A Pony Life: Fenton Watkins

What image comes to mind when I say the word “Birmingham”? I’m going to take a wild guess and say that it’s probably not Shetland Ponies. But, for a period of a few decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Birmingham was the premier place in the country to get a purebred Shetland Pony. And the subject of this podcast episode, Fenton Watkins, spent a great deal of his life working with those ponies, bringing joy to pony enthusiasts and the tourists on Boblo Island who rented the pony concessions that he and his uncle’s farm provided.

For photos and other documents related to the episode, check out our website

For questions, comments or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.

Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Transcript

                What image comes to mind when I say the word “Birmingham”? I’m going to take a wild guess and say that it’s probably not Shetland Ponies. But, for a period of a few decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Birmingham was the premier place in the country to get a purebred Shetland Pony. And the subject of this podcast episode, Fenton Watkins, spent a great deal of his life working with those ponies, bringing joy to pony enthusiasts and the tourists on Boblo Island who rented the pony concessions that he and his uncle’s farm provided. 

                This is Birmingham Uncovered, a podcast by the Birmingham Museum, where we are exploring the diverse and compelling lives that built Birmingham Michigan into the community that it is today. First, some background on Birmingham: we are a city of approx. 20,000 people over 4.73 square miles, approximately halfway between Detroit and Pontiac in Oakland County. This area was occupied by members of the Three Fires Confederacy of Indigenous People before white settlement in the area started in the late 1810s. Birmingham became a city in 1933 and today is known as a prosperous and multi-faceted community with a thriving cultural scene.

                Today the Quarton Lake subdivision in Birmingham is, well, a subdivision full of homes. The subdivision was first built in the 1920s and ‘30s and was a highly desirable address then and now. A short walking distance to downtown, good schools, high property values and easy access to parks, Quarton Lake and it’s wooded walking trails ensure that these homes stay in high demand. So, it’s probably difficult to imagine, standing in front of Quarton Elementary school during the busy pick-up or drop-off times, that this area used to be a 336 acre farm, full of the sights and sounds of livestock being moved from barn to pasture, of farmhands calling out to each other and livestock taking shelter from a rain shower or the hot mid-afternoon sun under the shade of some trees. 

                But that’s how Fenton Watkins experienced this area when he moved to Birmingham in 1905. Fenton was born in 1885 in Grand Haven, Michigan, on the west side of the state, on a farm that produced fruit that primarily went to market in Chicago. In the oral history he gave in 1972, he describes taking one of the three transit lines to the dock, where he and other boys would take crates of fruit to Chicago. If any of Fenton’s friends didn’t have any produce to take to the market, they would be “loaned” a crate of fruit so that they could join him on the trip. The journey was about 100 miles and took a few hours by boat. The boat Fenton remembered liking to take best was the excursion steamer  the Eastland because it had a calliope on it that played tunes for the passengers. Fenton was disappointed when he later found out that the Eastland sunk in 1915 in one of the largest losses of life in a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes (but that’s a story for another time). RIP to the calliope.

                Fenton Watkins had 8 brothers and sisters. Along with his parents, Frank and Harriet, his grandfather James also lived with the family when Fenton, sometimes referred to as “Fennie” was very young. He recounted that his family was musical and he himself played the violin his whole life and later he took up playing the dulcimer. 

                In the 10th or 11th grade, he dropped out of school to help his father on the family farm. His older brothers had moved out and there was a lot of work to be done and many younger siblings to help feed. 

                In the early 1900s, this wasn’t unusual. Nationally, in the year 1900, only 18.5% of Americans 25 years old and older has received a lower secondary (or high school) education. That year, according to the national center for education statistics, 94,883 students graduated, out of a population of almost 2 million 17 year olds (the study chose to study the percentage of the population that were 17 in July of any given year as a way to capture the average age of high school grads who are 17 or turning 18 their senior year). Why was this? Well, it’s just plain economics. 

