Dashing Through the Snow
Lake City Equestrian Builds Unique Sleigh
Let's take the road before us
And sing a chorus or two.
Come on, it’s lovely weather
For a sleigh ride together with you.
While Christmas carol lyrics speak of jingle bells, wintry fairy lands and a wonderland of snow, Bill Albright knows that chilly winds might be part of the experience when he’s gliding over the snow in his pasture south of Lake City with his horse-drawn bobsled. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy hitching his team, Copper and Smokey, for a spin around the acreage.
“It’s a smooth ride with the bobsled, and it’s quiet,” said Albright, whose bobsled is a mix of modern craftsmanship and historic preservation.
The runners on the bobsled once belonged to Rudy Engstrom, a long-time ag teacher at Lake City High School. After Rudy and his wife, Naomi, passed away in 2019, their children sold a number of items from the Engstrom estate. “Their son-in-law, who was in my high school class, called and told me that Rudy had quite a bit of horse stuff,” Albright said.
Albright told the Engstrom family he was trying to downsize but was willing to take a look at the items, including some bobsled runners. Albright decided to wait and see if anyone purchased the bobsled runners on an upcoming sale of the Engstrom’s items. No one purchased the runners, and the Engstrom family reached out to Albright again. “’If you want it, it’s yours,’ they said. ‘If not, we’ll probably dispose of them.’”
Albright decided to take the old bobsled runners home. “They were pretty dirty and had some old paint on them,” he recalled. “I was curious what was underneath, so I started cleaning them up.”
It turned out the runners were oak. After stripping the old paint, Albright sanded the wood and applied tung oil and a top coat of varnish. As he worked on the runners, Albright wondered how Rudy Engstrom had acquired the runners. “He probably bought it at the sale barn that used to be in Lake City,” he said. “Rudy loved going to the auctions on Thursday evenings and sometimes came home with treasures.”
Bobsleds were versatile tools on the farm
In some ways, Albright is an unlikely equestrian and historic preservationist. A “town kid” from Lake City, he enjoyed riding horses with local farm kids like Ray Hildreth when they were growing up.
While ag was never part of Albright’s career (he’s retired from the human resources department of Stewart Memorial Community Hospital in Lake City), he never lost his love of horses.
His daughter, Allison, also shared this interest in horses. Through the years, the Albright family purchased an antique doctor’s buggy (which came from Nevada, Iowa) and an elegant, horse-drawn carriage. While Albright was never in the market for old, wooden bobsled runners, he decided he couldn’t pass up the opportunity that the Engstrom family offered him.
As he worked on the runners off and on during the fall of 2019, Albright decided to make a box for the bobsled. “Bobsleds were really useful, versatile tools to help get work done on the farm,” he noted.
It’s easy to look at horse-drawn sleighs and bobsleds as charming and nostalgic, but in their day, they were basically utilitarian, necessary to get around on snow-covered roads. The bobsled was a standard fixture in farms and towns throughout Iowa and beyond more than a century ago. “Farmers could remove the bobsled box from the runners after winter was over and use it as a wagon box in the warmer months,” Albright noted.
Not only were bobsleds useful on the farm, but they were sometimes used as “busses” to help transport kids to school. They also provided fun for young people. Frances (Moseley) Pray, who grew up in Lake City in the late 1800s and early 1900s, spoke of a bobsled in her diary entry from Thursday, January 10, 1901.
“The boys had a large bobsled. We all got in the bobsled and were driving up Main Street [in Lake City] when the big Hughes’ boy’s father called him and told him to take that [bobsled] right to the farm, or he would give them a merry ride. So they took us back to Alice’s while they went to the livery barn for a team.”
Preserving pieces of the past
As Albright designed a box for his bobsled, he sought advice from Ted and Nancy Janssen of rural Auburn, who have years of experience with horse-drawn rigs. Albright used a few oak trees that had fallen on his heavily-timbered property, plus he cut down a few more trees to acquire lumber for his bobsled.
He took the trees to a sawmill near Slifer, Iowa, to mill the lumber into boards. “It was rough-sawn lumber,” Albright said. “When my brother-in-law [Andy Grantham of Lake City] and I planed the wood, it was exciting to see the white oak really come to life.”
Albright built an 8-foot-long box for the bobsled, whose sides are 2 feet high. The bobsled isn’t the only piece of local ag history that Albright has preserved. He built his 30-foot by 36-foot horse barn from lumber he salvaged from a large, wood-peg barn that used to stand just south of Lake City on the Fitch livestock farm.
“In the 1990s, the property owner was going to burn down the barn, but I got permission to salvage the wood,” said Albright, who used the lumber to build his own barn at his mother’s property on the edge of Lake City.
He figured this would be the barn’s permanent home. Then the Albrights had the opportunity to purchase land south of Lake City. When they moved to their acreage in 2000, they took the barn with them. “I numbered all the pieces, and our family helped reassemble the barn,” Albright said.
Everyone involved with the barn raising inscribed their name or initials on the barn wood, taking a cue from a unique piece of history from the original barn. “When I salvaged the lumber originally, I found a board in the rafters inscribed with the words ‘F. Rice, L.C., July 21, 1903, 12:04,’” said Albright, who figured this was a local carpenter.
That 1903 board is preserved inside the Albright’s barn. It honors local history, just like the family’s bobsled. “Building the bobsled has been a fun project,” Albright said. “I’ve learned a lot.”
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