Secretariat

James Hollis Chenery had no such visions. He was only sixteen years old when he started work at the dry goods store in Richmond. Sixteen years later, when he was thirty-two years old, Chenery married his second cousin—it was in the family tradition—Ida Burnley Taylor. They had six children, one of whom died young. Ida Chenery, a disciplinarian, pushed and raised and shaped them.

The oldest boy, William, went through journalism school and rose to be the editor of the Rocky Mountain News and then an editor at Collier’s magazine. A daughter, Blanche, attended the University of Chicago, married an advertising man, and settled down in Pelham Manor, New York, where practically the whole family wound up living at one time. The youngest boy, Alan Chenery, went through Richmond Medical School and became a urologist with a practice in Washington, D.C. Charlie, the only one of the children who did not go to college, eventually worked for his brother Chris. And there was Chris.

Christopher Tompkins Chenery became what he set out to become—a man of substance and horses and a part of the landed gentry. He was born in Richmond on September 19, 1886, but his parents soon moved to Ashland, north of Richmond and just south of The Meadow, where he acquired a feeling for the land and place that never left him.

Helen (Penny) Chenery Tweedy, Christopher Chenery’s youngest daughter, once wrote in a personal family history that poverty was a central emptiness in their lives:

The boys went barefoot from March first to October first to save their shoes. They did not have servants other than a cook, but they were too proud to admit it, so Chris would wait until after dark to carry the laundry in a wagon down to a colored washerwoman so the neighbors wouldn’t know. The best Christmas present was a tangerine in the toe of their stockings—a rare luxury. But they were a close family, fiercely fond of each other and fearful of insult…. Each of the boys grew up craving something—mostly to be relieved of poverty. Bill wanted books, Charlie, the third son, loved cards and girls, but Chris loved horses. A distant cousin, Bernard Doswell, still had a half-mile track at his place adjoining The Meadow, and when they weren’t out in Caroline, Chris would walk the seven miles to exercise the few remaining horses. He not only loved them, but they became a symbol to him of all the things he couldn’t have…. His mother kept his feet on the ground, however, and ruled him and his brothers with a magnificent and ladylike temper. If they got out of line, they spent a week in the yard or cut an extra cord of wood. There was no appealing for clemency or using boyish charm with her. She stiffened their spines and sent them out into the world with a great sense of family obligation.

The children shared their opportunities for education. Each boy was allowed to attend Randolph-Macon College in Ashland for two years, but was then expected to quit and work three years to allow another of the boys his two years of study. And that is what sent Chris Chenery into the mountainous terrain of West Virginia when still a boy of sixteen.

By then he had already finished two years of college at Randolph-Macon, and he had taken a job as a surveyor with an engineering party laying tracks for the Virginian Railroad, one of America’s largest lines of coal carriers. He worked there for three years, and when he left, in 1907, he took with him enough money to return to college, this time to study engineering at Washington and Lee. Scholastically, he behaved like a man possessed, poring over the texts, teaching a course in engineering, and pushing himself to the top of his class. By the time he graduated in 1909, he had acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a taste for wild adventure that sent him west, beyond the Appalachians to the Pacific. There he joined another engineering party that reconnoitered the uncharted interior of Alaska by pack train, looking for potential railroad routes from Cook inlet to the Yukon. The job involved surveying 600 miles of land in difficult weather. “It took two polar bears to live through one winter,” said turfwriter Charles Hatton, a friend of Chenery. The terrain was hazardous, the mosquitoes in the summer malevolent.

In idle moments Chenery read and reread the complete works of William Shakespeare and the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and in later years he quoted liberally from both, especially when he was with people educated in the arts and letters he had missed.

“When he got back to Oregon,” Penny Tweedy wrote, “he was quite a ‘hell-raiser’ and the minister’s daughter he wooed in Portland spurned him. Later he found her again in Chicago, and after two stormy, indecisive years they were married.” Her name was Helen Bates, and she descended from a long line of New England homeopaths who moved slowly from the east coast to the west, by way of Rochester, Minnesota. Helen Bates was pretty, resented her richer cousins’ hand-me-downs, and found a favorite uncle who sent her to Smith College. She went to Chicago to strike out on her own and improve herself, there married Chenery and left Chicago when America entered World War I:

Christopher “joined up” right after they were married in 1917. Helen did not relish living with her mother-in-law in Ashland. Mrs. Chenery had remarked, hearing that Chris was engaged to an Oregon girl, “I thought they only had barmaids out there.” But these two strong-minded women survived, and Chris survived the war—spent ignominiously teaching cavalrymen to ride at nearby Fort Belvoir.

