Making a show of strength

Young family members must wait before they can safely handle the big horses.
By NANCY TULLIS
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
CANFIELD -- A row of brightly colored ribbons strung on a stall door showed the result of the Stingle family's morning at the Canfield Fair.
Charles Stingle and several other family members spent Friday morning in the draft horse show ring, walking nine of the family's 18 registered Belgians past the judge. Today they will participate in the draft horse hitch classes, showing judges how the horses work when harnessed and hitched to a wagon.
Stingle and his wife, Dorothy, will celebrate their 58th wedding anniversary in November and still live on the Jefferson County farm they bought near Smithfield in 1967. Smithfield is southwest of Steubenville, but the Stingles don't mind the trip to Mahoning County. They love the Canfield Fair, and have been showing their Belgians here every year for nearly 40 years.
Stingle, now 80, developed a love of draft horses as a young boy. He has since passed that love on to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Several of his children and grandchildren were in the show ring Friday and worked the giant horses under his watchful eye.
Belgian horses weigh 1,700 to 1,800 pounds each, and some of the real giants can weigh 2,000 pounds or more. A 1-ton horse is a lot to handle, and Stingle makes sure all the Stingle family members work carefully.
Waiting their turn
The Stingle grandchildren and great-grandchildren seem comfortable around the big horses, even though some were a bit nervous about entering the show ring. They all seem to love the horses, and the younger ones are disappointed that they can't participate. The youngest family members have to wait a few years before they can safely handle the giant horses.
Stingle said he had a registered Belgian in 1947, not long after he returned from Army service in Germany during World War II. But his father sold the family farm, and it would be 20 years before there were Belgians on a Stingle farm again.
For 361/2 years, Stingle spent much of his time on the railroad, working as a fireman on steam-powered engines. He also was breeding and buying and selling many different breeds of horses and ponies, but he could not forget the connection he made with draft horses as a young boy during the 1930s.
He said all the farm work was done with draft horses in those early days. Road crews also used draft horses then to make road repairs.
"I've plowed many fields behind a horse," he said. "We used the horses for plowing and making hay -- everything. We didn't have a tractor."
'Good, honest work horse'Stingle said that at the time the farmers weren't worried about a horse's pedigree. They looked for a good, stout horse. There were Belgians and Percherons and even mixed breeds.
"They just wanted a good, honest work horse," he said. "When you were out there in the field working the horses all day long, the horses had to be tough."
During the 1970s, Stingle had about 50 Belgians on his farm and worked the horses in teams of up to six at a time. He hasn't done that for about 10 years, however, because as he said, "Father Time is catching up to me."
"These horses take a lot of work," he said. "It's not a job for a guy who's lazy. When I picked something I was going to love to do all my life, maybe I should have picked something easier."