orses, mares or
foals that can be proved to be mine ... they not being given by my
grandfather into the hands of the overseers." His grandfather, deceased
about 1657, was, prior to that time, in possession of horses as the
aforesaid entry shows. Colonel Joseph Bridger, of Isle of Wight County,
owned fourteen horses at the time of his death. These are shown in the
inventory of his estate entered, 1686. Thomas Cocke of Henrico County,
who died in 1696, disposed of a large estate in his will, including his
horses.

The absence of vehicles, except for a coach, a calash and carts, was due
perhaps not so much to cost and the necessity for importing them as to
the complete lack of passable roads in the Colony. Cartways, which were
the worn and widened Indian trails, over which oxen hauled heavy loads,
were the open ways over which travel by land could be undertaken. The
bodies of the carts were made in the Colony usually and attached to
wheels imported from England. Both the pillion and the side-saddle, the
latter an item listed in the inventory of Mrs. Elizabeth Digges, 1692,
were used by the women in accompanying the men on journeys. A pillion
and a pillion cloth were bequeathed in 1652, by Captain John Upton, of
Isle of Wight County, to his stepdaughter.

Notwithstanding the almost complete lack of highways, two Virginians are
known to have owned vehicles for travel in the seventeenth century. The
commission sent over from England to look into conditions which brought
about Bacon's Rebellion complained, 1677, that Governor Berkeley had
sent them from his plantation "Greenspring" to Jamestown, a distance of
three miles, in his coach with the common hangman as a postillion.
William Fitzhugh, a well-to-do planter of Stafford County, owned a
calash, a sort of a cab imported from England.

Those who did not own horses considered it no hardship to walk miles to
their destinations. Even so, the horse eventually became indispensable
to Virginians of all classes, who became very skilled riders at an early
age. Their adeptness in this as well as their knowledge in breeding,
training and handling horses passed from generation to generation until
the twentieth century. When the automobile supplanted the family surrey,
and the network of hard surfaced highways succeeded to the shady,
"woodsy," dirt roads, Virginia horses were retired from their long and
noteworthy service to Colony and to State.

THE FASHIONS

The earliest refer