                Knowing how to read, write and to do practical math was really all that was needed in most agricultural-based jobs at the time, which employed about one-third of all workers in 1900. But this was shifting. More and more students throughout the 1900s graduated from high schools that taught not just academic and college preparatory classes, but practical classes in using office technology, various mechanical skills and life skills. By 1950, only 1/5 of the total American workforce was employed in agriculture and 50% of the adult population had a high school education. The economy was changing and how students were educated was changing to keep up.

                Several of Fenton’s older brothers attended college, and that seems to have been his desire too. In 1972 he told the interviewer that, when he was caught up on the work at his family’s farm he would do outside jobs to earn money for college. 

                Life had other plans for Fenton Watkins. In 1905 he arrived in Birmingham to work on his Uncle Gilbert Watkins’ farm. “My sole reason for coming to Birmingham was to train ponies, break them in, as we used to call it, to be able to use them in the pony livery at Belle Isle.” His older brother, Guy, had come out to Birmingham years before to help his uncle with the ponies.

                Gilbert Watkins was the president of Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company and worked in Detroit, where he lived with his wife and three daughters. A catalog advertising his Shetland ponies for sale produced by Gilbert in 1892 contains an ad for Penn Mutual Life as well as a short appeal written by Gilbert to implore the men reading it to purchase life insurance. Thankfully women don’t need to worry their pretty little heads about insurance matters.

 Gilbert though, always wanted to do something different, according to Fenton, and had a farm in Birmingham. It was ideally located along the Rouge River and only ½ mile from the railroad. First, he owned and bred peacocks, but the neighbors complained when these winged invaders flew over and pulled up their corn and other crops. His next investment was Jersey cattle, which he purchased in person on Jersey, a 42 square mile island off the north coast of France in the British Channel. Jersey cattle are on the small side for milk cows, but produce a milk high in fat for superior butter and cheese production. Their small size means that you can graze more of them per acre than you could a larger breed and, unlike other breeds bred in more temperate climates, they can easily tolerate a wide variety of temperatures, including extreme cold and heat. 

We aren’t quite sure why, but by 1892, Gilbert Watkins had switched to mostly breeding ponies, although some cattle were advertised in the catalogue, as well as scotch collie herding dogs. And these weren’t just any ponies, these were purebred Shetland Ponies, purchased in person by Gilbert from Lord Londonderry in the Shetland Islands. 

Hey, hobbies are an important facet of self care. 

Each voyage across the Atlantic was about one to 1.5 weeks via steamer ship as transatlantic passenger air travel didn’t happen until the mid 1920s for dirigibles and a decade after that for airplanes. But why Shetland Ponies? 

We don’t have any record explaining exactly why Gilbert chose two relatively exotic breeds of livestock to focus as his farm hobby. Part of it could have been having something that very few other people he knew had, like many folks who own exotic animals today. But, another reason could lie in the economics and culture of the time period he was living in.

In our previous episode on Edwin O’Neal, we talked a little bit about how many folks from Ireland were immigrating to the United States and Canada in the mid-1800s. But Ireland wasn’t the only British-adjacent island folks were immigrating from. Large numbers of folks were emigrating from Scotland throughout the 1800s as a decades-long recession pushed highly educated members of the developing middle class to seek new opportunities elsewhere and the Scotland Highland clearances, which started in 1760 and lasted a century, pushed many poorer farmers off their land. 

Like all immigrants, wherever these Scottish folks settled, they brought their culture and perhaps even their livestock –or at least memories of the livestock. Tales of extremely hardy, small ponies who could survive off of little but scraggy brush and seaweed may have been very appealing to a gentleman farmer for their exoticness. But also, ponies were big business.

And let’s back up and talk about what the differences are between horses and ponies for the non horsegirls out there. And as always, horsegirlery is a state of being that knows no race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or ethnic background. Horsegirls are everyone and we are everywhere. There’s probably one behind you right now.

