The announcer told the audience to be quiet as Fred Fisher directed his te am of Belgian horses toward a loaded sled in the pulling ring at the Sandwich, New Hampshire Fair. Fred’s horses were competing in a pulling contest against eight other teams, and quiet was essential so his horses could hear his commands.

That I was sitting in the bleachers watching Fred on that crisp October day in 2024 was an accident, one of those magical Martha’s Vineyard moments of coincidence. This encounter was put into motion in 2012, when I started training oxen teams.

For years, I competed with pairs of working steers at county fairs in New Hampshire, where my husband and I own a small farm. Team members are called working steers until age four when they become oxen. I started with two pairs of working steers; now, I have five.

Controlling a pair of 2,000-pound beasts with just my voice and a goad stick (a sort of baton) was intoxicating. I got hooked on cattle and bought them like some women buy jewelry.

In 2024, I commuted monthly to the Vineyard to teach the 4-H Katama Cowpokes how to train working steers when I found a pair of perfectly matched steers at Mermaid Farm. One look into their deep Jersey eyes and it was love at first sight. I reasoned that someday they would make an excellent team for my 4-H kids. I bought them, and the 4-H Cowpokes named them Pop and Corn.

Pop and Corn were wild and needed serious work, but I had to return to my Loudon, N.H. farm. Cicilio Rosa Neto offered to help. Cicilio is often seen in a cart on Vineyard roads driving his ox. He’s a regular fixture at the Agricultural Fair. I got to know Fred Fisher when we moved Pop and Corn to Fred’s farm, where Cicilio would teach them to pull a cart. I also met Fred’s pulling horse team, Belle and Nellie.

Fred has horses and I own oxen, but both are called draft animals, a term that includes horses, mules and oxen.

I chose oxen over horses because horses are high-maintenance. Horses need new shoes every six to eight weeks, often costing $600 per horse. Oxen usually don’t need shoes. Oxen work in a homemade yoke instead of an expensive harness, and oxen don’t eat as much as horses.

Horses have one big advantage over oxen: speed. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was said that “a horse moves more earth in one day than an ox can in four.”

Before the combustion engine, draft animals were the tractors of the day and helped build Vineyard stone walls. Stones and boulders deposited deep in the earth surfaced as frost lifted and erosion uncovered them. Glaciers had deposited the boulders, which primarily reside up-Island.

Driving down Middle Road is like time travel to the 1850s when the stone walls were tall and kept sheep, oxen and horses from escaping. My love affair with Martha’s Vineyard started when I saw those marvelous stone walls during my first visit in 2019. Now that we’re fortunate enough to be wintering here, I’ll linger at 7a to admire the painting by Tom Walderon of oxen on a Vineyard beach or pause in the Ag Hall to look up at Fred’s father, Fred Fisher, Sr. standing next his horse team.

Like his dad, Fred Jr. is on the Agricultural Society board and supports the horse pull. Before the new Agricultural Hall was built, the draft horse community, who traveled from around New England to compete in the horse pull, were welcomed at Nip’n’Tuck.

Tractors have replaced draft animals, but a small cadre of farmers, like Fred and me, still train them. We do it mostly for fun but also to compete in county fairs, a throwback to when farmers wanted to prove they had the strongest or most handy teams.

In New Hampshire, I had entered my black Scottish Highland oxen in the Sandwich fair log-scoot class. This class replicates logging work, where a team drags cut trees out of a forest. The emphasis is not on how much weight a team can pull but on their ability to draw a load along narrow forest trails. In this timed class, teams dragged a log scoot (a sled with runners) carrying a single log through cones representing trees.

While waiting for my class to be called, I wandered by the horse-pulling ring when I heard the announcer say: “And now comes a team from Martha’s Vineyard, Fred Fisher with Nellie and Belle.”

Fred and his son, Brett, were in the ring with eight other teams. I had no idea Fred would be there, competing on the same day as me. I climbed into the bleachers to watch.

Fred’s team was entered in a weight class where the team pulling the most weight won. Back in the day, horses that could draw more than their weight were valued because they got stone walls built faster. The competition originated from farmers who claimed their horse team could pull more than their neighbor’s.

In this competition, each team had three tries to pull a sled loaded with concrete blocks. If a team successfully pulls the load six feet, they move to the next round, where more blocks are added to the sled. If they don’t, they’re eliminated. When the weight reached 7,200 pounds, only Fred and one other team were left.

The crowd was silent as Belle and Nellie surged forward, dragging the enormous load a foot short of the required distance. When the team was unhitched, I leaped up, cheering and clapping as people around me joined. The other team pulled the entire distance, putting Fred’s team in second place. Belle and Nellie hadn’t pulled the whole distance, but they pulled more than twice their weight.

Back on the Vineyard, I spoke with Fred about the competition. He said, “I’d been training Belle and Nellie since they were two. We’d done a practice run at the Ag Fair but never pulled that much before. They were bred to pull and it showed today. The other horse teams had competed before. This was our first time (pulling) against seasoned teams.”

Martha’s Vineyard pixie dust has no boundary because some settled on my team that day. We placed second out of nine in the log scoot. No matter where you live, once under the spell of the Vineyard farming community, you’re enchanted forever. Well, enchantment and hard work.

Fred spent the winter in Florida, hanging out with his teamster buddies, but he’s back now. In summer, he brushes and exercises Nellie and Belle for hours most days. They’ll often pull a small load for two to three miles, building muscle and stamina to prepare for the next competition. Fred is a one-of-a-kind Vineyard farmer honoring a former way of life.

As you drive around the Island, take a moment to admire the stone walls, a testament to the draft animals and farmers who built them. If you want to

see two present-day magnificent beasts, visit the Ghost Island Farm store in West Tisbury. That’s where Nellie and Belle are pastured.

4-H Leaders Carole Soule and husband Bruce Dawson own Miles Smith Farm in Loudon, N.H., and spend winters on Martha’s Vineyard.