VERY FINE MOLDED FULL BODIED GILT SHEET COPPER AND ZINC HACKNEY HORSE WEATHERVANE, DUBUQUE, IOWA, CIRCA 1880

originally was placed on a barn owned by Russel J. Mulgreu of Dubuque, Iowa;

removed to the Farber Family coach house in Dubuque, Iowa;

Allan Katz, Woodbridge, Connecticut.

The hackney horse originated in late-eighteenth-century England and became popular as a driving horse in the nineteenth century, when roads improved and light carriages replaced coaches pulled by heavier horses. Hackneys, which were known for their high-stepping gait, proved to be strong and graceful trotters, capable of covering sixty miles in a day, and many boatloads of the breed were shipped to the US in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries.