How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
directly at the pocketbooks of Kentuckians. Just as breeders were regrouping after the war, trying to replenish their stock or rebuild their farms so that they could begin earning an income again, extremely wealthy men in other states were seizing those financial opportunities out from under their grasp.
This increasingly popular trend reached a critical point when the racing career of that highly accomplished racehorse Kentucky came to a close in 1866. As we have seen, Travers and his group sold the horse for a record $40,000 to Leonard Jerome on the horse’s retirement to the stud. Instead of returning to the state of his birth, however, Kentucky stayed in New York, moving to new quarters close to Jerome Park to begin his breeding career, stinted to mares whose owners had no intention of sending them to breed to stallions in the Bluegrass. Two years later, in 1868, Belmont purchased Kentucky from Jerome for the purpose of installing the horse at his Nursery Stud on Long Island. In fact, Kentucky never returned to stand at stud in the state for which John Clay had named him. No one in the Bluegrass took this lightly.
Breeders in Tennessee also made an effort to get back in the business of breeding and raising racehorses; this, too, would provide more competition for Kentuckians. In Tennessee’s historic horse country near Nashville, where Andrew Jackson had founded a racecourse before becoming president of the United States in 1829, breeders took the lead in restarting their programs from the premier plantation of that state, Belle Meade. This particular horse-breeding operation had been recognized for its quality and the quality of horses it produced since long before the war. Within two years after the war, it took a significant step toward regaining some of its renown by holding its first yearling auction. Neighbors of Belle Meade, many of them breeders of Thoroughbreds, depended on this plantation for guidance and organization at a time when they were attempting to find a niche in the new marketplace.5
“With the probable exception of Woodburn Farm” in Kentucky, writes Ridley W. Wills II, this queen of Tennessee plantations, Belle Meade, “was considered America’s greatest breeding establishment.” During the 1870s and 1880s, the estate’s renewed success would see it achieve nationwide recognition once again, largely through annual yearling sales held at the plantation and also, for a time, in New York. The farm also gained renown for the valuable stallions it stood at stud, among them Bonnie Scotland, Enquirer, Vandal, John Morgan, Iroquois, and Luke Blackburn. General William Giles Harding, the master of the plantation for forty-four years, was recognized after his death at age seventy-eight in 1886 as a man who “had done as much for the breeding interests of Tennessee, and perhaps for all America, as any man in the nineteenth century,” according to Wills. As Wills also points out, Harding’s generalship of Belle Meade attained such renewed standing for the plantation after the war that it “was one of the few places where the Old South was brought over into the new.”6
The great mansion, paddocks, and pastures stocked with fine horses led Northern horsemen who visited during yearling auctions to believe that this was what the Old South had looked like during the antebellum period. Six columns, each twenty-two feet in height, composed the portico of the residence. The columns, each cut in two sections of limestone taken from quarries on the plantation, represented the craftsmanship of Belle Meade slaves. The appearance of this house undoubtedly figured into notions that Americans constructed decades later, after the demise of Belle Meade, when Kentucky’s Bluegrass horse country assumed the mantle as representative of the Old South. The portico of Belle Meade was well recognized throughout the United States, for writers had been describing the columns since before the Civil War. “It is true that the massive towering stone pillars that are seen in front, impress one more with the idea of extravagance than utility,” wrote a newspaper correspondent for the Nashville Union and American in 1854, “yet they so agree in architectural beauty with the whole, that economy would even not seem to require their removal.”7
Despite the devastation that its herds and physical structures suffered, Belle Meade was able to recover fairly quickly from the ravages of the war. Unlike other plantations in that part of Tennessee, it had not lost all its stock to armies or raiders, partly a result of the family having ingratiated itself with the Union army officers who made Belle Meade their headquarters. “The horses taken did not include any of Harding’s valuable brood mares,” Wills writes. “In his report, the officer said the mares were exempted from impressments until the ‘will of government’ was known.” Breeding operations resumed rather quickly after the war. General William Jackson began to assist his father-in-law, General Harding, in operating the plantation and, most especially, the horse-breeding endeavors.8
Belle Meade plantation, near Nashville, rivaled Woodburn in the production of Thoroughbred racehorses. It resumed its horse-breeding operation soon after the Civil War. The main residence was the iconic Southern horse farm. (Photograph by the author, 2008.)
In central Kentucky, the war had greatly compromised livestock breeding operations. Robert Aitcheson Alexander wrote from Woodburn to his brother, Alexander John Alexander, in 1864:
The sale was almost a failure from the fact that the Covington [KY] Railroad was not repaired so as to allow trains to run through (a bridge having been destroyed by [John Hunt] Morgan) and the fear of the men from the more Northern States that a raid would cut them off or they might not be able to get their stock away. There were only 3 or 4 men here from across the [Ohio] river and only one purchase.
The sheep brought more money than anything else…. I sold no trotting stock. Twelve head of thoroughbred later brought 3180 or 265 a head and 11 head of mares and fillies (Thoroughbred) brought 2270 or 206 each. I sold a Lexington mare out of Kitty Clark for $1000….
I am by no means satisfied with the condition of things here but cant [sic] do anything to change my stock from Ky till I go to Chicago.
In another letter to his brother, Alexander wrote in 1865: “I have got my colt brother to Norfolk back from the guerillas, but man owning him having been captured. I had to pay the captor $500 but as the horse seemed little the worse for the long sojourn amongst the rascals except in condition I am well satisfied to get him at that rate.”9
As in Tennessee, central Kentucky breeders restarted their bloodstock operations as well as they could, under the circumstances, in an attempt to join the new market. Quite quickly, they realized that they might be able to expedite the process if they received state aid. Governor Thomas E. Bramlette readily supported the growing horse industry and chartered a cooperative association that organizers named the Kentucky Stud Farm Association. Alexander and others leading this initiative included William S. Buford, F. P. Kinkead, and Abraham Buford of Woodford County, and Benjamin Bruce, John Viley, and James A. Grinstead of Fayette County. All were among the leading livestock breeders in central Kentucky. They intended for the association to develop its own breeding farm along the lines of the national stud in England. The English stud operated on an egalitarian principle, providing equal access to stallion service for all owners of mares.10
Organizers in Kentucky intended the association to provide members with the means to recommence their livestock breeding, no small matter considering that many had ended the war facing the loss of breeding stock, farms, and their labor pool, which, in most cases, had been their slaves. The group planned to purchase a farm, although there is no evidence that the plan ever got this far. The intention was to fit out the farm with paddocks and stables for horses, making it suitable for the raising of Thoroughbreds. The group also intended to purchase broodmares and at least one stallion, with the intention of auctioning the offspring when they reached the yearling stage. The Kentucky General Assembly and the Kentucky Senate chartered the new organization on January 26, 1866, and waived the customary incorporation fee of $100. Apparently, the state legislature perceived the need to support and accelerate the start of this group’s work. The Kentucky Stud Farm Association must have seen the need to help all