Vermont Morgan Horse Association

Well, I've finally taken another serious step toward this project: joined the Vermont Morgan Horse Association. I've also registered for the Annual Meeting, which should be a really nice night and give me some good information above and beyond the Morgan connections - the keynote is about Equine Metabolic Syndrome.

You can also like the VMHA on Facebook to support them.

UVM Morgan Horse Farm Short Video

I've visited the UVM Morgan Horse Farm on a few occasions, and it's a beautiful spot. I'll head back sometime this spring to do some touristing, probably. It's not really directly connected to the research I'm doing on Figure: the farm was originally founded by Joseph Battell, who collected the Morgan studbook information and bred horses himself. He turned it over to the US Government, who in turn gave it to UVM, all in the 20th century, long after Figure was gone.

The UVM Morgans are gorgeous animals, but trend a bit away from the stocky all-rounders that I love and into the saddleseat/breed showing side of things.

Here's a really wonderful short video about the farm and the work they do there.

Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House

I'm taking a brief moment to talk about something not horse or Morgan-related at all. Please pardon the indulgence!

Louisa May Alcott and her family moved to a house in Concord, MA in 1858. Her father, Bronson, named it "Orchard House" after the apple orchards that surrounded it. It was in that house that Louisa wrote the book that would make her famous: Little Women. She blazed through the draft in one month, sitting at a little desk overlooking the front yard.

Orchard House is a truly special place. If any house can be said to have a soul, Orchard House has one. I worked at Orchard House in college, mostly as a tour guide. When I was promoted to opening and closing, I would often get to the house 15 minutes early and sit on the floor in one of the rooms, soaking up the atmosphere. I love that house like I love few other places in the world.

It's a special place with a really special history, on both the emotional and the intellectual levels.

Right now, Orchard House is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary telling the story of the house itself, which dates back to the Revolutionary War and contains fascinating American history above and beyond the Alcott family, whose story is much more far-reaching than just Louisa's literary career. The house has been a museum for over a century, and has a remarkable portion of original family furnishings and artifacts. If for no other reason than to tell the story of one of the most remarkable historic house museums in the United States, this documentary will be an extraordinary thing.

If you're a fan of Little Women, please consider donating to the Kickstarter campaign.

The Ultimate Insult

D.C. Linsley took his defense of the Morgan breed very seriously. In response to one anonymous criticism of the breed, written by a self-described Vermonter and excellent judge of horsemen, he goes line by line through the criticism and "proves" how false it is. It's an emotional and highly charged defense during which he honestly offers no real facts; it's one man's opinion against another. Halfway through the rant, Linsley delivers the ultimate insult, which had me giggling in what was supposed to be a quiet research space:

Not a word of proof is offered, and the assertion leads one to think that the writer is neither a horseman nor a Vermonter, and that he has only borrowed the name of our little State, to have a good place to write from about Morgan horses.

OH SNAP.

(Linsley, p. 76)

Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses

I have, to be honest, not a lot to report right now on my research. I'm in a reading-and-thinking stage, in which I'm taking in large quantities of information and and taking lots of notes - mostly about other things to find, or look at.

I've gotten about 100 pages into Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses, which was the first concerted effort to document and catalogue the history of the original Morgan, Figure, and to properly establish the Morgan horse as a breed.



It's an interesting thing: Linsley spends almost a hundred pages setting up his book, by way of a world tour through different breeds of horses, then an American tour of the types of horses that are used in various regions of the country. He spends a long time describing the type of work a horse in American ought to be able to do, and then he spends pages and pages detailing what he thinks is an objectively perfect conformation for that work. In utterly exhausting detail.

At the end of that - after he has defined what makes a breed and then described his ideal horse - he concludes that Morgans fit all these characteristics. Then he spends a dozen pages or so utterly trashing one or two people who happen to have evaluated Morgans and not been wild about them.

Only then is he ready to begin to discuss the origins of the breed, which he does in his trademark exhausting manner. On that, more later.

Linsley's book is like so many others about the Morgan breed. It has a thesis. He sets out to prove that Morgan horses are a distinct, valued breed, and that they are moreover the best possible American breed. He fuses the work he is doing in trying to establish Morgans as a respected breed with a sense of regional (Vermont) and national (American) identity.

He is not the first, nor will he be the last, writer to do so. In fact, it's entirely possible that he set up a storyline for writing about the Morgan that is still very much in play today, both in fiction and nonfiction writing about the Morgan horse.

Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1972)

On its way to me now!

Check out the epic 70s hair on Don Murray as Justin Morgan. The movie appears to have completely cut out Joel Goss's role as narrator of the book, and added in a love story subplot.

Expect a review when it arrives.

James Monroe and Figure - More Sources

So when I left off on this piece of research, one of the main sources I'd found detailing James Monroe's visit to Vermont in 1817 had no mention at all of Figure - or indeed any special horse at all.

It was clearly time for a new research angle. I headed to the research library of the Vermont Historical Society*, thinking I would see if they had any letters, diaries, or other primary source accounts by those who were there that day and saw James Monroe's visit.

At first glance, this was going to be a trickier proposition than I thought. None of the manuscript collections that had been indexed and described in finding aids mentioned James Monroe, or at least not his visit to Montpelier. There was one very interesting document in which members of the militia artillery company that saluted Monroe (per the description I quoted in the previous entry) signed an agreement to share the costs of powder and shot for that salute. The absence of easily indexed finding aids made the next option a general survey of all manuscripts dating from that period and tied to Montpelier - which I held off on, pondering my next move.

There were a few files on general Morgan horse history, so while I was waiting for those to be pulled, I went into the stacks in search of secondary sources.

There have been innumerable books and articles published on Morgan horse history, and the stacks at the Vermont Historical Society's library provided an excellent overview of secondary sources.

The first two sources I went to were the two earliest and most comprehensive. Daniel Chipman Linsley's
Morgan horses: a premium essay on the origin, history, and characteristics of this remarkable American breed of horses, published in 1857. He did the first detective work to find out where Figure came from, and collected the first 240 stallions for the general Morgan pedigree. I'll have a lot to write about Linsley in the future, as it's a fascinating book on many levels, but today I was primarily interested in seeing what he had to say about Monroe's visit.

Here was my first surprise of the evening: nothing. He had nothing whatsoever to say about Figure being used as a parade mount for James Monroe, though he had plenty to say about everything else connected to Figure.

Next source: Joseph Battell's Morgan Horse Register, published in 1894, which was the next major historical treatment of Figure. Same thing: no mention at all. Zip. Zero.

Now I was starting to get worried, and I double-checked my original sources for the claim that Figure was Monroe's parade mount. The statement appears, among other places, on the website of the National Museum of the Morgan Horse, so I didn't make it up entirely!

I started reading secondary sources in earnest, skimming hard and trying to track the earliest iteration of this story. It started cropping up again in the 20th century - victory! So sometime after 1894 but before 1942, when Marguerite Henry included a fictionalized version of it in Justin Morgan Had a Horse (though she places the parade in Burlington, not Montpelier).

Where did I find it?

Eleanor Waring Burnham's Justin Morgan, Founder of His Race: The Romantic History of a Horse. Here it is on Google Books. I have a whole series of posts planned on Burnham's book, which is amazing on many levels, but the long and short? It's a children's book. YA, maybe. It is highly, highly fictionalized, in the best tradition of Black Beauty.

Here's the passage as it appears at the very end of Burnham's book; she also places the parade in question in Burlington:

Suddenly over the face of President James Monroe there passed a look of keen interest, followed by one of intense admiration.

He had caught sight of Morgan, and his eye, unerring in its judgment of horseflesh, was arrested at once by his vigorous and fearless style. He turned to a group of officials. 

"I see, gentlemen," he said in a tone of genuine appreciation "that Vermont can produce a horse worthy of her heroes!"  

A moment later he had thrown his leg over the back of the proudest horse in America!

And then the book ends.

Is this really the source of the story? Had Burnham done some actual research that led her to include the story? Did she think it was just another colorful addition to the legend? If we're meant to take everything in the book as historical fact then there are some real doozies in there

More digging is necessary!

*In the interests of full disclosure, I work for the Vermont Historical Society, though not in the research library. 

On Research, and When Enough is Enough

A good friend of mine recently sent me an article he wrote for Grub Street, a Boston-based writing workshop, about research. He is, like me, a historian and researcher and wanted to provide some useful tips for those who might want to write stories but had no academic background in digging into sources.

I wrote back to him that if he was thinking of writing more, I'd love a musing on when "enough is enough." He asked for clarification and got this essay in return, which I thought I'd cross-post here as it's applicable.

So here's what I'm grappling with at the moment.

