Horses’ ‘Fairy’ Godmother

Hilary R. Cloos ’96 trots along rural New York and Connecticut county roads, looking for her Cinderella. For the past 10 years, Cloos has spent her days trimming, fitting, and polishing—working hours on end to craft the perfect slipper. When she’s done, the armored hoof is ready for showtime.

Cloos, a former Harvard physics concentrator and equestrian team captain, is known in eastern New York as a farrier. Laymen often call her a blacksmith, but while blacksmiths forge iron into many shapes and forms, farriers devote their lives to fitting shoes and attending to the health of the horse’s hoof.

“A blacksmith does artistic things with metal. I just make shoes for horses’ feet. Unfortunately, I don’t have an artistic bent,” Cloos explains.

A Quincy House resident, Cloos knew from her first day of college that she would not end up in a physics lab. After entertaining the possibility of becoming a veterinarian, a rider, or a horse farm manager, Cloos took the advice of a summer employer and started thinking about horseshoeing.

“My parents were sort of resistant to the horse interest,” says Cloos.

Although she started riding when she was seven, her interest in horses remained latent throughout boarding school and most of college. One day during her undergraduate years, the opportunity to ride again came when she confessed her love for horses—and not classical mechanics—to her undergraduate adviser, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi ’67.

“That was definitely a surprise,” says Georgi, who is also the master of Leverett House. “Nobody grows up wanting to be a blacksmith, except sons and daughters of blacksmiths.”

Georgi’s wife, Ann, and his son are both passionate equestrians. Before Cloos knew it, she was introduced to Max, one of the Georgi family’s horses. When Cloos left Harvard to settle into upstate New York, the Georgis sent Max along with her.

“I had a wonderful time learning from that horse, both how to ride and then how to shoe—he had tricky feet!” Cloos recalls.

After training at Cornell and four years of apprenticeships, Cloos, a Cape Cod native, slowly built her own business and clientele. Like a family doctor, she travels door-to-door to check in on her clients—removing blemishes, mending cracks, and curing hoof maladies.

On a typical day, she visits one or two farms and shoes an average of five or six horses. Cloos starts with store-bought shoes, which she then heats up and modifies to best fit the horse’s hoof.

There are also emergency situations, which Cloos says are “never life or death,” but nevertheless can prove problematic for the many competing horses that she treats.

The secret reward of the job is the instant gratification at the end of the day, Cloos says.

“I show up and get a horse, and two hours later finish the job,” she says.

To the surprise of those who might think farriers and blacksmiths belong in past centuries, Cloos says the career is becoming more popular.

Many people find Cloos’ career choice unexpected, but she sees parallels between physics and her current job, according to one of Cloos’s blockmates, Sebastian H. Conley ’96.

“There is a lot of physics in [horseshoeing], it is all about momentum and weight,” Conley says.

Conley produced a short documentary about Cloos while he was studying film as a graduate student. He remembers Cloos speaking about the hardships a woman farrier encounters in looking for dates. When she would ask a man out, she often would hear, “I would not want to date a woman who could bench-press me,” according to Conley.

Although the job demands a high level of physical fitness, Ann Georgi says it is a cerebral occupation as well.

“Figuring out horses, training them, competing, is tremendously intellectually challenging,” she says. “You are constantly trying to communicate with a partner who’s got his own agenda.”

But despite the demands of the job, Cloos says she is hoping to “shoe” until she retires.

“I am not thinking about doing anything else,” she says. “I can’t imagine anything that would bring me as much pleasure.”