Passion Took Collector for Sleigh Ride

The smell of new paint greets visitors who walk into this museum filled with horse-drawn carriages and sleighs built in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But twist the brass door handle and crack the door of a century-old carriage parked just inside the door, and the musty smell of years gone by fills the air.

With a little imagination, visitors to the Thrasher Museum can conjure up images of a man in a top hat sitting snugly inside the carriage beside a lady dressed for an elegant night on the town. Imagine a crisp fall evening in the late 1800s when steam poured from the nostrils of horses hitched to the shiny black coach.

This carriage, built in New York around 1889, was the first of more than 100 carriages and sleighs collected over three decades by James Thrasher. Thrasher, a local resident engaged in the coal business, died at the age of 73 in 1986.

Collecting carriages was his passion.

“He always liked horses from when he was a kid. And his dad was a blacksmith,” his daughter, Patty Morton, said. “He had a couple horses even before he started working on the carriages. He traveled all over the United States getting the carriages and redoing them.”

Included in the museum’s display of his collection is a carriage used by Theodore Roosevelt at his inauguration. It was built by James Cunningham Sons & Co. in Rochester, N.Y., around 1890. There is also a red-and-black sleigh once owned by the Vanderbilt family.

There are private coaches, a red light-delivery wagon, and a dark-green rural mail wagon with red spoke wheels. Upstairs is a reproduction of a stagecoach, and a lady’s carriage made of wicker with a fringed, umbrella-style top.

There is coal-black casket wagon and an 1890 horse-drawn hearse that has windows on the sides so a coffin could be viewed.

In the back of the museum, visitors will find an old milk wagon used in Bethesda by Ayrlawn Farms around 1914. The orange and tan paint is peeling from the truck, but you can still make out the words “Pure Jersey Milk.”

They all used to sit in a dusty old schoolhouse in Midland, Thrasher’s birthplace, just south of Frostburg in Allegany County. They were available for viewing only by appointment.

Shortly after Thrasher died, Allegany County purchased the carriage collection for $450,000. After a four-year search for a home and a year of renovation of a building at the Old Depot, the carriage collection opened to tourists in July 1992.

“They say some of the lanterns on the carriages are worth as much as the carriages themselves,” said Beth Cross, marketing director for the Old Depot, a restaurant and shops in Frostburg at the western terminus of the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad.

“They say Mr. Thrasher could have told you about each piece, but when he died, he didn’t have it all written down.”

About 50 carriages and sleighs are now housed in the former Prichard Warehouse, which the county is in the process of purchasing as well. The county eventually hopes to display the other 50 pieces from the collection in Cumberland, the eastern terminus of the scenic railroad line.

“Cumberland has such a transportation history with the railroads and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. The county wants to build on that heritage,” said Natalie Chabot, manager of the Allegany County Visitors Bureau.

Horse-drawn carriages were developed in the early 1700s to provide speedier and more graceful travel than slower, heavy wagons and coaches.

The first carriages were imported from England and France. They were not made in America until about 1740. By 1880, however, the United States was producing more horse-drawn vehicles than any other country. Demand for the carriages waned with the advent of the automobile in the early 1900s.