Our Story
The Hitching Company is the premier horse-drawn carriage company serving Minneapolis / St Paul and the surrounding area. Hear the familiar clip-clop of hooves and the occasional whinny from the horse as you experience a carriage or hayride.
We offer a variety of options to choose from, including downtown and river tours in Minneapolis, in addition to custom tour options, with your pickup and destination preferences. If you’re looking for a special event and would like the charm, elegance, and nostalgia that a horse-drawn carriage or hayride would bring to your event let us know and we will work to fulfill your dreams. Whether it’s a first date, an engagement, wedding, anniversary, or family gathering, after experiencing a horse-drawn carriage, trolley or hayride someone will say, remember when…
History
The Hitching Company was started in 1988 with one white Cinderella carriage, pulled by two beautiful white horses catering mainly to the wedding trade. After about a year or so of providing elegant carriage rides for weddings and special occasions we purchased the assets of Cobblestone Carriage Company in Minneapolis MN. This acquisition gave us three valuable assets, a second carriage; a cell phone with a marketed phone number; expand the number of events we could perform, and a footprint in Minneapolis. It was shortly after that purchase that we decided to offer carriage rides downtown.
After a long process of paperwork and red tape, we were granted permits to operate carriages in Minneapolis. We operated out of The Hyatt Hotel for about a year and then decided to add The Nicollet Island Inn as a second location. The cobblestones of Main Street and the history of the Island seem to be a good fit with the historic and romantic carriage rides. We purchased two more carriages when we started at The Nicollet Island Inn.
With the purchase of the third and fourth carriages, we purchased a building downtown to house the carriages. Over the years we have added six more carriages and many horses. The horses are brought downtown each night from our farm. We also added a third location in the summer of 2004, Vic’s dining which is located on Main Street.
We have also had long-term contracts with Shoreview Variety Band for their holiday concert, The Shops of Arbor Lakes for the holiday rides, and many other families and small businesses for their holiday events. In 2011 we acquired the assets and contracts of Lindell Carriage Service of St. Paul and a contract to provide trolley rides for the St. Paul Farmer’s market every Saturday and Sunday for 26 weekends during the spring-summer and fall.
We currently have a staff of 18 full and part-time employees. We offer rides seven days a week from May until September, then by appointment for the rest of the year. Tours, romantic dates, engagements, weddings, proms, birthdays, special occasion rides, funeral transportation, company parties, holiday parties, holiday rides, and parades are some of the events we provide a service for.
Our product is not transportation, although we do physically move people, we transport people mentally with the sounds, aromas, and sensation of both the horse and carriage adding ambiance suiting the occasion.
Our objective is to offer a fair, competitively priced service for customers with a reasonable return on investment for our employees and ourselves.