Then and Now: Sometimes one horsepower beats forty

The vintage picture here was taken 79 years ago this month. The photographer, Marion Post, was standing in front of what is now Trumbull’s Hardware on Portland Street, in Fryeburg, Maine. At the extreme left in her photo is the corner of what was then the Fryeburg post office, and just beyond that can be seen the pediment of the Masons’ Pythagorean Lodge No. 11. On the left of the road in the distance, above the roof of the parked 1939 Plymouth (and visible only with magnification) stands the world-renowned doughnut tree.

Ms. Post (then known as Miss Post) was touring northern New England on behalf of the Farm Security Administration — documenting how rural Americans coped with harsh weather conditions. Actually, they still coped pretty well, at least this far north of the Massachusetts border. With four-wheel-drive unavailable on the civilian market, a man who wanted to move a cumbersome homemade saw rig right after one of those heavy spring snowstorms simply fell back one generation in locomotion. All he had to do was hitch the woods pony up to the equally homemade trailer and head into town. Snow tires had not caught on yet in the U.S., but the heel- and toe-caulks on that horse’s shoes are keeping his hoofs an inch or more over the pavement, providing plenty of traction.