Justin Morgan and the Horse That Made a Breed

In the early seventeen nineties, a Vermont schoolteacher and singing master named Justin Morgan acquired a small, plain-looking bay colt in West Springfield, Massachusetts, reportedly as partial settlement of a debt. He brought the colt back to Vermont, where he worked as a farm horse and was available for hire. Nobody paid the colt much attention at first. He stood about fourteen hands tall, which was modest even by the standards of the era.

Then people started racing him, and the colt kept winning. He outpulled horses twice his size in weight-hauling contests. He beat taller, longer-legged horses in running races. He worked all day in the fields and won a race the same evening. Vermont farmers began to notice.

The colt was called Figure, but he would eventually be known by the name of his owner: Justin Morgan. He lived to be about thirty-two years old, which was extraordinary, and before he died he had sired a large number of offspring that all seemed to carry the same traits: compact size, exceptional strength relative to body weight, stamina, and a particular gentleness of temperament that made them easy to work. Those traits bred true, generation after generation, in a way that was unusual enough to be remarked on by horsemen throughout New England.

The Morgan became a breed defined by a single foundation sire. The Morgan Horse Register, established in eighteen ninety-four, traced virtually every registered Morgan back to Figure. The breed served in the Civil War on both sides, carried the mail over mountain roads in New England, and became the workhorse of the Vermont hill farm for more than a century.

The University of Vermont maintains the UVM Morgan Horse Farm in Weybridge, about two miles from Middlebury, where Morgans have been bred continuously since the federal government established a Morgan horse farm there in nineteen oh seven. It is the oldest Morgan breeding operation in the world. In nineteen sixty-one, the Morgan was named the official state animal of Vermont. The horse is still associated with Vermont the way the longhorn is associated with Texas, an animal so completely identified with the landscape that it becomes hard to picture the place without it.