Historic markers recognize the Morgan horse all over the Upper Valley, or the Vermont side of it, anyway, where the breed originated in the late 1700s, around the time Vermont was becoming a state. There’s one in Woodstock village, on Central street, and one in Randolph Center, next to Vermont Technical College, and another two markers around the Tunbridge-Chelsea line where Figure, the scrappy little stallion to whom all Morgan horses trace their lineage, is buried.
The Morgan is among the oldest horse breeds established in North America, and its history is entwined with the nation’s. It served in the Union army’s cavalry in the Civil War, and it gave rise to trotting races, a sport that was the foundation of the traditional agricultural fair. People who own, ride and drive Morgans love studying the breed’s history, and there’s always more to discover.
Until recently, for example, the location of the home to which Figure’s owner and the breed’s namesake, Justin Morgan, brought his wife and children from western Massachusetts to the White River Valley was a mystery. The home itself, a rough log cabin, is long gone.
Dennis Tatro, who with his wife, Laura, has owned Morgans since the 1980s, felt that this needed to be cleared up. After a long search, they have tracked the site down. The state has put up a historic marker and a dedication ceremony is planned for Aug. 29.
“My wife and I spent 14 years,” Tatro said last week. “We had a general idea. We knew he was somewhere around the Randolph and Brookfield town line.”
That turned out to be correct, but it took many maddening twists, turns and dead ends to end up in the right place. Even then, Craig Russell, who was farming the land at the time, declined to allow a historical marker on the property, which Tatro describes in Living on the Town Line, his self-published book about his quest. (Russell’s father, Charles Russell, owns the farm and later said he would have been happy to have the marker there, but by then the state had identified other nearby sites for the marker.)
The marker is across the road, on land where Figure was turned out to graze that has remained pasture since those days.
For all its importance to American history and to horse breeding, the Morgan remains a small part of the equine landscape. The American Morgan Horse Association currently has about 80,000 horses registered, said Erica Eulau, the association’s registrar, though she estimated that as many as one-third of that number might be horses that have died and haven’t been reported to the registry. By comparison, the American Quarter Horse Association, the nation’s largest horse breed organization, reported 78,000 new registrations last year alone.
“I don’t think it’s in trouble, per se,” Tatro said of the Morgan. But the breed’s numbers have declined with the economy, as all horse breeds have seen their numbers decline since the Great Recession.
“Young people today are more interested in video games than they are in being out in the heat, learning to ride,” Tatro said.
A small breed like the Morgan faces risks that the quarter horse might not. While Morgan owners and breeders feel confident that the Morgan will endure, they are thinking about the breed’s future nearly as much as they are thinking about its past.
“There are a whole lot of factors that are making it tougher for people to have horses,” said Denny Emerson, who operates Tamarack Hill Farm in Strafford. He rode Morgans in his youth, when he worked for Robert Lippitt Knight, an influential Morgan breeder who operated the Green Mountain Stock Farm in Randolph. In his 20s, he turned to the sport of three-day eventing, which favors big, athletic thoroughbred horses, and returned to Morgans more recently. He has three on his farm now.
“When I was a kid, people had horses in their backyards,” he said. But population growth, land lost to development and other factors, such as stagnating wages for the middle class, have put horse ownership out of reach for many.
The Morgan was celebrated for its versatility and toughness. They have always been smallish horses, around 15 hands, and many fall below the height that divides horses from ponies, 14 hands, 2 inches. (There are 4 inches to a hand, and a horse’s or pony’s height is measured at the withers, the bony bump between neck and back.)
But they were renowned for being able to work on a farm all day, win trotting races and pull a carriage to church on Sunday. They are easy keepers, which suited the early American need for thrift, and their heart and strength are out of proportion with their stature, qualities that also endeared them to Yankee settlers.
Those qualities might make it harder for Morgans to find a home today, however. The horse world is increasingly specialized, with horses bred for particular disciplines: thoroughbreds for racing and eventing; quarter horses for roping and reining and other traditional ranch chores; Arabians and their crosses for endurance riding; European warmbloods for dressage and show jumping.
“We feel some sense of mystery,” said Stephen Kinney, who used to train Morgans and now edits The Morgan Horse, the official magazine of the American Morgan Horse Association. “The breed is so nice.”
Morgans are versatile, tractable, easy to teach, he said in a phone interview.
“You can find a Morgan suitable for almost any purpose,” he said.