Chenery left the service in 1918, and in the next decade he switched from engineering to finance and began one of those inexorable American climbs to the presidency of a string of utility companies. In 1927 he quickly became wealthy and began to acquire all the accoutrements of money and position and substance as they had been defined for him and as he had defined them for himself. He moved to Pelham Manor, New York, and founded the Boulder Brook Club—a riding club—in Scarsdale. He played some polo and fox hunted with the Goldens Bridge Hounds. He had an office in Manhattan. And he sent his children to good schools. Chenery was never a haughty man, never a man who flaunted his wealth, and he was enough of a romantic and sentimentalist to want to finally return to The Meadow.

One day, in 1935, he took his daughter Penny and his wife Helen to see a boarding school that Penny would attend in Washington, D.C. She would recall the day many years later, picture it as she and her father and mother drove south toward Richmond from Washington and bumped toward The Meadow, where he had spent summers as a youngster, toward Ashland where he had grown up and learned to know the country to which he was returning now:

We drove south for several hours that day, on narrow roads that went up and down like a roller coaster over countless hills. The brown winter woods and the sluggish creeks had a sameness that depressed me; they were so unlike the twisting roads and sudden vistas of my familiar New England, but I was excited to be going back to dad’s home—not really his, but his cousin’s, where he had spent his happiest summers.

Chenery drove farther south, toward the “wooded hills dropping down to deep-cut brown rivers, and wide old fields lying in between,” across the dirt roads climbing to a bridge, high and rickety, that delivered them from Hanover to Caroline County:

Here indeed were the broad fields of the farm, but they were sandy and bare of soil. The car climbed a hill with a commanding view of the river flats to find—a gas station, two old pumps and a shed along side the road. About two hundred yards behind it stood an unpainted three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house. It stood amid some handsome old trees but the ground around it was bare. A mongrel dog lay under the porch, the chickens pecked around the steps. My memory fills in tattered children and a few pigs, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

The car nosed into the drive and the yard. There was a silence, and Penny Tweedy recalled her father looking perplexed, then angry:

Still standing were a tall story-and-a-half building at one corner of the yard—the office, he fumed. At the other were two smaller shacklike structures, but with definite architectural details, which were the smoke house and the old kitchen. The remnants of a classic revival cupola capped the well house. Below, in a wide loop of the river, there had once been rich fields. Slave labor had built a dike around them to keep the river out, but after the Civil War, it was breached by high water, and the cove, as it was called, was now covered by an immense tangle of brush, trees and brambles. It had been overgrown even when dad was a boy, and he had heard stories of a runaway slave who lived down in there. No one had ventured down in many years.

Chenery stopped the car in the yard and climbed out, looking at the house and the trees and the land around it. He told his wife and daughter to remain in the car, warning them that the house might be full of lice. Chenery went inside, but he didn’t stay long. Moments later he walked back to the car. He said nothing as he slid inside and drove off to the house across the road. Penny wanted to ask him what The Meadow homestead was like inside, what it looked like, but she saw his expression and decided to say nothing at all. He bought The Meadow a year later.

Thus Christopher T. Chenery had repossessed his childhood, reclaiming some old hills and remembrances and a place to raise horses. But if there was some of the Gatsby romantic in him—something of a man trying to recapture his past—his brothers hardly shared his enthusiasm. They were against his buying back The Meadow, Penny said:

They thought Chris was crazy to buy it back—that was all behind them—and Virginia would never leave the shackles of its backward economy, especially rural Virginia. The Depression was easing, but the specter of poverty never left any of them.

But Chenery had made his money by stringing utilities together, and he was on his way to being a millionaire several times over again. By 1936, he had already been the president of the Federal Water Service Corporation for ten years, and that year he also became chairman and director of Southern Natural Gas Company. Deep in the Depression, Chris Chenery was making money and incorporating his holdings and sharing his stock with the family, and with the gold he set about in earnest to rebuild The Meadow.

