Small, paltry, inferior.

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1854.  I’m done with one-horse bedsteads, I am.—Anecd., N.Y. Journal of Commerce, n.d.

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1857.  A Mormon elder says he has visited and preached in the following places in Texas: Empty-Bucket, Rake-pocket, Doughplate, Bucksnort, Possum Trot, Buzzard-Roost, Hardscrabble, Nippentuck, and Lickskillet; most of which, however, he says, are merely one-horse towns.—Harper’s Weekly, Nov. 14.

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1858.  I have seen a country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a brother-minister’s discourse which would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped sophomore in the one word—slow.—Holmes, ‘The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,’ ch. ii. (N.E.D.).

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1859.  Close by the little one-horse church, (skirted by the belt of cedars).—Knick. Mag., liii. 318. (March).

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1861.  

        To see how he liked pork ’n’ pone flavored with wa’nut saplin’,
An’ nary social priv’ledge but a one-hoss, starn-wheel chaplin.
Lowell, ‘Biglow Papers,’ Second Series, No. 1.    

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1862.  Tellin ’em that the only way for Southern men to protect their property is for ’em to dissolve the Union and ’stablish a one-hoss consarn, with such one-hoss chaps as you at the head of it.—Harper’s Weekly, May 17.

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1867.  See ON TIME.

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1890.  Having spent our money and labor, then to be compelled to quit work just because a few little one-horse ranchers below in the valley made a fuss because our gravel covered up their potato patches and radish beds.—Haskins, ‘Argonauts of California,’ p. 252.

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