#52 Ancestors 2020 Week 24 Handed Down: My Cousins and the Maryland Horse Racing Tradition

My cousins, Samuel Ogle and Benjamin Tasker,  were instrumental in developing Maryland's tradition of Thoroughbred horse racing.

Samuel Ogle, the son of Samuel and Elizabeth Ogle, was born in England about 1694.  He was appointed as Maryland's Royal Governor in 1731. In 1741, he married Anne Tasker and had five children: Anne, Mary, Samuel, Benjamin, and Meliora.

Samuel's brother-in-law, Benjamin Tasker Jr., the son of Benjamin Sr. and Anne Bladen, was born in Annapolis in 1721.  He never married, but at the death of Governor Ogle in 1752, Tasker took on the care of his son and heir, Benjamin Ogle (later Governor himself). In 1743, Tasker built Belair Mansion for Ogle on a 7000 acre plantation in what is now Bowie MD.  There Ogle established the Belair Stud, a stable of Thoroughbred horses that would continue for more than 200 years, one of only two stables to have produced two Triple Crown winners: Gallant Fox (1930) and Omaha (1935).

Horse racing in the New World dates as far back as 1665, when New York's royal governor plotted a race track on Long Island.  Until the 1720's, racing was often a match between two wealthy country gentlemen, each convinced they had the faster horse. The men frequently rode their own horses, grabbing and punching at each other as they hurtled down a narrow path surrounded by fans trading bets.

In wealthy Annapolis, where the citizens were often said to be more British than the British, racing evolved into something a little less bawdy. There, in the early 1700's, the highlight of the social season was a week of parties and plays organized around a racing meet. 

The Maryland Jockey Club, the oldest chartered sporting club in North America, was founded in Annapolis in 1743, the same year that it held the first recorded formal horse race in Maryland.  Governor Ogle is credited with introducing the sport of Thoroughbred racing to America. The silver Annapolis Subscription Plate, second oldest trophy in America, was awarded to the winner.  George Washington frequently attended the Maryland Jockey Club racing meets.

The prestige and money associated with racing inspired the gentlemen to try to breed faster horses.  British soldiers had long told stories of the fabulous horses they had seen in the middle east.  So Arabian sires were imported into England and led to the development of a new breed--the Thoroughbred.  Soon these leaner, faster horses were imported to America, but of course only the wealthiest men could afford to pay for the grueling three-month trip across the rough Atlantic. Samuel Ogle, the royal governor of Maryland, and his brother-in-law, Benjamin Tasker, were two of the first to import thoroughbreds. Ogle imported "Queen Mab" the famous English brood mare, and "Spark" a blooded stallion originally owned by Frederick, Prince of Wales and given to Ogle by Lord Baltimore.  (Among his other livestock at Belair,  Ogle kept a buffalo.) 

The Godolphin Arabian

Now, Tasker's Thoroughbred was a mare named Selima; her sire was the Godolphin Arabian, one of the three Middle Eastern horses that had started the Thoroughbred breed. (Many of America's most famous horses--Sea Biscuit, Man o' War--trace their lineage back to the Godolphin Arabian.) Selima was born in England in 1745 and shipped to Maryland in 1750. Her most famous race was in 1752.

  

William Byrd III, son of William Byrd of Westover (founder of Richmond), and member of the Virginia House of  Burgesses, was a notorious gambler.  He would bet on practically anything.  In 1752, he was dying to show off his new horse and score a big gambling win; plus, running a horse in a big race would be another way to emphasize his prominence.  He put up 500 pistoles (Spanish trading currency, a fortune big enough to furnish a sizeable mansion) for any horse to race against his horse Tryal.   His flamboyant challenge resulted in the first significant Thoroughbred race in America, what some historians have called "the most important race of the colonial era." 

 John Tayloe, another wealthy Virginian put up 1000 pistoles and entered two of his Thoroughbreds.  Another Virginian, Francis Thornton, entered his mare, and Benjamin Tasker sent word from Maryland that he would race his mare Selima. And thus was set up an epic five-horse, four-mile contest worth 2500 pistoles, at a time when a winning horse usually won about 30 pistoles.

Belair

Tasker's decision to enter Selima aroused regional passions as Maryland's owners and breeders believed their racing was vastly superior to Virginia's.  So Selima's race took on great symbolic value. Selima had been trained at Belair for two years, had already won her first race, and at seven years old was in her prime racing form. She was described by one racing historian as "one of those majestic matriarchs whose greatness is monumental."

Even after walking 150 miles to the race in Virginia, Selima bested Byrd's horse and of course won a great victory for the honor of Maryland racing. There is no record of her winning time, but other winning horses of the era covered four miles in about eight minutes. 

The Virginians were outraged and banned Maryland horses from racing in Virginia henceforth. Maryland breeders got around that by taking their pregnant mares to Virginia to deliver, thus making their offspring technically Virginia-born.

Selima retired after that race with a perfect two-for-two record.  As a broodmare, she produced ten sons and daughters, nine of whom were spectacular racers. Her most famous son was Selim, a temperamental bay foaled at Belair in 1759.  Sold as a yearling to Samuel Galloway, proprietor of the Tulip Hill estate in Galesville, Anne Arundel County (and another cousin of mine), Selim began competing at age 4 and never lost until he was 9, continuing with very few defeats until retiring at age 13. In his greatest victory, a virtual replay of his dam's finest moment, he defeated a Virginia-bred horse in 1766 when the local gentry raised 100 pistoles to lure "the two most famous horses on this continent" into a race.

Benjamin Tasker went on to be Mayor of Annapolis in 1754 and was friends with Benjamin Franklin, who visited him at Belair. Tasker died at Belair in 1760.  His nephew Benjamin Ogle went on to be Maryland's governor from 1798 to 1801.

William Byrd, by the way, continued to breed Thoroughbreds but never participated in another major race.  He died by suicide, deeply in debt, in 1777 at the age of 48.

My family's interest in horse racing was evident even in the 20th century as my uncle Robert Summers was instrumental in the return of Thoroughbred racing to the Marlboro Race Track  He was the owner of Maplehurst Farms, a Prince George's County MD stable and president of the Marlboro Hunt Club at the time of his death in 1991.