 Welcome to the 90th annual meeting of the Brookfield Historical Society. This is the first time in three years that we've been able to meet in person due to, you know what, I won't mention the name. And we are very grateful, at least I am, to be able to once again meet with friends and neighbors and break bread together. Before I proceed I might explain that this is being recorded by ORCA, which is the Onion River Community Access. That's it it is. Yes, and so if you have some reservations about being recorded or having the back of your head photographed you should raise your hand or maybe we can move, move you. So the program, this evening's program will run like this. First of all we have to have, necessarily have to have a business meeting which will be very, very short or I'll get into trouble with Terry Kasich. And that will be followed by the presentation by our guest Amanda Guston on Justin Morgan's horse. I'm sure that that's the primary reason why you're here, not the business meeting. And then after the business meeting, after Amanda's presentation we'll have the potluck supper. If you didn't know about the potluck or weren't able to bring anything, don't worry, there's plenty of food for everyone. And we hope that all of you can join us, break bread together. I'd like to, before we conduct an election of trustees, I'd like to run through the highlights of activities during the past year. First of all, by pointing out that after two years of what might be called intensive, intensive effort, concerted effort on the part of many volunteers, a major restoration project was completed in the historic Marvin Newton House. That work involves the central hallway and four of the rooms, four of the exhibition rooms. It involved pretty extensive plaster restoration. It involved ceiling, whitewashing. It involves painting. It involves wall papering. And before the grand opening that revealed all of these improvements, grand opening last August on the occasion of the ice cream social, all of the exhibit rooms had been reconfigured and a number of new exhibits had been installed. And all of this work depended heavily upon volunteers. And I'd like to quickly identify and express appreciation to these volunteers. This is in no particular order. And if you want to read the details about this in the curators report, you're welcome to take one of these newsletters. You're also welcome to join the society if you're not a member. And if you do join as a new member, you get the latest history of Brookfield free. Otherwise, it's $15. So here's a listing, a quick listing of the volunteers to whom we're so grateful. And again, this is in no order, no special order. Skip Buck and Elaine Mangy Buck, Sarah Isham, Alexis McLean, Greg White should be cited for his indefatigable efforts at painting trims and mullions, measuring and cutting picture rails and repairing windows. Charlie Blue, raise your hand, Charlie. Charlie is appreciated for a single-handedly wallpapering three of the restored rooms. And you're not for hire, are you, Charlie? Others include Pat Mayer, Lukina Andriev, Blake and Melanie Riddle, Jeremiah Kemberling, Ilya Andriev, Dmitry here, should be congratulated for painting and hanging picture rails, scouring Rostov ornate stoves, roping beds and creating ingenious solutions for display problems. Amy Borgman should receive appreciation for her tireless work and updating records with object locations and cataloging collections. The person I haven't mentioned, though, yet is Rachel Andriev, our curator. Rachel was really the primary force in bringing all of this together to a successful conclusion. And finally, I might mention our two summer interns, Samantha Flint, who's now a student at the Vermont State University at Castleton, and Riley Langdon, who attends Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. They were responsible for carrying out numerous projects during the course of the summer. And they infused us with what might be called youthful energy. And they were a source of fresh perspectives, and we hope that they will return as interns this coming summer. I want to mention public outreach projects that were conducted in the course of the last year. The annual, actually, this was the 20th annual ice out contest that occurred last spring. We were involved also with the History 252 Project. There are 252 towns in Vermont. This is a project initiated by the Vermont Historical Society, and they asked each town that could respond to offer them a story, an interesting and unique story about their community. And so the Brookfield Historical Society presented a story entitled, Brookfield's Public Library, Vermont's oldest public library in continuous operation. Again, the Historical Society mounted a photographic exhibit in Hippo Park, and that should come down soon, and that has its central theme, the history of farming in Brookfield. And complimenting this display was an exhibit that was mounted in the Marvin Newton House, the Brookfield Historical Society, an exhibit consisting of agricultural implements that were drawn from the society's collection. And also related to the farming theme was a program presentation by Keith Sprague on the history of dairy farming in Brookfield, before a packed audience in the Old Town Hall. And I should add that this presentation was made in