One-horse Shay

one-horse shay, also called cheer (for chair), or whisky (because its light weight enabled it to whisk about), 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.