I'm working on researching the history of the first Morgan horse, a stallion named Figure. There have been sketchy histories done of him in the past, but nothing substantive, with true primary source research.

Figure was in Vermont from approximately 1792 - 1819. He had upwards of a dozen owners during that time, in over half a dozen distinct different parts of the state.

I have in my mind the idea to go to each of the places where we know Figure was and look for journals, diaries, and letters dated within a few years of that time, and read through them ALL to see if any mention this strange horse. I could also do the same for newspaper accounts during his lifetime.

Even more specifically, there's a story that in 1817, when James Monroe visited Vermont as part of his Era of Good Feelings tour, he rode Figure in a parade in Montpelier. There's one published source about the visit; it doesn't mention the horse. But surely there are letters, diaries, etc., remembering the president's visit to Vermont. Would one of them be the original source for this story? Would one of them have mentioned that the president was given Justin Morgan's horse to ride? Those accounts could potentially be located all over the state.

Is it worth it to read every single word? Is it worth it to track down every source that could possibly have bearing on the topic you're researching, especially when it's statewide? Or do you hit a tipping point when you have enough evidence to support your thesis and tell your story and doing even more research than that clutters it? Is it just fun to read 8 million things even if they don't necessarily have strict bearing on it?

I think that this problem becomes more seductive the more you know and understand about history and good primary source research. As you learn to do a close reading of the sources you see how themes can track through contemporary accounts that might not even have anything to do with your primary subject. (Would a farmer's account of how he uses his workhorses be useful to illustrate the world that Figure lived in? Would 10 farmers accounts yield a sort of average lived experience for a workhorse in Vermont? How about reading 100 accounts in order to find the perfect encapsulating quote?)

So, when do you draw that line without going completely insane/wasting your time/never finishing your project?

James Monroe's Visit to Vermont in 1817: One Source

One of the oft-repeated set pieces of Figure's story is that in 1817, while he belonged to Samuel Stone of Montpelier, he served as a parade mount for President James Monroe.

First things first. James Monroe visited Montpelier, and in fact the entire state of Vermont, as part of a general tour of the northern states of the US shortly after becoming president. (By "northern states" at this time we basically are to read New England.) He spent 15 weeks touring, following a tradition apparently begun by George Washington. He had won the election in a landslide, and his two terms in office were marked by strong one-party control. He was enormously popular, and riding a wave of national optimism that was coined the "Era of Good Feelings." In fact, the phrase came about following an early stop on his northern tour, a stay in Boston.

James Monroe, c. 1819

So, what of his visit to Vermont? I have a lot to dig up to see what the original source to this story is, and therefore whether to lend it credence or not.

One good source that speaks generally about Monroe's New England tour in 1817 is a pamphlet written by Samuel Putnam Waldo and published in 1819. Titled "The Tour of James Monroe, President of the United States, Through the Northern and Eastern States, in 1817: His Tour in the Year 1818; Together with a Sketch of His Life; with Descriptive and Historical Notices of the Principal Places Through which He Passed" (yes, really) it is an exhaustive and lengthy treatise of where the president spent each hour of each day on his trip, and even what he had for breakfast. Thus it is that according to this pamphlet we can track Monroe's movements in Montpelier on July 22, 1817.

At 10, he was met and welcomed by the Committee of Arrangements, at Mr. Stiles' in Berlin. The procession was then formed, under direction of the Marshals, and proceeded to Montpelier.

A little before 11, a discharge of artillery announced the near approach of the Chief Magistrate of the nation. On entering the village, he alighted from his carriage, and proceeded with the cavalcade, on horseback, to the Academy, through the Main-street, lined one each side by citizens, under direction of Joseph Howes, Esq. Returning to the head of State Street, the President dismounted, was received by the First Light Company, commanded by Lieut. E. P. Walton, and conducted to the State House under a national salute from the Washington Artillery. 

Monroe never gets on a horse again. In fact, our friend Waldo is careful to say that he walked among the people with an uncovered head. At the end of his visit, he gets back into a carriage and continues on to Burlington.

No mention at all of a special horse that he rode during this very brief (one mile? two?) procession. This from the same author who makes sure to note that lunch that day was a "cold collation provided with admirable taste and elegance." Every notable person in Montpelier who gave a speech or commanded a militia company was mentioned. No Samuel Stone. No specific horse. This pamphlet is about as good as sources get. So where does the story come from?

