To the national media, the thing that made Lincoln Chafee interesting as a candidate for U.S. Senate was not anything he had done as mayor of Warwick, but the seven years he spent shoeing horses on the Canadian plains.

They found it interesting that a young man would choose an old trade, and that he knew how to coax along a 1,500-pound problem without getting leaned on or kicked or stomped, and how to keep going if he did.

Thus, when The New York Times last had occasion to take candidate Chafee's photograph, they wanted a horse in the picture.

His last photo in the Boston Globe?

Politician here, horse there.

Even locally, Chafee's horsemanship has served him politically over the years as a kind of shorthand for the old-fashioned virtues he wanted people to see in him. Indeed, most Warwick voters did, and returned him to office with increasingly larger pluralities in 1994, 1996 and 1998.

During the last election, the highest-ranking Democrat in the city, at grave risk to himself, pronounced the Republican mayor "sincere and ... honest" and refused to endorse the Democratic challenger.

Chafee said something like, "Thank you," to Council President Carlo Pisaturo, while an annoyed Democratic City Committee said something like "Pack your bags" to Pisaturo.

He was replaced as council president by Democrat Gerry Gibbons, who now becomes acting mayor when Chafee resigns and goes to Washington.

Lincoln Davenport Chafee was born in Warwick on March 26, 1953.

He won a seat on the Constitutional Convention in 1985 and on the Warwick City Council a year later.

He ran for mayor after four years on the council, but Warwick had not elected a Republican chief executive in 30 years and the Democrats were far too strong in 1990 to permit it.

Just two years later, though, Democratic heavyweight Mayor Charles J. Donovan was bedeviled by a school strike not of his making. He astonished the city by campaigning for a second term as an independent, which split the Democratic Party and helped Chafee prevail in a three-way race.

In his seven years as mayor, Chafee had the benefit of good advisers and good economic times. He could afford to gives raises to the city's powerful public employee unions even while arresting the rate of increase in the property tax.

With labor peace and financial stability, Chafee built a base of support among Democrats and Independents. It mirrored, on a smaller scale, the success his late father had in inspiring so many non-Republicans to return him to Washington every six years.

Democratic nominations for mayor of Warwick started to go uncontested as even the most ambitious Democrats eventually got used to the idea that Chafee was here until he decided to go.

Indeed, while voters let the Democrats keep their council seats, they kept putting Chafee back in the corner office and the big leather chair with greater confidence each time out.

In 1998, he achieved a personal political goal when he won, for the first time, all nine wards in the city.

Yesterday, he said, he expected to resign that landmark victory on Nov. 19.

It would be the one "bittersweet aspect," he said, of accepting his appointment to the U.S. Senate.