Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 June 1898 — AMERICA'S FIRST TROTTER. [ARTICLE]

AMERICA'S FIRST TROTTER.

He Was Imported from' England in the Year 1788. “One reason,” remarked the Colonel to a company of interested listeners, “that we raise better horses In Kentucky than are raised anywhere else on earth is that we not only hare the water that makes bone because of the lime that is in it, and the finest grass in the world, but we have all over the Blue Grass region, where the great horses come from, an elevation of a thousand feet and more above the sea, which gives just the right kind of air for a horse to breathe to become the right kind of a horse. Did you ever hear of a really great horse bred and born at sea level? “And speaking of horses,” continued the Colonel, “how many of you know when the first trotting horses—that’s the kind I take to market—made their appearance in this country*, or in any country for that matter? Of course, there have always been trotting horses, for that is the animal’s natural gait, but I mean trained trotting horses. Well, the father of trotting horses in the United States, and generally, for the trotting horse may be said to have originated in the United States, was Messenger, a thoroughbred, imported from England in 1788, at the age of 8 years, and for twenty years thereafter at the stud in the neighborhood of Philadelphia and New York. “He was a great horse with a long pedigree, which included some of the best English strains as well as Arabian, from which he probably took his color. He had a numerous progeny by thoroughbreds and cold-bloods, and almost Invariably these latter produced horses which showed the same trotting quality. It took some time, however, for the trotter to get off the road and divide turf attraction with the thoroughbred, but it was bound to come, and in the year 1818, ten years after Messenger’s death; the first public trotting race of which there is any record In the United States took place, when the gray gelding Boston Blue was matched to trot a mile in three minutes, a feat deemed at that time to be impossible. All the same, the gelding went the mile In less than three, though what the figures were nobody knows, as records were not kept then as they are now.”—Washington Star.