Livestock as an Object Lesson: History Education on the Hoof by
Ed Crews Out with the old, in with the ewe–and her lamb: one of
Colonial Williamsburg’s Leicester Longwool sheep tends to her
young. Coach and Livestock’s Karen Smith, Elaine Shirley, and
Richard Nicoll, holding hoof, feather, and wheel, in the
Colonial Williamsburg stables. Try to imagine an eighteenth-
century American town without horses and carriages in the
streets, pigs and chickens in the pens, and cattle and sheep in
the pastures. Tough to do. In the 1700s, animals were as much a
part of the urban landscape as homes and shops, courthouses and
taverns . . . well, you get the idea. Livestock and wooden-
wheeled conveyances were as much parts of a community as people
and their houses. You couldn’t create a workable picture of the
place if the frame didn’t include some from all of them. The
animals and coaches in The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s
Historic Area give guests a sense of how the town appeared and
how people lived when the city w