conjunction with the Brookfield Community Partnership. The last projects that I want to mention involve the garden, the Newton House garden, and wall, retaining wall on the south side of the house. The ongoing improvement of the Newton House gardens is under the direction of Sid McClam, who's the project coordinator who serves as an agent, I suppose you would say, of the UVM University of Vermont Extension Master Gardener program. And Sid managed, Sid here, Sid managed to enlist an enthusiastic core of volunteer gardeners that I'd like to mention by name. They included Nicole Conti, Master Gardener, Holly Dustin, Sterling Giles, Sarah Isham, Linnea and Ron Leperle, Elaine Mangie Buck, Liz Parker, Master Gardener, and Barbara Paulson, Master Gardener. Finally, the retaining wall. Some of you have no doubt noticed the work in progress in reconstructing the retaining wall on the south of the Marvin Newton House by Andy Lake. That work was interrupted by the flood in July because the flood inundated Andy's house and he had to switch his focus. So I would say it's probably almost two-thirds complete. Let's go to the election of officers. There are five, there's a slate of five people who have been nominated for election to the Society's Board and one of them, Sid McClam, is presented for a first term. The other four, Pat Mayer, Perry Kasich, Elaine Mangie Buck, and Sarah Isham are slated for re-election. They've been nominated for re-election. And with this, I'd like to combine the nomination of Eleanor Gray as Trustee Emerita. Eleanor has been on the board since 2008 and she's been invaluable for her vast store of local history knowledge, she's not only a historian but a very knowledgeable genealogist as well. And we're hoping that as she moves to emerita status that she can continue to serve as a resource for consultation on local history matters and also genealogy. So that's the slate. Those six people that I have identified who have been nominated for the positions that I have identified, I'd like to call for emotion to move that slate of officers. Is there a second? Second. Second. Holly, thank you. Discussion, hearing none. All of those in favor of the motion to accept the slate of officers as proposed. Say aye. Aye. All opposed. Business done. The presentation by Amanda Gustin that you're going to hear or see shortly is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities through the Speakers Bureau program. Vermont Humanities in addition to providing public talks, literacy programs and other humanities events statewide seeks to engage all Vermonters in the world of ideas and foster a culture of thoughtfulness and inspire a lifelong love of reading and learning. Amanda Gustin has been extraordinarily patient. Not today, but she's been extraordinarily patient as a prospective speaker before the Brookfield Historical Society. Because between April of 2020 and October of 2022, we tried five times to lure her here. And she agreed to come, but you know what, intervene. The word that I won't mention because it might appear again if I do. So finally, here she is in Brookfield. Amanda is a graduate of Middlebury College where she earned degrees in history and French with distinction. She attended the Tufts University Master of Arts program in history and museum studies. And while she was a graduate intern there, well, she was a graduate intern at Old Sturbridge Village while a graduate student. And after that, she served as a researcher in the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. And then subsequently joined the staff of the Vermont Historical Society first as public programs coordinator. And now she is director of collections. And there's something else. And access. Yes. I'm not sure what that means, but director of collections and access. Yes. So let's welcome after three years of waiting. I hope I live up to that three years of hype. I'm going to do the very helpful what slide is next thing. And you will appreciate that I live in Berry City and it's been a very long summer. So I will take whatever visual aid I can get. Briefly collections and access because at the Vermont Historical Society part of our philosophy is that collections should always be available and accessible to the public. So we wanted to build that right into the department title that is a newish department for us that for the first time in the societies nearly 200 year old history combines our museum and archival and library collections under one department. They had previously been separate departments managed by separate people. And now they are they are all together. It's not like we didn't talk to each other before, but now we are now we are truly integrated. So thank you for that for that very kind introduction, Gary. I appreciate it. And thank you all for having the continued interest to keep asking me to be here. Despite the many obstacles of this very busy last three years, I got home from work a couple of days ago and I walked in the house and I said to my husband, I would like to go back to studying history instead of living through it, please. I am sick of all of this. So today I'm going to present to you on what is actually a piece of personal research. I do quite a lot of research for topics for the Vermont Historical Society. They're not always topics I choose. Why I'm currently the