 Despite the rumors you might have heard, ponies are not baby horses but their own distinct type of equine. Generally, ponies are under 14 hands. What’s a hand? Good question. A hand is one of those archaic measurements that occasionally pop up in the modern day under extremely specific circumstances, in this case when it comes to horses and ponies.  A hand is equal to 4 inches and horses and ponies are measured height-wise from hoof to the top of the shoulder. Meaning that ponies are generally 4.6 feet high at their shoulder or shorter. Ponies are generally stockier; have thicker manes and tails; shaggier coats and are much hardier than horses. Horses, as you might expect, are larger than 14 hands, have thinner coats, longer legs and greater nutritional needs. 

Small ponies are great for when you need a lot of horsepower but you have cramped quarters, like mines (and I mean, it’s not that great for the ponies). The fact that ponies don’t eat as much as a horse is also great for when you have limited grazing or can’t afford much food, and they can still do some farm work. Their size also make them great for children, both riding and pulling carts or sleighs. 

Before the age of busses or being driven by their parents to school in cars, most children walked from nearby farms or used horse or pony power to get to school in town. In the late 1800s, there was a stable next to Hill School in Birmingham, where Shain Park is today, where students could keep their horses or ponies during the school day. Even local early aviator Harry Brooks (who will get his own episode at some point) used horsepower to get to high school in Birmingham from his home in Southfield. 

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And that bit about Shetland ponies being able to live off of scrub brush or seaweed that I mentioned a minute ago? That’s not an exaggeration. The Shetland Islands, a group of 100 islands located 104 miles northeast of Scotland, is a harsh environment for human or pony. These islands are located in the subarctic, with an average high during summers in the 50s and the average low in the winters is in the 30s. No place on the islands is more than 4 miles from the sea, and sea winds are constantly blowing at anywhere from 15-73 mph. There are very few trees or natural wind breaks as well. 

Scientists believe that the first equines set foot on the islands in the bronze age, brought over ice from Northern Europe by humans, and they were originally used for transporting fish and peat. Harsh conditions over time led to a pony that had short sturdy limbs, a short back, a thick neck, and small ears. Big stock starved; fragile stock broke; only the small, quick, hardy, and intelligent animals survived to reproduce. 

But also, natural selection produced something cute as well. Shetland ponies in the 1890s were beginning to win hearts all over the western world and Gilbert was at the forefront of the trend in the United States. It was only in the 1890s that the first stud book society was formed to promote the breed, with Lord Londonderry at its head. You know, the guy Gilbert bought his ponies directly from.

In the 1892 pony catalogue (and yes, I will put parts of it on the website, check out our shownotes), Gilbert boasts that his ponies are the only ones in the United States to be registered in the Shetland Islands and in the United States. 

Increased Leisure time and a desire for amusements were having a moment too at this time. As unions fought for an eight hour workday and 40 hour workweek, as well as better pay, more and more Americans joined the middle class. They had weekends off to relax, have fun and make family memories. Paid vacation time wasn’t yet a thing for the majority of workers though, so what we now call “staycations” were the name of the game, with folks seeking out interesting and fun things to do only a few hours away from home.

In the 1890s, a one way trip on DUR light rail from Birmingham to Detroit was only 15 cents, and once you got there, there was a whole lot of options for fun and amusement. Then and now, Belle Isle was a popular destination for weekend excursions. Fishing, boating, dancing and picnicking were frequently indulged pastimes on the isle. In the 1880s, Fredrick Law Olmstead, father of American modern landscape design and designer of New York’s Central Park and landscape architect to Chicago’s 1890 World’s Fair, was hired to create a design for the island, some of which were implemented. The island had canoe rentals, fishing piers, nature walks, a band shell, a casino and, of course, a riding stable! 

By the time Fenton Watkins arrived at his uncle Gilbert’s farm in 1905, the ponies were already making their way down to Belle Isle every summer, and were stabled on the island along with the patrol horses used by the police. Fenton’s brother, Guy, stayed with the ponies on the island and was responsible for their care. We have a postcard in our collection showing ponies from the Watkins farm pulling carriages for tourists on the island, which we’ll have up on our website. Pony rides were available as well. 

