available to the public on The Arboretum’s Digital Archive! For questions concerning the digital archive, please email daweshistory@dawesarb.org.
Are you interested in doing in-person research at The Arboretum? Do you have a history question that you can’t find the answer online? Don’t hesitate to use the Department’s History Research Request Form, where you can get answers to all of your Dawes history-related questions and research requests.