Randolph, Vermont: The Horse That Made a Breed

Randolph was chartered on June twenty-ninth, seventeen eighty-one, and named for Edmund Randolph, a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention, in a bid to earn that state's support for Vermont's admission to the union. The town had earlier been called Middlesex under a disputed New York patent.

But Randolph's most lasting contribution to American history is a horse. Justin Morgan was a schoolteacher who settled here and around seventeen eighty-nine acquired a bay colt he called Figure. The little horse proved extraordinary: he could outpull oxen, outrun thoroughbreds, and outlast any animal put against him. His descendants were so uniform in their exceptional qualities that they became recognized as a distinct American breed, the Morgan, named for the man who owned Figure. The Morgan became Vermont's official state animal in nineteen sixty-one. Randolph, a town of about four thousand seven hundred, recalls that legacy, and the University of Vermont Morgan Horse Farm carries the breed on across the mountains in Weybridge.