About Clyde II
Winchendon once manufactured so many wooden toys that the town earned the nickname Toy Town. Its most visible reminder is Clyde II, a giant painted rocking horse standing under a pavilion where Front Street meets School Street.
The current horse dates to 1988, but it continues a much older local tradition. The original Clyde was built as an oversized version of a commercial rocking horse and appeared in Winchendon’s 150th anniversary parade in 1914. It later stood near the railroad station and at the Toy Town Tavern before years of exposure and movement left it beyond practical preservation.
Local organizations eventually raised support for a replacement. Craftsman Sherman Labarge built Clyde II as a reproduction of the original, and the new horse made its public debut in 1988. Smithsonian American Art Museum inventory records describe the painted wooden sculpture as approximately fifteen feet tall, ten feet long, and four feet wide.
Clyde II is displayed outdoors in a small public park and can be seen from the road, with a path leading toward the pavilion. Massachusetts tourism officials still point to the Toy Town Horse as one of North Central Massachusetts’ roadside attractions. It is a perfect civic mascot for a place whose industrial legacy involved making toys: not a solemn monument, but a giant rocking horse that refuses to grow up.