Foxlily

Kentucky was once the West:  the ragged edge of the frontier of European settlement.  That distinction passed quickly.

Within a few decades, settlers had pushed the Iroquois and Shawnee out of their Kentucky hunting grounds, and the frontier had followed Lewis and Clark (who left on their great western expedition from Louisville, Kentucky on October 6, 1803) across the Mississippi and finally, across the Missouri.

According to a much repeated theory, Kentucky “joined the losing side” after the Civil War out of distaste for the politics of Reconstruction and a natural affinity for the agricultural and newly impoverished South, which had suffered countless casualties and lost nearly half its regional wealth by the war’s end.  Not necessarily so, posits Wall, who says:

I argue in this study that Bluegrass horsemen joined with outsides in assigning a Southern identity to their region early in the twentieth century, when doing so suited the nostalgic needs of white Americans generally and the economic needs of Bluegrass horsemen specifically…the Bluegrass region of Kentucky became associated with this cavalier South thanks to a group of highly esteemed and highly popular writers whose work pictured central Kentucky in those terms…that brought a great economic boom to the region’s equine business.  This boom turned the Bluegrass into the horse capital of the world.

As Hall points out, Kentucky had tried to remain neutral during the Civil War. By the war’s end, 25,000 white Kentuckians had fought for the Confederacy, and twice that many (along with 23,000 Kentucky blacks) for the Union; but 187,000, including politically prominent persons such as John Clay, had taken no side in the hostilities. Kentucky was last among the more southerly states in the percentage of white citizens who had fought for the Confederacy, and first in the percentage of whites who did not fight in the war at all.

In the late 19th century, escapist plantation literature offered a bucolic myth of leisured Southern life in white-columned mansions, where a paternalistic master reigned as a sort of feudal lord over a gracious and happy rural community.  This image offered a pleasing contrast to the realities of life in the industrial North, as well as to those in the often lawless post-war South.  Says Wall:

Kentucky authors who linked this imagined Old South achieved wide national acclaim.  Foremost among these were James Lane Allen, Annie Fellows Johnston, and John Fox Jr.  So many people read these three that the Southern identity they bestowed on Kentucky clearly resonated with a readership eager to embrace the Old South.

Wall offers a fascinating, readable history of the thoroughbred industry in Kentucky both before and after the Southern myth took hold.  She tells of Robert Aitcheson Alexander, the squire of Woodburn Farm in Woodford County, who greatly expanded the thoroughbred industry in Kentucky, with superior bloodstock (including the great sire Lexington, which Alexander  bought from the Clays, of the Ashland estate in Lexington).

Like many other Bluegrass horsemen, Alexander lost many horses to guerilla bands during the Civil War, and eventually sent most of his horses north to wait out the war’s end.  Raiding opportunists didn’t care that he was a British citizen who flew the Union Jack over Woodburn and had taken no part in the war.

In one harrowing raid, mercenaries stole Alexander’s prize colt, Asteroid, along with several other horses.  A hastily mustered posse went after the thieves, finally catching up with them after they’d run the colt too hard, and made him swim the Kentucky River. Alexander’s men paid the raiders a $500 ransom for the colt, pleading untruthfully that the horse had only sentimental value at Woodburn.

Wall’s narrative also includes stories of George Armstrong Custer’s visit to Woodburn in 1871, and the articles he wrote praising the Bluegrass for a popular New York magazine that Alexander had helped to establish.  (Five years after his visit to Woodburn, Custer died in a reckless attack on the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana.  He was riding a Kentucky thoroughbred in that battle, where both met their deaths.  The only federal survivor was Captain Myles Keogh’s mustang-crossbred, Comanche).

Wall tells of the still unsolved 1871 murder of the Harper family on Nantura Stock Farm, also in Woodford County, next to Woodburn;  of the black jockeys, such as the famous Isaac Murphy (1861-1896), who were among the greatest and richest athletes of their day (and suggests that Murphy may have been murdered by poisoning); of the northern moguls such as August Belmont, who relocated his thoroughbred operations to Kentucky in the late nineteenth century; of capable women in the thoroughbred business, such as Josephine Clay; and, not least, of horses whose names still resonate in the Bluegrass:  Lexington, Longfellow, Domino, and many others. She brings her story into the twentieth century with James R. Keene, of Castleton Farm, and John E. Madden, who founded Hamburg.

Wall also explains the mystery of the John Hunt Morgan statue, which for over a century has stood on the lawn of the old Fayette County Courthouse in Lexington.  It seems the Daughters of the Confederacy, encouraged by local image makers in the horse industry, gathered the funds to create the statue.  At the same time, Lexington’s public school history texts were confiscated so that references to Morgan as a guerilla raider who burned property and stole bloodstock (which is exactly how many contemporaries in the area remembered him) could be expunged.  In the likeness shown here, Morgan rides a stallion, though the horse he really rode was a fine thoroughbred mare, Black Bess.  The horse in the statue looks to me more like an American Saddlebred, with its high head carriage and very thin neck;  again, perhaps, a visual allusion to the plantation myth.

How Kentucky Became Southern is a compact and highly readable primer for anyone interested in the history of thoroughbred racing or central Kentucky. Visitors to the Keeneland race course or to wider Fayette and Woodford counties will find the book useful and highly entertaining preparatory reading.

Author Wall, who lives in Lexington, is a veteran turf writer who has retired from journalism.  She wrote this book after completing her doctorate in history.

My book club will discuss this book at a gathering I will host tomorrow at Holly Hill Inn in Midway, very close to where Woodburn and Nantura were.  Some of what was Woodburn is now Airdrie Stud.

As a side note:  Wall is right about the pervasiveness of “plantation literature.”  When I was in grade school, after lunch each day, our teacher would read us a chapter from one of  Little Colonel books by Annie Fellows Johnston (1863-1931), even though by then, the books and the concepts implicit in them were quite dated. Johnston, who was from southern Indiana but spent much of her life in Pewee Valley, near Louisville, set this series of books on a mythic Kentucky plantation, but based her story on that of Colonel George Weissinger (1836-1903), a former Confederate officer who had lost an arm in the war.