He spent thousands of dollars making it a showplace, rebuilding and enlarging and refurnishing it:

He built stables for one hundred horses, a mile training track, breeding sheds, hay barns, and an office—the old one had been beyond repair. The poor country boy eventually spent his winters in Palm Beach buying at auctions the things that were symbols of wealth in his childhood. He first acquired oriental rugs, then turned to nineteenth-century paintings, and finally to jade.

He had earned what he was spending and what he owned. He had a contempt for idle people and for laziness, a disdain for dullness and the weak witted. Education was not what set men apart. What distinguished them was the intensity of the drive and the energy and imagination they possessed and used.

Politically, he was conservative, a staunch anti-Communist—or, as he would prefer to say, an anti-Bolshevik. Financially, he was bold but careful, and when he invested in thoroughbreds in the late 1930s he made small and what appeared to be insignificant acquisitions of blooded horses. “The price does not always represent what a horse is worth,” Chenery once said. “It is only what some fool thinks he is worth.”

Among his first purchases was a filly named Hildene, a daughter of the 1926 Kentucky Derby winner, Bubbling Over. He paid only $600 for her. “Hildene showed speed, but she tired badly eight times in eight races,” he said. So he retired her to the stud, and there she produced a family of some of the finest horses on the American turf.

Sometime during the Depression, when he was getting started in racing, Chenery acquired a set of jockey silks. They were some old silks that had been abandoned, no doubt discarded by some owner who went haywire for a decade and then dropped off into the perpetual twilight that came in October of 1929. The silks were snappy: white and blue blocks on the shirt, and blue and white stripes down the sleeves. And a blue cap.

CHAPTER 3

In the end it was the land that made them all—the land that raised the horses and made room for the people and supported the empires of chance they built on it.

It was blocked off in white and creosote fences and planted in clover and grass, a deep green shag rug that ran, as if unrolled, across a boundless countryside. The land is where the horses were born, on farms such as Hamburg Place in Kentucky, where still stands a single barn—a historic marker now—in which five Kentucky Derby winners were foaled: Old Rosebud (1914), Sir Barton (1919), Paul Jones (1920), Zev (1923), and Flying Ebony (1925). It is where the horses were raised and weaned, where they romped and grazed and grew to young horses on the racetrack. Some were returned to it as pensioners, many more to serve in studs and nurseries. A chosen few were buried on the land, the best beneath granite headstones chiseled in their names and, at times, in epitaphs rendered in the style of Boot Hill:

HERE LIES THE FLEETEST RUNNER

THE AMERICAN TURF HAS EVER KNOWN,

AND ONE OF THE GAMEST

AND MOST GENEROUS OF HORSES.

That is the epitaph on the monument of Domino, the “Black Whirlwind,” who was buried in 1897 in a grave outside of Lexington. There was no faster horse than Domino in the sprints—he was the Jesse Owens of his species in the Gay Nineties—and when they retired him to stud, he whirled the wind again as a progenitor. Domino died at six, twenty years too soon for a sire of his prepotency, and he left only twenty offspring from his duty as a stud horse, eleven daughters and nine sons. But among the sons was Commando, a horse who would strike his and his sire’s names into the pedigree charts of champions for many years. Through Pink Domino, a daughter, his name would surface often in the family trees of numerous racehorses, appearing in the distant collateral reaches of the bloodlines of many modern horses, including the colt Gentry delivered that night at The Meadow.

Domino was a phenomenon, a complete thoroughbred, sui generis. He remains today one of the few American racehorses in history who left the land and became one of the fastest horses of his era, then returned to it and made an even deeper imprint on the breed itself. Most thoroughbreds, in the days of Domino and since him, left the land and failed at the races—if they ever got to the races at all, which many did not—or they raced through careers of declining mediocrity. Many colts were gelded along the way, destroyed for a variety of reasons, sold for use as saddle horses or jumping or hunting horses, or hitched to wagons or rented out, by the hour, at livery stables everywhere.

