Perspective

There has been a cooling of tempers, but still considerable unease in the wake of the August drama that put us in the center of national politics, human rights issues and an historic migration. As a community, we seem to be cooling down, but are not yet back to normal—whatever that is.

We still have a burgeoning homeless issue and, at the same time, the water department is heroically taking on the optics of manganese—a constituent in our water that does not pose an immediate health risk at present concentrations, but undermines citizen confidence.

The school system is grappling with how to fix or repair failing infrastructure, yet continues to be the primary driver of property taxes–the burden of which seems to fall at the feet of the county. Meanwhile, the county grapples with the inheritance tax as though it were slavery in the early 19th century. It’s unpopular, immoral and they can’t figure out how to get along without it.

With all of that on our minds, it might be fitting to look at a problem that we don’t have, if only to give us some perspective.

Before we had smog and spontaneously combusting batteries, we had horses. I recently stumbled on an article on Substack titled, “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894” written by New Hampshire journalist and author Dan Szczesny.

Szczesny’s discussion has less to do with a specific date than the harsh realities of an entire era. He reminds us that late-19th-century cities ran on horsepower, and the bill came due daily. New York alone kept roughly 150,000 horses, each producing up to thirty pounds of manure and several gallons of urine—more than three million pounds of dung and forty thousand gallons of urine dumped into the streets every day. Rain turned avenues into brown rivers; dry spells ground the stuff to dust that rode the wind, stinging eyes and lining throats. Pedestrians hired “crossing sweepers” to carve a path through the muck. When the waste was carted away, it rose again in vacant lots as mountains forty to sixty feet high, alive with flies.

Those flies were not a nuisance so much as a vector. Outbreaks of typhoid and the heartbreakingly named “infant diarrhea” surged with their populations. The streets carried another horror: the animals themselves. Overworked and spooked, horses bucked, bolted, kicked, and trampled, leaving pedestrians—especially children—at constant risk.

Then, when the animals failed, they failed in public. Accounts describe thirty or more carcasses hauled from New York’s streets on an average day; bodies swelling in summer heat until crews could cart them off.

Urban planners tried to clean faster, but the arithmetic mocked them: more carts meant more horses, which meant more manure. The crisis “resolved” itself only when electric trams, motorbuses, and automobiles displaced the teams. That swap, as Szczesny notes, brought its own century of complications.

So what does a vanished stench offer a town stewing in today’s headaches? Perspective, perhaps. Our stresses are real: taxes and water, classrooms and prisons and the human hurt of people without homes. Fortunately, our streets are not minefields of decay, and our public health battles are waged without fly-swarmed mountains rising on the corner lot. Szczesny’s piece is a reminder that problems can feel permanent until they don’t, that some crises are endured until the world pivots under them. Relief isn’t always elegant, but compared to yesterday’s rivers of manure, today’s troubles come some semblance of dignity and decidedly cleaner shoes.