state's expert in auto racing history in the state of Vermont, which was a topic, frankly, given to me, but that I did fall in love with. It's one of the perks of my job. This topic is one that has been near and dear to my heart since my second grade teacher gave me a copy of Justin Morgan Had a Horse, which is probably a book familiar to many of you. I was always a horse crazy little kid, always desperately wanted a horse as an adult. My very first job after college was for the Middlebury College collections, Special Collections and Archives, where I was making the incredible salary of $18,000 a year and promptly bought my own horse. So this sort of combines two of my very favorite things, which are horses and history and, well, three, if you include Vermont. So what we're going to talk about today, I structured that title very specifically. And then Historical Society's membership is a great audience for this talk, because sometimes I go out and it's like a public library and it's an audience full of horse people who just want fun horse stories. And there's some of that in here. But really what I want to do with all of you today is talk to you about how we understand history, how we record history, how we create history and create meaning from history. Because this horse's story is much more complicated than just there was a horse and he did interesting things. And I'm going to make it more complicated for you all as we go through today. So that's why my first slide is a bunch of books, which I like the look of it, but it does make me cringe to have them block side down a little bit. So what I want to start with you by saying something, some of which a lot of you already know, which is that a lot of the ways in which we do history rely on documentary evidence. This is often what Glenn's credence to the phrase history is written by the winners. The people who wrote down history, whether their own or someone else's, are often the people who got a say in what was history and whose voices were heard and how we understood a certain place or time or event. And a lot of the work of history involves seeing between the lines or some people describe that as reading against the grain of an historical account. There may be an incredibly important event or moment in history for which we only have one person's short account. So you have to piece together that history in other ways. This is a lot of what leads to a lot of the really useful and thoughtful conversations now about telling the history of people who over the course of history have been marginalized for whatever reason. They are not necessarily people who wrote down their own histories or who were noticed by the people writing history. So it's a tricky thing. You have to think of different ways to tell those stories and you have to think creatively about sources. I'm giving you that brief historiography 101 lecture to get you to how difficult it is to tell the history of an animal. This horse was not writing down his own history. His history was being written by the people around him. He did not have his own voice necessarily. I mean, those of us who are involved with horses know they have very clear opinions on things. They're just not necessarily written down in history books in the same way. And which is why we're going to start our story of the first Morgan horse, a stallion named Figur, with these two gentlemen, both of whom lived and worked between 30 and 50 years after this first horse died. So on the left hand side there we have a man named Daniel Chipman Linsley. Linsley grew up in Middlebury, Vermont. Actually both of them grew up in Middlebury, Vermont in a total coincidence. Linsley grew up in Middlebury from a very distinguished Welloff family, trained as an engineer and went west to work on the railroads, which at the time in the 1840s meant Ohio. And while he was out there in Ohio, he kept noticing these amazing horses. And they were all of a certain type and he was just deeply impressed by them. And he said, tell me about these horses. And I said, dude, you're from Vermont. These are Morgan horses. How do you not know about Morgan horses? And it turned out he didn't. But when his contract was up in Ohio, he came home to Middlebury and he had become by this point so obsessed that he devoted the next couple of years of his life to writing the first ever history of Morgan horses and the first Morgan horse. And he, those of you who have read 19th century histories know they don't always like hold to the same standards that we would necessarily write a history book today, which means that the way he learned about this horse was he wrote letters to everyone he could think of and scoured newspaper articles and then just printed it all. He wasn't necessarily saying, I find this account more credible because he really just was dumping it all in there, which means that we get all sorts of possibilities on the Morgan horse story in Linsley's book. But he did that important work of getting capturing some of those voices. He's doing this work 35 years after the very first Morgan horse died, which means that the people who have active memory of this horse, that active memory is 40 or 50 years old potentially at this point or even longer. The other thing that Linsley does and one of the things I'm going to ask you to think about today is