Scores of stallions, coming off superior racing careers, failed as stud horses, some more ignominiously than others. Sir Barton, winner of the 1919 Triple Crown, failed to transmit much of his speed to his offspring, and he finished out his stud career at a cavalry remount station in Douglas, Wyoming. Grey Lag, one of the most gifted runners in the early 1920s—winner of the 1921 Belmont Stakes and the prestigious Brooklyn Handicap—was virtually sterile when sent to stud. Returned to the races at age nine, he had trouble beating horses that could not have warmed him up in his younger days. He was retired a second time, given away, and a few years later was discovered again, at the age of thirteen, running against cheap $1000 claiming horses in Canada. Harry F. Sinclair, who raced Grey Lag in his prime while leasing oil fields at Teapot Dome, was in no need of more adverse publicity. Quietly, he dispatched an agent to Canada, bought the horse, and retired him to his Rancocas Farm. Grey Lag never raced again, living out his life as a pensioner. The other famous impotent, 1946 Triple Crown winner Assault, did the same, as did many fine geldings, such as Exterminator and Armed.

But most of the horses sent back to the farms, the many fillies and mares and the few colts and horses, were pressed into the service of breeding enterprises, of large stud farms such as Hamburg Place and Himyar, Rancocas and Idle Hour and Calumet Farm. The fortunes of the farms and their owners, in some ways, ran with the fortunes of the horses and the bloodlines they produced. All of them would rise to prominence in their day, wane, reemerge, or die away. There is no great Himyar anymore, no flourishing Idle Hour since Colonel E.R. Bradley died, though the land still raises horses. Sinclair sold the last of the Rancocas horses in 1932, all but Zev and Grey Lag. Hamburg Place, once the showplace of American breeding, bred its last Derby winner, Alysheba, in 1984. And Calumet Farm is no longer the 1927 Yankees it was when Bull Lea filled the farm’s stable with so many high-classed runners, three Derby winners and all those nimble-footed tomboys. But what is behind them, behind all the young horses and the new owners and breeders of thoroughbreds, is the land.

While Christopher T. Chenery was piecing together the shards of his family homestead, the descendants of Richard J. Hancock emerged as the leading breeders of thoroughbreds in America. It had taken seventy years.

R. J. Hancock founded Ellerslie Stud and within ten years of the war had bought his first stallion, Scathelock, and his first broodmare, War Song. That was the start.

Hancock’s rise to prominence as a Virginia breeder actually began after he acquired the stallion Eolus from a Maryland breeder, swapping Scathelock in an even trade. The transaction revealed Hancock’s shrewd eye for horses. Eolus sired a number of winners, giving a measure of prestige to the Hancock name among Virginia horsemen. Among the best was Knight of Ellerslie, who not only won the 1884 Preakness Stakes, but also made a name as the sire of Henry of Navarre, the chestnut colt who battled Domino, the Black Whirlwind, in one of the most celebrated struggles in the history of the American turf. High-rolling Pittsburgh Phil bet $100,000 on Domino and calmly ate figs out of a bag as he watched the two horses struggle to a dead heat.

Eolus died three years later, in 1897, but by then Ellerslie had become a major thoroughbred nursery in Virginia, selling its yearlings every year at auction, buying and raising its own bloodstock. And by then, too, Richard Hancock’s son, Arthur, had graduated from the University of Chicago, a reedy young man, six feet six inches and 165 pounds, who came home in 1895 to be about his father’s business. He became his father’s assistant, attending yearling sales and doing his novitiate on the farm. And then, within one three-year period, a series of events occurred in Arthur Hancock’s life that enlarged its scope and potential, multiplying the possibilities open to him as a breeder.

In 1907, seeking a man without local ties or friendships, Senator Camden Johnson of Kentucky invited Hancock to judge a class of thoroughbreds at the Blue Grass Fair in Kentucky. Hancock accepted. While he was there, he met Nancy Tucker Clay, one of the many Clays of Bourbon County. Like the Harrises of Virginia, the Clays of Kentucky were landed gentry, owning lots of land, acres of some of the choicest real estate in the Blue Grass country. Nancy Clay and Arthur Hancock were married the following year, in 1908, fusing a family owning one of the finest estates in Virginia with another owning miles of rolling greenery in Kentucky.

In 1909, Arthur Hancock took over the operation of Ellerslie from his aging father.

