How Kentucky Became Southern by Maryjean Wall

Author:Maryjean Wall [Wall, Maryjean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-813-12607-4
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Pierre Lorillard’s Iroquois became the first American horse to win the Epsom Derby in England in 1881. Americans were so excited over his victory that the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading the day the news arrived in the city. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library.)

A debate over bloodlines likewise threatened to leave Kentucky at a disadvantage. Sons of the great stallion Lexington were proving unremarkable in the stud, an unfortunate development that might have attributed to the popularity of Leamington (imported from England) in his Pennsylvania home. At Jerome Park, turfmen had debated the relative merits of Lexington and Leamington as breeding stallions during casual conversation. The question was one of mere sporting competition at that point. However, with the sons of Lexington, the discussion took a different turn, down a path of disappointment. Asteroid’s “waning popularity” was well known, with one commentator remarking that the horse simply was not going to duplicate his extraordinary talents in his offspring. “Breeders thought that he was such a remarkable race horse himself that all they had to do was to breed and get one like himself,” was the lament. Kentucky, standing in New York, had not fared better than his rival.13

A noted pedigree authority observed in 1879: “The sons of Lexington had, taken as a whole, proved a failure at the stud when compared with the English importations.” The writer was Walter S. Vosburgh, a New York resident who wrote bloodstock articles under the pen name Vigilant. Vosburgh’s point was worth considering since the sons of Lexington were all that remained for breeders if they desired to try to replicate his bloodline; Lexington had died in 1875, and breeders expected his sons to carry his bloodline forward. Vosburgh concluded: “The sons of Lexington, though first-class performers themselves, have failed in transmitting it to their progeny…. The grandsons of Lexington have had the misfortune to meet a better strain in the progeny of the English horses and … proved inferior to them.”14

An even greater debate questioned whether imported English stallions contributed more to the breed than stallions bred and raised in the United States. Those elite patrons of Jerome Park who arrived at the races in English coaches fell on the side of the English horses—a trend that did not at all favor the bloodlines popular in Bluegrass Kentucky. “Some of the Englishmen who belong to the Jerome Park Club will hold up their hands in horror at the idea that any one should be so bold as to assert that an American be as good as, or better than an English race horse,” wrote an observer quite familiar with the beliefs of these New York elites.15

Belmont, who could well afford to buy whatever suited his fancy, was a major importer of English horses to his Nursery Stud. “His stallion, The Ill-Used, combines more of the blood royal of the English Stud-book than any horse in the world,” the Spirit of the Times commented. Belmont stood two sons of Lexington at

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