The Thoroughbred and Bluegrass Horse Country

The grass that gives the Bluegrass Region its name is not actually blue. It is a cool-season grass thought to have come to North America with early European settlers, and for about two weeks each spring, its seed heads flush with a faint blue-purple that, from a distance, over rolling hills, reads as a blue haze. That is the moment Kentucky writers reach for.

The rest of the year it is simply rich, deep green. What makes the Bluegrass exceptional for horses is what lies beneath. The Ordovician limestone base enriches the soil with calcium.

Horses raised on that calcium-rich ground were long said to grow hardier, with denser bones. The science has been contested and refined over the decades, but the practical result has been consistent: horses raised in central Kentucky have dominated Thoroughbred racing for two hundred years. The Thoroughbred breed itself derives from three foundation stallions imported to England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Arabian.

The first importation to the American colonies came in seventeen thirty, and after the Revolution the horse culture of Virginia planters migrated west across the Wilderness Road. By eighteen hundred, Lexington and its surrounding counties were already established as the center of American Thoroughbred breeding. The Kentucky Derby, run at Churchill Downs in Louisville every year since eighteen seventy-five and now held on the first Saturday of May, became the first jewel of what would eventually be called the Triple Crown.

The Derby's modern distance of a mile and a quarter, the roses draped over the winner, the mint juleps in the stands, all of it accumulated over generations into one of the most fully realized ritual occasions in American sport. The horse is the emblem of an entire region's self-understanding.