Quick Facts
- Also called:
- cheer (for chair), or whisky (because its light weight enabled it to whisk about)
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one-horse shay
carriage
Also known as: cheer, whisky
one-horse shay, open two-wheeled vehicle that was the American adaptation of the French chaise. Its chairlike body, seating the passengers on one seat above the axle, was hung by leather braces from a pair of square wooden springs attached to the shafts.
Early one-horse shays had fixed standing tops, later ones folding tops. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” a satire on Calvinism, paints a whimsical picture of a “one-hoss” shay that was so perfectly built that it lasted for 100 years and then fell apart all at once.
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