Auto dealer Horace "Ken" Sowles collected the vehicles his line of business had made obsolete - and amassed one of the nation's largest collections of horse-drawn carriages.
At his death last month at age 77, he left some 300 milk wagons, stage coaches, sleighs, shays, hotel stages and breaks.Sowles, of Falmouth and North Yarmouth, Maine, willed most of them to a museum he founded, the Carriage Museum of America, in Bird-in-Hand, Pa.
The collection includes a wicker two-wheeler from the late 1700s, a small sleigh, known as an Albany cutter, once owned by President John Quincy Adams and a 19th-century open carriage built for trips to the racetrack.
Rather than treat his carriages as precious museum objects, he drove several, hitching them up to the horses he kept on the farm and taking his three sons for rides.
"Ken was collecting carriages at a time when people were trying to just get them out of their barn because they were taking up space," said Susan Green, museum librarian.
Carriage collectors are a small group whose members include Prince Philip of England. The Carriage Association of America, another organization Sowles founded, claims about 3,000 members.