But Belle Isle wasn’t the only place close by where folks from Metro Detroit went for fun or where those folks could rent out the Watkins’ Shetland Ponies. Starting in 1906, Fenton began taking some of the ponies to Boblo Island, an island further south down the Detroit River where there was a popular amusement park. Today, the island consists of high-end residences, but if you are of a certain age, you probably remember going to the amusement park on the island and of taking one of the two ferries to get there. Fenton was once again riding a ferry, only this time with several dozen or so ponies instead of boxes of produce. 

But you might be thinking, just how did they get the ponies down to Detroit to get them to either Belle Isle or onto the ferry for Boblo? In his oral history, Fenton recalls that it was his job to go to the high school around Memorial Day and recruit several boys to help him walk the 100 or more ponies down Woodward Avenue to Detroit. They walked them in batches of about 2 dozen at a time, just to make the task slightly more manageable. That’s 27 miles each way! And there was the light rail track down the center of Woodward, which meant that they often (approximately every 30 minutes) had to herd all the ponies off the road, wait for the trolley to pass and then herd them back onto the road. Fenton claims that he never lost a pony, which is most impressive. 

And I know what you might be thinking, who made the harnesses for the ponies on both Belle Isle and Boblo? And if you guessed previous podcast subject Edwin A O’Neal you’d be right! 

Fenton stayed on Boblo Island all summer to take care of the ponies and run the pony concessions. So how much for a pony ride? Fenton recalled that it was 25 cents an hour, 15 cents for a half hour and 10 cents for a ride in the arena where the length of the ride was dependent on how long the line was. 

At this point, the only folks who lived on the island besides Fenton and his family and the other workers at the amusement park were members of the Wyandotte Nation. All his life Fenton was a collector of Native American stone tools and artifacts and he collected some from the Wyandotte during this time. You can see his collection today in the lobby of the museum, in an especially custom built case that Fenton had made in the 1970s to fit his collection. 

By Labor Day, school was back in session and there were fewer families visiting Belle Isle, Boblo and Palmer Park (a large park in Detroit where the ponies were also taken, but the museum doesn’t have much in it’s archives at this point about it) so the ponies came back to Birmingham. And just like at his dad’s farm, Fenton used this down time to take on more work and one of those jobs was taking care of Prince for the Crawford family.

Fenton had ponies to thank for the opportunity of meeting Florence Crawford. Florence was born and raised on a farm just outside of Birmingham and, like a lot of her peers, had a pony to take her to school in a cart. In her oral history she describes the Shetland pony, named Prince, as a “well pony” who could get through anything, no matter how thick the mud got on the roads. 

Florence describes seeing Fenton for the first time in the yard when she pulled up after school. Fenton was leaning against a tree reading the newspaper. And while that seems like an excellent set-up for a Hallmark movie, Florence was only 13 and romance would have to wait. 

At 18, when Florence was back home from teacher’s college in Ypsilanti, she decided to see what Fenton was up to. And they hit it off,  but they didn’t get serious about each other until Florence graduated with her teachers certificate in 1913 though. See, sometimes you can go back home and hit it off again with your childhood crush and that is a set up for more Hallmark movies than you can count.

The couple married on the Crawford farm in December of 1916 when Florence was 22 and Fenton was 31. Florence mentions that her family didn’t want a large celebration, as that fall her brother had been killed accidently at 15 years old. A side note on oral histories: One of the more frustrating things about oral histories done in the 1970s, is how highly structured they can be and how little a subject could just go off on an interesting tangent. It was a fairly new technique at the time in anthropology and there was an emphasis on consistency, of asking each interviewee the exact same questions so that they answers could be compared. So, while these interviews are invaluable you do often get the interviewees dropping little snippets of interesting things that are never followed up on in favor of the next question that had to be asked. In this case, the question was where Florence and Fenton lived after marriage, which was on Pierce Street. So we don’t have any idea what else Florence might have told us about her brother or his tragic end, because the interviewer moved right on.

Am I immensely grateful that these interviews were done and recorded? Absolutely. Do I want to know more about Florence’s brother and less about whether the Watkins were aware of the existence of Shain’s drug store in downtown Birmingham? 100%. 

