If you are a WARHorse, you know horses are capable of amazing feats. Somehow there’s a horse than can run faster, jump higher or go further than any horse before. This week a humble team of eight Belgian drafts showed the stuff they’re made of when they moved an old house.
The community of Arthur, Illinois is preserving their Amish heritage. Two homes built after the American Civil War were moved this week to a permanent location, the Illinois Amish Museum and Heritage Center, where they will be restored and serve as education centers for the community. A commemorative ceremony Tuesday morning marked moving day. The team of horses moved the oldest home several hundred feet to an intersection where the house was transferred to a truck for the rest of the 3-mile haul.
Moses Yoder built the horse drawn home in 1865. It is the oldest known Amish house in Illinois. It has two floors, 960 square feet and weighs about 45 tons. A quick calculate will gauge the effort these horses put forth. Our first consideration is that dead weight is used to calculate the ability of a draft horse. Dead weight is the unrelieved weight of a motionless mass. A draft horse, weighing 1650 to 1750 pounds, can pull a dead weight of 1/10 their body weight for 8 hours a day. Larger weights can be pulled for shorter durations.
The Yoder house weighed 45 tons or 90,000 lbs. (40.8233 kg)
The combined weight for the Belgians guesstimating 1700 lbs. each (771.1 kg) x 8 = 13,600 lbs. (6168.85 kg)
These horses pulled 6.25 times their body weight. Note please that the Yoder home was perched on wheels, so our formula does not calculate dead weight, but its still impressive. RESPECT!
The world record was set in 2014. Two Belgian horses weighing 4800 combined pounds pulled 17,000 pounds of dead weight over 7 feet. That weight was 3.5 times their body weight.
Edited from the Following Resources: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2016-09-21/help-horses-amish-houses-hit-road.html, https://www.reference.com/pets-animals/much-weight-can-horse-pull-5c31928f2ebe6217#
