The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [10]
Constructed during boom times, these wedding-cake constructions that lined the North Shore encompassed libraries, grand ballrooms, and dining rooms that could seat scores at formal dinners—but by the 1950s, the old WASP fortunes, built around shipping and mercantilism, were fading. Estates once kept running by a cadre of servants had become too large to be maintained by a single family. Many were being shuttered, the properties broken up and sold for development.
Land of Clover had the good fortune to be spared intact when the mansion and grounds were purchased for use as a school for girls. Laced with scenic trails winding through piney woods that opened to reveal the gray waters of the sound, it was the ideal site for young girls who liked to ride horses. In this remote and sheltered place, the girls were educated in a splendid isolation, their lesson horses housed in a stable designed for rich people’s leisure.
In his eight years on earth, Snowman had pulled a plow, suffered neglect, and been given up for dog meat, then adopted by the de Leyers, nursed back to health, and turned into a riding horse. As he gazed out over the courtyard from his new digs, a roomy box stall in the grand stable of Land of Clover, the horse must have been struck by a sense of improbable wonder at his good fortune.
4
An Ordinary Farm Chunk
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1947 or 1948
In 1950, there were still six million horses in America, or one for every twenty-five people. By 1960, that number had declined by half. During that decade, the last family farms were mechanized, tractors replacing the plows that until then had tilled the smaller fields. The reduction of the equine population, which had begun in the 1920s, accelerated rapidly after World War II, declining from east to west, with the numbers dropping fastest along the eastern seaboard, except in specialized pockets, such as Amish Country, where horses were used because of religious and cultural preference. Some of the decline came by natural attrition—by the 1950s, the horse population was aging, with many old workhorses retired. Breeding of workhorses had also declined significantly, and along with it, the veterinary profession was shrinking so rapidly as to be in crisis: programs in veterinary medicine were closing their doors, and some journalists even predicted the demise of the entire profession. Farmland that had once been used to grow horse feed was being converted to other crops, creating surpluses that were one of the underlying elements in the severe drop in farm prices during the Depression, and again after World War II. As demand for horses dropped, farmers also lost income from breeding them, which had once provided a good source of additional cash. But even with reduced breeding and an aging population, by midcentury there was still an excess of horses—unwanted animals that were expensive to keep and care for.
In 1900, the value of all the horses and mules in the country exceeded that of all the cattle, sheep, goats, and hogs put together. States in the Mississippi Valley and the East tended to import horses—they produced only a small number of the horses that they needed. The rest were bred in the West, then shipped eastward through established distribution points. Starting after the Civil War, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, and Memphis had developed large horse markets. Different regions were known for different kinds of horses: draft horses were typically bred in the Midwest and the Northwest; most lighter-boned saddle horses were bred in the Southwest, as were the mules that powered the cotton economy of the Deep South. Horse dealers frequented auctions specializing in different categories. Some handled the massive and valuable draft horses.