How a small piece of history from a famous beer company ended up at the Minnesota State Fair
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Clydesdale horse hooves are enormous.
“They’re 1,800 pounds of fur,” said Mark Munson, a union pipefitter in Starbuck, Minn. Mark, his wife, Susan Munson, and their 21 bloodhound dogs share their 80-acre lot with Clydesdales.
They’ve owned the horses for 25 years.
“You don't see very many draft horses and Clydesdales. So that's what we're here for,” Mark said at the Aisle of Breeds in the Horse Barn on Judson Ave. and Liggett St. on the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.
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When the Munsons were deciding on which breed of horse to get, Mark wasn’t as impressed with a standard quarter horse.
“The neighbor up the road has 100 head of horses, and they all kind of look the same,” Mark said. “Like a fool, I said, ‘You know, those Budweiser horses are really pretty.’”
The legacy of the Clydesdales and Budweiser started in 1933. According to Anheuser-Busch, that was when two sons of August A. Busch, Sr., gifted their father a six-Clydesdale hitch commemorating the end of Prohibition. From there, they became a massive marketing gimmick.
The Clydesdales were ferried all across the country and shown at county and state fairs, including the Minnesota State Fair. Fair archivist Keri Huber prepped for their most recent appearance in 2013 by unearthing some older photos of the Budweiser Clydesdales at the Fair decades prior.
“We decided —for leading up to the Minnesota State Fair — let's put this on the web to show, ‘Hey, Budweiser Clydesdales are coming. This is how it looked back in the 1970s and ‘80s,’” she said.
Budweiser liked the post and asked for them to be turned into posters for when the Clydesdales arrive. When they eventually did, those banners brought along a surprise, too.
“One of the Clydesdale handlers came up to me,” Huber recalled. “He goes, ‘Oh, well, you know, the year of that picture is wrong.’ And he goes, ‘I know it because I'm in it.’”
Tony Pichler had been working with the Budweiser Clydesdales for decades. He was able to date the photograph to 1987.
“He's like, ‘I would love to have these photos for my own collection,’” Huber said.
So she printed out the photos and mailed them to him. A week later, a box arrived. “Opened it up, and it was two horseshoes from the Budweiser Clydesdales,” she said.
When the new History & Heritage Center opened in the West End Market in 2014, the building was filled with artifacts and historical tidbits from the Minnesota State Fair over the years — including a Budweiser horseshoe.
“It’s kind of a secret,” Huber said.
Despite the Budweiser Clydesdales’ pop culture prominence and history with the Fair, this shoe isn’t labeled or identified as relating to Budweiser. Instead, it’s used to demonstrate the size difference between a standard quarter horse and an enormous draft horse.
“The fact that he went out of his way to send it back to us as a thank you was really meaningful,” Huber said.
And so, in one of the largest state fairs in the country — and from one of the largest marketing campaigns — sits a small, unassuming hoof-print of history that’s been hiding in plain sight for more than a decade.
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