that he does the very first writing down of a kind of proto stud book for the Morgan horse breed. Think about what you think of when you think of a breed of horse, dog, sheep, cow, you know, whatever the animal is. Today we have a pretty clear conception of what we mean by a breed of animal. We mean that it has certain physical characteristics that it shares in common with other types of that breed, but we also mean that there is a certain exclusivity to that animal, that it has been bred with others of its breed and that that has been written down and carried forward. And usually there are breed associations that keep that information. No one had been doing that for the Morgan horse before Linsley sat down to start to track some of these early horses. So in essence it wasn't really a breed yet and really this is about the moment when the 19th century conception of a breed of animal is just starting to form. We're talking good 150 years of evolution of how we think of a breed of animal. So he does those two very, very, very important things. Joseph Battelle on the right-hand side, if you've ever driven through Middlebury, every third thing is named after him. He picks up this work about 30, 40 years later, reprints some of a lot of what Linsley had gathered about the first Morgan horse, adds a little bit of extra information of his own, but where he really takes it to the next level is he ends up publishing seven volumes of studbook. He does an incredible amount of research tracking down those first generation sons and daughters of this first Morgan horse. So take away from these two things, the Morgan horse breed is a kind of nebulous thing that coalesces over the course of the 19th century. And as it does, so too does the myth of the first Morgan horse and also that no one was doing the primary source work really to research and learn about this first Morgan horse until between 30 and 50 years after it had died. That's hard enough to do for a human who left a diary. It is really difficult for a horse, which is why you're going to hear me doing a lot of describing the ways we learn about the horse today or the ways we know about this horse today. So now we're going to jump back in time. This is just meant to be an illustration for you. This is a view towards West Springfield, Massachusetts in the middle part of the 18th century, which is about when a young man named Justin Morgan was born in West Springfield. He was one of, I believe, it's 17 children, enormous family, and a lot of cousins. His father had been one of many Morgans. There were a lot of Morgans all around. So he's born into a large farming family in West Springfield. As a young man, he goes into farming himself. His first real appearance in the historical record is when he purchases part of his father's barn, the rights to cross the barn yard, and a portion of land a little further away, which kind of tells you how crowded the family lands in West Springfield were, and also some interesting stuff about agricultural economics, but that's not today's topic. So Justin Morgan appears in the historical record early on as a farmer. He purchases land or trades land with family and with neighbors. He marries a cousin of his named Martha Day and they begin to start a family in West Springfield. He does a couple of other things to earn money. He is briefly a tavern keeper because West Springfield is on some major roads at this time. We're not talking like anything big. We're talking like his house stood near some roads and he would offer drinks to people as a stagecoach stop or on the way, but he was selling liquor. Another thing that he did, which is relevant to today's talk, is that he started making a little bit of money and there's a fun vocab word for you, a stallionier, which is the term for someone at the time. We don't use it as much anymore, who would have been standing an ungelded male horse or a stallion at stud, and this was his business, and this was a lot of people's business at the time. Then as now, most horse people do not keep their own stallions for breeding. They are not easy animals to manage. And also, there is an understanding that you need to share genetics and need to spread genetics. So Justin Morgan and other stallionnaires like him would trade stallions regionally. He might be officially leasing a stallion from someone else, basically paying rent for the year to someone else. He might buy a stallion. We have evidence that he did a little bit of both over the course of this time. And he would do that with different stallionnaires, different men who were just making a little extra money on the side by doing this. They would advertise the stallion, and that's what you see here. This is an advertisement for a stallion. I'm sorry, it's a bad scan of a very old newspaper. But he's advertising here a dapple gray stallion named Sportsman. We'll cover this season at Justin Morgan's Stable in West Springfield. Dropping in newspaper advertisements saying come to me, pay a little bit of money, get your mare spread. Very common business at the time. Sometimes you look at a newspaper from this time and there's a whole page of stallion advertisements of people making money this way. And you can see stallions move around the region through these advertisements. So this is relevant because of this stallion advertisement