In 1910, within a span of four days, Nancy Clay Hancock’s father and mother died. Nancy Hancock inherited 1300 acres of property in Paris, Kentucky, rich farmland set off Winchester Road. So the events of the year made Hancock the steward of two manors, and they left him an heir to his fortune and name. Earlier in the year, Nancy Hancock had given birth to a son, Arthur Boyd Hancock, Jr., a man whose influence on American bloodstock would one day exceed that of his father. Arthur Hancock, Sr., did not take long to coordinate the operations at Ellerslie and Claiborne Farm, the name they chose for the land in Paris. The Hancock stud at Ellerslie survived the horse-racing blackout of 1911–1912, when the sport was outlawed in New York during an outburst of moral fervor, but Hancock had to cut back the broodmare band to all but about twelve mares. Over the next twenty-five years, Hancock’s long climb to preeminence as a breeder began. He moved his family permanently to the Kentucky farm in 1912, a move suggesting that he knew Kentucky would one day be the home of thoroughbred breeding in America.

A year later he bought the stallion Celt, a son of Commando, for $20,000 in a dispersal sale at Madison Square Garden. Under Celt, the Hancock stud regained the vigor it possessed in the days of Eolus. Hancock’s interest in foreign bloodstock heightened when the prices dropped in Europe at the start of World War I. In 1915 he bought the English stallion, Wrack, for $8000 from Archibald Philip Rosbery. It marked Hancock’s first major acquisition of a foreign stallion, and it launched a breeding operation at Claiborne Farm, where Wrack was sent to stud. Barns were built near Kennedy Creek. Part of the land was fenced with planking. A grazing paddock was built for Wrack to loll away his idle hours. And the farm itself expanded, growing in size from 1300 to 2100 acres.

The Hancock studs flourished in the 1920s, grew in influence and prestige. In 1921, Celt was America’s leading thoroughbred sire in the amount of money won by his offspring, his fifty-two performing sons and daughters winning 124 races and $206,167 in purses. Hancock reached out for more foreign blood. His acquisition of foreign bloodstock reached its zenith in 1926, when he formed a four-man group—composed of Hanover Bank president William Woodward, Marshall Field, Robert Fairbairn, and himself—and bought Sir Gallahad III, a French stallion and a son of Teddy, for $125,000. Sir Gallahad’s impact at the stud was felt almost at once.

Bred his first year in America to Marguerite, a daughter of Celt, he sired Belair Stud’s Gallant Fox. “The Fox of Belair,” as he came to be known, won the Triple Crown in 1930, the second horse to do it. Sir Gallahad III was the leading American sire that year, with just sixteen offspring winning forty-nine races and $422,200, a record in purses that stood until 1942. He led the sire list three more times, his horses winning more than the horses sired by any other stallion.

Through the importation of the potent Teddy blood, through Sir Gallahad III and later his full brother, Bull Dog, American and other imported blood was freshened and invigorated. Sir Gallahad III’s influence became unusually pervasive in his role as a “broodmare sire,” so pervasive that he led the annual broodmare sire list for twelve years, ten years in a row, from 1943 to 1952. The broodmare sire list is a special category that singles out stallions whose daughters are exceptional producers. For twelve years the daughters of Sir Gallahad III produced racehorses that won more money than the racehorses produced by the daughters of any other sire. No horse in American history, before or since, ever dominated that list so long. He sired La France, dam of the 1939 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, Johnstown; and he sired Gallette, dam of champion handicap mare Gallorette; Fighting Lady, dam of the speedy Armageddon; and Black Wave, dam of the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner, Jet Pilot.

In 1936, Hancock was instrumental in bringing Blenheim II, the 1930 Epsom Derby winner, to America. Blenheim II cost an American syndicate $250,000. Among Blenheim II’s first sons to reach the races in America was Whirlaway, winner of the 1941 Triple Crown, the fifth horse to win it.

Hancock’s fortunes as a breeder soared. In 1935, horses bred by Hancock won more races—392—and more money—$359,218—than the horses bred by any other breeder. He led the breeder lists for the next two years. Hancock was not racing his homebreds. Following a policy adopted originally by his father in 1886, he sold his yearlings at auction every year. Through the years, he developed a reputation as a breeder knowledgeable about bloodlines, both foreign and domestic, who could recall in minute detail the distant reaches of a pedigree.