The Finest Horse in Town is a book about two of my mother's aunts who really lived in Maine in the 1800s and early 1900s. They owned a store in their town and sold "clothes and socks, cloth and corsets, needles and pins, and all kinds of shoes." One summer my mother, Sarah, and I decided we would like to learn more about these aunts. We could not ask questions because they were no longer living. We went to the town where they had owned their store to do some "detective work."

We found an old newspaper ad that also told us they sold coats and petticoats. Those were the days before automobiles when horses provided the rides from one place to another. An old man who remembered them told my mother and Sarah and me that they also owned "the finest horse in town." I wrote these stories to help me think about what adventures these sisters might have had with their wonderful horse.

Jacqueline Briggs Martin has written a curriculum guide (2003) on researching and writing family stories for the Iowa Social Studies Project. The guide, with background information on The Finest Horse in Town suggests writing projects for students. The guide was funded by a federal grant and is available free for educational purposes. It can be accessed on the resource page for The Finest Horse in Town.

I really did not know who took care of the horse while the sisters worked in their dry goods store so I made up three stories that I thought might have happened. Think of another story about the horse and who took care of it while the sisters worked. Tell the story to a classmate, record it on a audio cassette tape, or write the story for others to read.

Find out more about horses by reading one of these books:

• Alderton, David. Horses. Dorling Kindersley, 1995.
• Budd, Jackie. Horses. Kingfisher, 1995.
• Da Silva, Maggie. Horses. Grolier Education, 1997.
• Hansard, Peter. A Field Full of Horses. Illustrated by Kenneth Lilly. Candlewick, 1994.

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