How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
developing his own breeding farm close to the city of New York. Belmont built the Nursery Stud near Babylon, Long Island, and Sanford, a textiles magnate, constructed what might have been the most elaborate, up-to-date Thoroughbred farm in the United States. He called his farm, which he had located near Passaic, New Jersey, the Preakness Stud. Soon, more would follow this trend. The perplexing question of why these new titans of the turf were building farms so far from racehorse country had to be of concern to Bluegrass horsemen. If the Northeastern horse owners were to retire their leading racehorses to stallion careers in New York, what was to be the future of Bluegrass breeding operations?
Certainly, Alexander’s aloofness at the height of the Kentucky-Asteroid frenzy in 1865 had not helped form agreeable relationships with these Northeastern men. He had forfeited an excellent opportunity to join West with East when he ignored these new titans of the turf— or, as he called them, “some New Yorkers”—whose rapidly rising power and control of the sport he seemed to have difficulty comprehending. But the new moguls of Eastern racing also had erred in assuming that the race should be held at Saratoga. They, too, would have benefited from forging stronger relationships with the horsemen of the West in Bluegrass Kentucky, for Kentucky horsemen possessed unrivaled expertise and controlled the most prestigious equine bloodlines.
When the new moguls of racing began building their own farms in the East and—most importantly—retiring their best horses to breeding careers at those farms, Kentucky horsemen must have felt concern. They surely envisioned a future that might not include their interests, at least to the extent that they had held before the war. The Saratoga Race Course had seized an important moment in 1865, bringing to prominence men who would play the most significant roles in the sport for decades to come. Alexander had dropped the ball once. He would not make the same error twice. Now he began initiating damage control intended to join Kentucky horsemen with those of the Northeast. The hope was for Bluegrass Kentuckians to reclaim their preeminence in the Thoroughbred sport, as the center of the racehorse world. An extraordinary amount of work lay ahead.
chapter TWO
The Greening of the Bluegrass
Some 460 million years before horses like Kentucky and Asteroid appeared on American racetracks, central Kentucky and Middle Tennessee formed their destiny as horse country. This occurred during the Ordovician Period, a time of major plate collision of the earth’s crust, along with volcanism on what would become North America. Continents moved, mountains formed, and vast seas opened into a shallow marine shelf that was to form the central portions of the east-central United States. Surging seas swept over this shallow shelf, bringing with them the millions of invertebrates that left behind a precious natural gift, their fossilized shells, which gave rise through the millennia to a particular form of limestone rock, the building block that horsemen have long believed is critical to raising a strong-boned racehorse.
The structure of this rock includes the calcium carbonate that composes most limestones. However, and more importantly to horse breeders, the composition of this particular limestone includes a heavy concentration of phosphate, an occurrence that Professor Frank Ettensohn, a geologist at the University of Kentucky, has stated is relatively uncommon and occurs in few other places outside the Bluegrass. Ettensohn has theorized that the phosphate plays a greater role in growing a strong horse than does calcium carbonate by itself. During the early nineteenth century, Bluegrass horsemen appeared unaware of the contribution the phosphate made to the rock; they believed that the limestone itself was responsible for the exquisite flavor found in beef and sheep raised on this land. They believed that the limestone made the same contribution to those strong-boned horses raised in the Bluegrass, horses they described as “hickory-boned.” These nineteenth-century Americans might not have realized fully the composition of the limestone, yet they still seemed aware that the soil drew its strength from it. In 1865, the Louisville Journal attributed the quality of Bluegrass livestock to “the stratum of blue limestone which underlies the whole country at the distance of from ten to twelve feet from the surface, and perhaps has some effect on the grass.”1
The soil, the limestone, and the Kentucky bluegrass that grew on this gently rolling land continued to fascinate observers who wrote about this verdant section of the United States. In 1876, the Harvard professor Nathan Southgate Shaler, a geologist and paleontologist, wrote that Bluegrass land was “surpassed by no other soils in any country for fertility and endurance.” Around the same time, an article in the London Daily Telegraph cited the mineral benefits that horses in the Bluegrass received from the soil. In 1980, the University of Kentucky professor Karl B. Raitz succinctly described the Bluegrass region as “a broad limestone plain which has been etched on a structural arch of Ordovician limestones and shales.” Noting the phosphatic content in combination with calcium, he wrote: “The gently rolling terrain is underlain by phosphatic Lexington and Cynthiana limestones which decompose into exceptionally fertile silt loam soils.2
Early in the nineteenth century, central Kentucky and Middle Tennessee both became known as “the Bluegrass,” the name taken from the Kentucky bluegrass that flourished in their fields. No one has ever produced definitive answers on whether the legume that made the reputation for these regions actually possesses a blue hue and whether it is native to these states or originated someplace else, perhaps in Europe. “Whether the grass of the Blue Grass region be indigenous, or transplanted here at an early day by artificial means we have not room to discuss,” observed the Lexington Transcript in 1889, adding: “Anyhow, it lies at the foundation of our immense stock business…. It makes fine whisky, cattle, trotters and runners, and gives strength to our men and symmetry and beauty to our women.” Thus, even though no one knew the origin of the grass, folktales abound about Poa pratensis, more commonly known as Kentucky bluegrass.3
Some say that, if you observe the grass in this region just at dawn, when the dew lies heavily on it, you will see a hint of blue. The folklorist R. Gerald Alvey has related still another way in which people have attempted to explain the presence of this supposedly blue-tinted grass. He told how people observed a bluish vein running through the limestone and believed that the constantly decomposing blue limestone was responsible for the blue grass. Most importantly, people believed even decades before the Civil War that livestock in this region absorbed through the grass the important minerals that the limestone rock gave up into the rich soil. Equally as important in their eyes were the natural springs that spilled water infused with the same minerals into farm ponds and streams where livestock drank.4
Bluegrass breeders learned early on how to exploit this natural agricultural gift of the soil and turn it into a rich resource, combining the nutrition that it provided to grazing animals with their own ever-widening knowledge of equine pedigrees. Long before the mid-nineteenth century, Americans recognized that the strongest, fastest racehorses came from the Bluegrass region. This had occurred not by accident, but thanks to the gift of the land and the breeders’ continuous attempts to upgrade the quality of their stock.
After the Civil War, the unexpected rise in the number of fabulous horse farms under construction in the Northeast represented a new direction for the sport, one that challenged popular notions about the unique value of Bluegrass soil and grasslands. In fact, the owners of these new estates appeared to have ignored altogether the benefits that Bluegrass horse country offered, with its mineral-rich land and the superior equine bloodlines. The trend was becoming obvious to all: Belmont, the society leader and banker; Travers, the financier and president of the Saratoga Race Course; Milton Sanford, the textiles mogul; and the Lorillard brothers, Pierre and George, heirs of the vast tobacco fortune, were building their own horse farms to complement the growing number of racetracks in the Northeast. Just as men like these already had shifted the center of racing away from the South and the border states, now they appeared to be starting a new trend by developing their own breeding farms in New Jersey and New York. Bluegrass breeders undoubtedly would have viewed this as problematic to their interests, for it hinted at the possibility of horse country becoming obsolete or at least diminished