Next steps: newspaper and diary accounts at the time.

(Waldo's pamphlet has been scanned and is available online through Google Books; the trip to Montpelier is on pages 240 - 244.)

Questions: Myth and Legend and the American Dream

One of the primary questions for me about Figure's story is how much actual documentation we have. Quite frankly, it's not a lot - mostly tangential, hearsay, reported years after the fact. So far, the contemporary documentary trail is thin on the ground. (Though of course I do hope to uncover some new sources during my work.)

In the absence of that primary source evidence, a series of legends have grown up around the story of Figure, and what fascinates me particularly is trying to parse them out from history.

For example: There are several different and conflicting stories about Figure's breeding, with some later sources (mostly gathered by Linsley or Battell) that claim him to be a Dutch horse or a Canadian horse. Some have interpreted that to mean, variously, Friesian, Cheval Candien, or some other heavier breeds that might help to explain the physical traits that were clearly passed on down the line.

The story that interests me the most, however, is the one that has Figure sired by a Thoroughbred stallion named True Briton.

True Briton, the story goes, was the prized cavalry horse of Captain James Delancey, Loyalist officer during the American Revolution and member of the New York Delanceys, a family of immense power and wealth in colonial America. True Briton is supposed to have been stolen out from under Delancey's nose and spirited off to Connecticut, where he was re-named Beautiful Bay. (Delancey later got his comeuppance when he was forced to flee to Canada after the Revolution.)

Justin Morgan, who made part of his living as a stallioneer (ie, he leased and stood stallions to collect breeding fees) is supposed to have stood Beautiful Bay at stud for a few years, and during that time bred him to a mare he owned of indeterminate breeding. By the time the foal Figure was born, the mare was out of Morgan's possession. Morgan came to own Figure again some years later.

The more I think about this origin story, the more it fascinates me. So much of the story of Figure and the first Morgan horses is tied up in the twinned ideas of the American frontier and American exceptionalism. Figure was by this re-telling a true all-American, born out of the Revolution, fathered by a British stallion of impeccable breeding, who belonged to a wealthy landowner, and foaled by a scrappy mare of unknown breeding. He was an amalgam, a true American blend of pedigree and grit. He would go on to sire a line of horses who become closely identified with American history, from their service as cavalry mounts in the Civil War to their role in opening the American West.

This story of Figure as all-American gets particular play in fictional accounts of his life, in particular Marguerite Henry's Justin Morgan Had a Horse, which ends as follows:

"Well, the schoolmaster and Farmer Beane both be dead now," Joel said, restoring the piece of evergreen to the horse's headstall, "and likely nobody will ever know who was this fellow's sire and who was his dam. He was just a little work horse that cleared the fields and did what was asked of him."

Joel's face suddenly lit up as if he had thought of something for the first time. He spoke now to the horse, as though he were the one that mattered. "Why, come to think of it, you're just like us, Bub. You're American! That's what you are. American!"

It's a neat narrative trope for Henry, who after all made her living transforming equine history into young adult books, many of which had similar themes about the horses who made made America. But it appears in other sources - Eleanor Waring Burnham's Justin Morgan, Founder of His Race: The Romantic History of a Horse, and explicitly or implicitly this storyline is repeated in nearly every other article or history of Figure.

Figure, American original, has become such a hard-wired narrative that any history of his life will have to navigate it and to deconstruct it. It becomes crucially important, then, to look at the various stories of his origins and see when they came on to the scene, and by whom they were repeated. As my research continues, I'll do just that.

Introducing the Project

I've always been fascinated by horse stories through history, and though I make my living as an historian, I've never felt the itch to dig into a particular story myself.

Since I moved (back) to Vermont in 2012, that itch has been slowly growing as I read and researched and grounded myself in the Green Mountain state's history.

I've been doing quiet background reading for some time now, and I'm ready to officially launch this project on this blog.

I'm going to research the story of the first Morgan horse, Figure. So many talented people have written so much about him, but the deeper and more closely I read, the more amazed I am at how little analysis, research, and historiography has been applied to the sources about his life. There is no single, overall, scholarly history, and I'd like to see if I can do one.

In subsequent posts, I'll examine some of the questions that fascinate me about Figure's story, which is so tied up in American history, Vermont history, equine history, genetics, politics, myth, legend, and some really basic questions about how humans interact with horses.

In the meantime: welcome! Please feel free to contact me at any time by leaving a comment on a post.