r/interesting • u/MobileAerie9918 • 9h ago
SOCIETY Fact: When French workers won paid vacation in 1936, the pit horses got them too. Each one was brought to the surface for a week and turned out in a field
Horses hauled coal underground in France for almost 150 years.
The first one went down a shaft in the Loire region in 1821, and the big coalfields of the north followed in the 1840s. Their job was to pull strings of loaded coal wagons along the rails from the coal face to the bottom of the shaft.
Getting them down was the hardest part. Until 1930s there w
no cages big enough, so a horse was blindfolded, had its legs bound, and was lowered down the shaft in a harness or net on the end of a steel cable.
Most never came back up while they could still work. A pit horse commonly spent 10 to 20 years below ground, living in stables cut into the rock. The mines used heavy draft breeds from northern France and the Ardennes, like the one in this photo.
Miners often grew closer to the animals they worked beside everyday
By 1926 there were about 10,000 horses in French mines.
Conveyor belts and small locomotives replaced them over the following decades, and by 1960 only about 130 were left.
Ćmile Zola put two pit horses, Bataille and Trompette, at the heart of his 1885 mining novel "Germinal."
