Hauling Bark with a Stone Boat?

Merry Christmas! It has been a while since my last post. Over the last week, I have been working on a little scene for the logging railroad - a horse hauling a stone boat. What is a stone boat you ask? It was a very simple "sled" used to haul stones out of early farmers fields. 

These simple sleds were then adopted for many other purposes, such as hauling extract bark to landings at logging operations in the Appalachian mountains. Below is a team working on pulling a stone boat with bark extract on the logging operations outside of Richwood, WV. Several operations also used single horse pulled stone boats, which is what I decided to model. One less horse to paint.

I scratch built my stone boat with stripwood left over from other projects. I carved the sled runners and added the stakes. The horse is from Aspen Models, where I removed the blinders. Most horses used in for log skidding and bark hauling did not use blinders. Now all I need is someone to hold the rains.

See you in the New Year!