‘An amazing exhibit’
Seminole County to display largest museum collection of horse-drawn buggies in Florida
In the days before the automobile, one of the few ways folks could travel around town was by climbing aboard a horse-drawn carriage and pulling on the reins for a bumpy ride along dirt roads.
But as cars became affordable about 100 years ago, the horse-drawn buggy went the way of the typewriter, the rotary-dial telephone and the phonograph.
To give the public a glimpse into those bygone days of transportation, the Museum of Seminole County History in Sanford soon will house the largest museum collection of old horse-drawn carriages in Florida — including a few from the late 18th century — after a Geneva resident agreed to donate 18 refurbished buggies from his private collection to the county.
The American buggies from Bill Nygren’s collection will join two 19th-century carriages already on display at the museum on Eslinger Way, off U.S. Highway 17-92.
“It’s going to make for an amazing exhibit on transportation history,” said Bennett Lloyd, the museum’s coordinator. “These were the personal, everyday, transport for people. And the technology used in these carriages was later transmitted to the automobile. So this exhibit will be valuable not just for this museum. It will be valuable for the preservation and telling of that history and heritage to everyone.”
Nygren, who owns about threedozen or so historic buggies, decided to make the donation to the county museum about four years ago as a way of preserving them and also for education, according to museum officials.
The 72-year-old Nygren could not be reached for comment. According to friends, he is a retired engineer who has been collecting horse-drawn Bill Nygren stands next to one of his old buggies at a storage facility that houses his collection.
carriages for decades. Most of buggies are currently housed in private storage facility.
“I can’t tell you awesome they are,” said Kim Nelson, a board member of the Seminole County Historical Society, a nonprofit group that supports the county museum, after recently seeing Nygren’s collection. “It’s really kind of overwhelming.”
But it will be a few years before the public will be able to see Nygren’s buggies.
The museum currently lacks enough space to display 20 horsedrawn carriages, considering that the buggies are “about the size of an SUV,” Nelson said.
In September, Seminole County commissioners agreed to allow the buggies to be displayed inside a county-owned warehouse, known as Building 302, adjacent to the museum.
However, the Seminole County Historical Commission — a county panel — and the Historical Society will have to raise $150,000 toward renovating the 3,600-square-foot warehouse with an upgraded sprinkler system, a climate-control system, new walls and making the public areas accessible to the disabled, according
his his to an agreement with the county approved by commissioners. The warehouse is currently being used as a storage facility for county equipment.
The two groups will have until September 2021 to raise the money or the agreement expires.
Gloria Austin, who owned the Florida Carriage Museum in north Lake County and one of the largest collections of carriages in the country, called Nygren’s vehicles “pretty exceptional.”
Seminole’s future exhibit will offer an important lesson in American transportation history, she said, because it will “show the progression from horse-drawn carriages to the automobile.”
Much of the technology used in late 19th-century horse-drawn carriages — including the axle, brakes and steering mechanisms — were transferred to the first automobile. In the early days, car manufacturers simply put an engine on a horsedrawn carriage.
“The early automobiles were called horseless carriages,” Austin said.
Until last year, her multimilliondollar collection of nearly 200 carriages was displayed at the Grand Oaks Resort, north of Lady Lake off Marion County Road.
That display has since been dismantled, and she has sold off most of the vehicles. However, she still owns a gold coach worth millions of dollars.
“As I tell people in my lectures,” she said, “we’ve had 6,000 years of history with carriages and horses. But we’ve had only 100 years of the automobile.”
Don Epps, president of the Seminole County Historical Society, said the future exhibit will be an important asset for the county.
“I think our museum is one of the best kept secrets in Seminole County,” Epps said. “And it will be a unique opportunity for people — not only in Seminole County, but from around the state — to see these carriages.”