Florence joined Fenton on Boblo in the summers after their marriage and eventually 3 out of the couple’s 5 children were born on the island. I should mention here that Boblo is part of Canada, so those three kids could have gotten dual citizenship. In addition to the family, several boys who helped with the ponies lived with the Watkins on Boblo. The island at that time had no electricity for their home, so all the cooking for the growing family and the workers had to be done on a woodstove. Florence called the set-up “very primitive” but also said that “when you’re young, you don’t mind that sort of thing.”

And since Boblo Island is Canadian territory, things were bound to get a little hairy during WWI. Canada joined the war on August 4, 1914. At that time, Canada’s status was a British Dominion, which meant that foreign policy decisions were in the hands of the British Parliament but Canada could decide to what extent they would participate in the war effort. By comparison, the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917. So for several summers Canada was in war-mode when the US wasn’t and that caused some difficulties with trade and with bringing livestock back and forth between the two countries. 

Fenton recounts that in 1914 the government of Canada wanted him to pay a duty of $3,500 to bring the ponies over. That’s equivalent to almost $90,000 today! The Canadian proprietor of the island, a Mr Campbell, worked out a deal to have the ponies housed in Amhustburg, Canada over the winter, thus making them Canadian ponies (eh) and not subject to any duties. From then on out the 75 ponies that worked on Boblo during the summers were cared for by Canadian farmers during the off-season, not at the Watkins’ Farm. 

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In 1926, another company took control of the island’s amuseument park that wasn’t keen on outside concessions. But the Watkins ponies provided amusement for children on Boblo Island until 1929.

After the Watkins left, the ponies then stayed in Canada. They went to families who primarily, according to Fenton, used them as children’s riding ponies. In their oral interview, Fenton and Florence recalled regularly driving over to the Amherstburg area and visiting the ponies and the families that had taken them in until their health prevented it. They also regularly received mail with updates on the ponies and the children who had grown up with them. 

So what about the Watkins farm in Birmingham? By 1929, Gilbert Watkins had been dead for over a decade and the his farm had been sold to the Quarton family. In 1918 the Quartons sold 200 acres to a group of investors called the Quarton Lakes Estates Company. The developers built a new damn on the Rouge River to widen the pond, which had previously been known as the Mill Pond or Watkins Pond, and it was rechristened Quarton Lake. An ad for the new housing development described it as “Where the Lavish charms of nature beguile the heart of man.” The neighborhood boasted wide, paved roads perfect for automobiles that people were now wanting  and houses with indoor plumbing and electricity. Many of these early homes can still be seen in the neighborhood today.

The Watkins farmhouse still exists too in the area of Puritan Street and West Maple and its early portions date to 1855. It was one of the first recipients of a Historic District plaque from the city of Birmingham. 

But the end of the pony farm wasn’t the end for Fenton. In the winters during the Boblo years,  he had worked as a carpenter and after the end of the pony concessions, he worked for the city of Birmingham managing the Springdale Golf Course, which had been built in the 1920s. At the outset of WWII, he went to Detroit to work in a factory making aircraft parts for the military. At the end of the war, he retired and he and Florence split their time between Birmingham and Florida. 

Fenton Watkins died in October of 1981 and followed by Florence in December of that year.

                While there are no longer and Shetland ponies living in the Birmingham city limits (and believe me, I am constantly trying to convince the city manager that we need to put a line item in the museum’s budget for at least 2 ponies), the memories of the ponies and what they once meant to the area remain. Today you can find Shetland ponies all over the country, being ridden by children, pulling carts and occasionally performing agricultural labor. As ubiquitous as they are in stables, parades and paddocks all over the country, there was once a time where they could only be found on one farm and that was right here in Birmingham.

                Join us next time as we explore two best friends who changed everything in Birmingham: from where folks banked to how they got their news. Almeron Whitehead and George Mitchell had their fingers in almost everything in the village of Birmingham in the 1800s, to the point where it’s gonna be a struggle to name them all in 25 minutes.

                I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos and other documents related to The Watkins farm check out our website, the link is in the shownotes. For questions, comments and episode suggestions, feel free to reach us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.