Elmendorf Farm: The Bluegrass Estate That Fed the World's Racetracks
Near Lexington, Kentucky
Kentucky's Bluegrass region is horse country, and among all the storied farms that line these limestone-rich pastures, Elmendorf has one of the longest and strangest histories of any of them.
The farm was established in eighteen seventy-four by Milton Sanford, a New York banker who purchased five hundred forty-four acres and devoted them to Thoroughbred breeding. He named the operation Preakness Stud after his champion horse Preakness, the same animal for whom the Preakness Stakes was named. When Daniel Swigert bought the farm in eighteen eighty-one, he renamed it Elmendorf after his wife's grandmother, a Dutch family name from the Hudson Valley.
Under Swigert, Elmendorf produced a remarkable run of horses: Kentucky Derby winners Baden-Baden and Ben Ali, the great Hindoo, and the celebrated filly Firenze, among others. But the most dramatic chapter came when James Ben Ali Haggin acquired the property in eighteen ninety-seven.
Haggin was already fabulously wealthy, having made fortunes in California gold and copper mining. He brought that appetite for scale to Fayette County. Over the following years he bought up neighboring farms until Elmendorf had grown to nearly nine thousand acres, the largest consolidated Thoroughbred breeding operation in the world at the time. He kept close to two thousand horses, built a private power plant and grain elevator, stood forty-three stallions simultaneously, and produced between two hundred and four hundred yearlings every year. He invested more than two million dollars in the farm at a time when that sum could build a small city.
Haggin died in nineteen fourteen and the estate was broken up. Later owners included Joseph Widener, who continued the breeding tradition. The farm changed hands several more times across the twentieth century.
Elmendorf still operates today, considerably smaller than Haggin's empire but on the same limestone ground that made it exceptional in the first place. The stone pillars at the entrance off Iron Works Pike are about all that remains to suggest the sheer industrial scale of what horse breeding once looked like in the Bluegrass.
