FOSSIL HILL—Manitoulin’s relatively new Amish community is dealing with its first horse and buggy accident on an Island roadway, thankfully not involving a motorized vehicle.
On Saturday morning Manitowaning’s Shirley Hamilton and a friend were on their way to breakfast at JD’s Garden Shed Café in Tehkummah when they made a starting discovery while cresting Fossil Hill on Highway 6, just before New England Road.
“We were just coming up that grade when suddenly horses came wildly running at us,” Ms. Hamilton told The Expositor. The horses, two of them, and still bound by their harnesses, were running down Fossil Hill, northbound, having obviously been spooked.
“They came up over the hill, stuff still rattling around them,” Ms. Hamilton added, referencing the remnants of the buggy.
Ms. Hamilton and her friend then came upon a distressing sight—the buggy to which the horses had obviously been tethered was found along the rock face across the highway from New England Road, smashed into many pieces. The pair got out of the vehicle to look for any passengers and found nothing, until they caught sight of an Amish man making his way around the rock face, bleeding but mobile.
“We put him in the back seat of the car and called the ambulance,” Ms. Hamilton said, noting that her friend is a nurse and checked him for injuries, but that besides a gash to the face and chest, he appeared to be okay.
The man, Ken Albrecht, told the women that the horse on the right had come into contact with the guard rail, setting it off, in turn spooking the other horse. He had been pitched from the buggy on impact, which destroyed the vehicle.
Before the ambulance came Mr. Albrecht gave the women an address book of all his family and relatives, including the couple who leases land from him. Knowing the couple would have a phone in the home (Amish tradition dictates that no phones or other electronics can be within the home), they called the tenants to let them know what had happened to their landlord and to tell the appropriate people.
Mr. Albrecht and his family had just moved to Manitoulin less than three months ago.
Still bound together, one of the horses jumped to its death over the guard rail. The other horse did not make the jump and was found to be suffering greatly on the highway. When the Ontario Provincial Police arrived on scene the horse was euthanized.
“He sat there, in the backseat, the whole time with this sweet smile,” Ms. Hamilton said of the gentle nature of the man she helped. “Meanwhile he’d just lost his wagon and two horses.”
“You just never know what’s around the corner,” she added thoughtfully. “It was just like being in the Wild West, with horses racing at you.”
Ms. Hamilton said that while sorry for the accident, she was pleased that it didn’t involve a motorized vehicle.
“There’s more Amish moving here and we want to make sure they are safe on the roads,” Ms. Hamilton concluded.
