Today, any sizable town needs at least one service station to keep the wheels of transportation turning. Not so long ago, any village worthy of a place name could boast at least two skilled trademen who kept horses and their equipment fit for service -- a blacksmith and a harness maker.

In days gone by, the harness maker was an important member of the community. Whenever someone rode a horse, drove a buggy or hitched up a team to plow a field, it was leather straps that quite literally "harnessed" the muscle power of the animals so that humans could control it and use it for productive work. Just as skilled mechanics are essential in the modern world, in the age of horse power the survival of the community depended to a large extent on the skill of people who knew how to work with leather. Using simple but specialized tools, the harness maker could repair broken harness (or "tack") and manufacture new equipment when required. If he were especially gifted, he might have been called upon to make buggy whips or riding crops. The epitome of the harness maker's art was saddlery -- a skill unto itself. It required an experienced artisan to repair a broken saddle, and a trained craftsman to fashion a new one.

Here at the Scugog Shores Historical Museum in the beautiful town of Port Perry, Ontario, Canada you will find an authentic, local harness shop dating from the turn of the Century, reassembled on our site. The original tools of the trade are here for you to see and touch; and examples of antique harness are also on display. During special events in the summer you can meet the harness maker to learn more about this intriguing craft -- a vocation that may be less in demand than it was a hundred years ago, but which remains critically important to anyone who works with horses, even today.

In rural Ontario, the harness maker's shop sometimes did double duty as the temporary workshop of an itinerant cobbler. The business relationship between the harness maker and the shoe maker was a natural association, because both craftsmen worked with leather. A hundred years ago, most boots and shoes were custom made. In villages too small to support a full-time cobbler, folks from the neighboring farms would visit the harness shop when they came to town, choose a shoe style from drawings or from a few samples, and leave a pencil tracing of the outline of their feet. When the shoe maker made his rounds every few months, he would set to work filling the accumulated orders, often relying on nothing more than these tracings to judge the sizes! See our collection of antique shoes in the harness shop, and be amazed at how small peoples' feet used to be in the Good Old Days!

Horse lovers will find this place fascinating, and even if you don't know the difference between a hame and martingale, you'll find the harness shop mighty interesting! Hitch up your buggy and pay us a visit!