When horse breeding took a hit in the Great Recession, the number of Morgans registered each year fell from around 3,500 to a low-water mark of 1,268 in 2014. Other breeds have seen similar reductions. Breeders in the United States raised 40,000 thoroughbreds in 1990 and fewer than half that in each of the past two years, according to records kept by The Jockey Club, the thoroughbred registry.
Margaret Gladstone started breeding Morgan horses at her family’s Newmont Farm in Bradford, Vt., about a decade ago, when the economy was just starting to recover.
“I kind of entered at a tough time,” she said last week. “To be honest with you, it hasn’t gotten much easier.”
Gladstone has made a project of bringing back some of the older Morgan bloodlines. Some of the stallions in the Morgan show horse bloodlines appear up and down modern pedigrees, a sign that horses have become more inbred than is healthy for the breed’s long-term future.
“A whole lot less people are breeding than there were in the past,” she said. “I think it’s concerning.”
The Morgan association opted in 1948 to keep what’s called a “closed book” registry, as opposed to an open book that allows in horses from the outside based on merit or other criteria. This has been especially challenging for the Lippitt Morgan, which has bloodlines that trace back to the breed’s earliest days, but also has the smallest gene pool. The Livestock Conservancy, which calls attention to livestock breeds with dwindling numbers, has labeled the “traditional Morgan” as “critically endangered.” As a whole, the Morgan breed is faring better than that.
“I don’t think it’s at the brink,” Emerson said, “but I think 25 years from now it could be at the brink.”
Eulau, though, pointed to growth in numbers. In 2018, owners registered nearly 1,800 Morgans, nearly 50% more than in 2014.
“We wish our numbers were bigger,” Kinney said, but when the economic downturn came, Morgan breeders did the responsible thing and bred fewer horses, he added.
Breeders like Gladstone look mainly to the show ring for customers. That’s the economic core of the Morgan breed, but saddle seat riding, the discipline most Morgan show horses compete in, is not a growing segment of the horse world, and the Morgan community needs to keep broadening the horse’s appeal, Emerson said.
The good news, Emerson and others said, is that the Morgans bred now, whether for the show ring or other purposes, are a bit bigger, which makes them more useful to a wider range of riders, and they are excellent horses — sound, sane, willing and more athletic than the Morgans of old.
“They’re as good as they ever were,” Emerson said. “In fact, I think they’re better.”
Changes to an old breed led to some grumbling, but Kinney sees an older continuity: “Horses have been bred in every generation … selectively for the needs of the people using them,” he said.
No other American horse has the same history, the great stories, to build on. Justin Morgan had moved to Vermont in the late 1780s. He collected Figure, then a colt or a young stallion, and another young horse as payment for a debt in 1792 and walked back to his home on the Randolph-Brookfield line. Figure later was traded for land in Moretown, Vt., and became known far and wide as Justin Morgan’s horse, and then just Justin Morgan. He sired dozens of horses, among them three stallions, Woodbury, Bulrush and Sherman, who spread the breed far and wide. Morgan blood helped produce other American breeds, including the Standardbred and the American Saddlebred, as well as the British Hackney.
In his book, Tatro imagines what life was like for Justin Morgan and his horse in their years in Vermont. It’s an abiding fascination, and Tatro talked to many people who had been captivated by the story, some of whom, such as Randolph historian Miriam “Mim” Herwig, and Eaton Snow, who owned the land on which the historic marker now stands, have since died.
“We need to know this is where he lived and this is the pasture the Morgan Horse roamed when Morgan brought him to Vermont,” Tatro wrote in his book. “We need to document it and we need to mark it so that further generations will be able to come to this location 200 years from now or longer.”
Like the Vermont home of Justin Morgan, the Morgan horse is “a secret hidden in plain sight,” Emerson said. He and other believers in what Kinney called “America’s oldest indigenous breed,” just want to make it a little more visible.
The event later this month will go some way toward that, in a year when many Morgan shows have been canceled. In addition to a social hour at 11 a.m., and the dedication of the marker at noon, Tatro has planned some trotting races at 1 p.m., where Morgan horses will give their utmost, as they long have done in the hills of Vermont.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
Clarification
Craig Russell, who was farming the piece of Randolph land on which the Justin Morgan homestead was located, said in 2019 that he didn’t want a historical marker recognizing the homestead on the property. His father, Charles Russell, owns the land, and later said he would have been happy to have the marker there. The source of the objection was unclear in an earlier version of this story.