that Justin Morgan places in April of, and I apologize, the year has gotten cut off and I'm blanking on the memory. I think it's like a 1787 as I think the date. It's late 1780s for sure. This is a stallion advertisement for a stallion named Beautiful Bay. The elegant full-blooded horse called the Beautiful Bay will cover this season at Justin Morgan's Stable in West Springfield, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is important because this is the stallion most agree to be the sire of that first Morgan horse figure, Beautiful Bay. And this is also where one of my favorite myths or stories about this first horse comes from. There are a couple of reasons we believe this stallion to be the sire of this first Morgan horse. One is that Morgan himself later says, oh, he was sired by Beautiful Bay. But he could have also been, like, exaggerating. And that's probably the best reason. But one of the stories that is told about this horse is that he was originally owned by a colonel in the British Army during the Revolutionary War and that he was stolen from that colonel and secreted away to Connecticut where he started his breeding career as a thoroughbred breeding stallion in Connecticut and was renamed Beautiful Bay. Some say his original name was True Britain. So True Britain to Beautiful Bay. I think this is like an equine superhero origin story in the 18th century. Like, is there a better lineage for the horse that is going to become the quote-unquote all-American horse than his father was stolen from the dastardly British and renamed from True Britain to Beautiful Bay and promptly become a real American horse? I went into the thinking, that's ridiculous. I mean, I love it, but it's ridiculous. And it turns out that Colonel James Delancey, who was supposed to have owned the sire, actually did have a horse stolen from him that was actually taken away to Connecticut. So there's a little grain of truth there. Most sources agree that horse was a gelding named Goliath, not a stallion named True Britain. But you can see there's a little bit of something there that you can sort of hang a hat on. And again, what a great origin story for this horse. So this is how I'm going to tell a lot of these stories about this horse. Like, there's a little grain of something there. But what's most important is the sort of shape of the story it gives to this horse. So one of the other ways that Justin Morgan is earning money, and I'm going to take a brief aside into this, because it's one of the other things that people know about him, is that he is serving as a singing master or a singing teacher in western Massachusetts. By singing master, I think when I was little in reading Justin Morgan Had a Horse, I was picturing he was coaching opera singers. It's not what we mean here. We're talking about essentially a travel inquire director. He's going from church to church, teaching new hymns to the choirs there, coaching them a little bit on it, having the repeat phrasings and things like that. He might have directed the choir for a Sunday service or two as well. And he also composed his own work. We know of Seven Extant Hymns by Justin Morgan. There were probably more, but it was not common to sign your name to hymns when they were published in big compendiums at the time. So for sure he signed his name to seven of them that we do still have today and that we know of today. He may have also signed others that were lost. They have largely fallen out of favor. When you think of the style of this hymn, think a little bit more like shape note singing that we might think of as a more contemporary church hymn. And that's part of why he was teaching them. These are not necessarily like, you wouldn't have learned he's from sheet music necessarily. You would have learned them by singing them with your choir. It's going to be quiet, but I have a short video that plays a little bit of a taste of a Justin Morgan hymn next and I encourage you strongly to Google for Justin Morgan's hymns. There's a bunch of them that have been recorded and are up on YouTube and they're really quite beautiful. This next one is my favorite, not only because it's named Amanda, but it is really quite lovely. Sorry, sometimes it goes wonky. Okay, Google Justin Morgan's hymns. Go to YouTube. It's going to be very quiet anyway. And you'll get a sense of the kind of music he was writing. It's sort of incidental to this story. I would also note that there was a phenomenal UVM historian named Betty Bandel who wrote a really good biography of Justin Morgan that's incredibly refreshing and that she so clearly does not care about the horse at all. She's really interested and invested in his career as a singing master, as a composer and as a religious man and as a teacher. And sorry, so she treats his hymns very thoroughly, but even within that one of her clear theses of that book is that he made throughout his career most of his money farming. The singing master work was always sort of what we would call today a side hustle. It was just a little bit of extra money for him to add on to farming at the time. I'm glad to hear that. They're really wonderful. There's also a phenomenal orchestral cover of this same hymn. That's just, I just put it on like in repeat sometimes when I'm in study mode. It's really beautiful. Oh, no one is going to play. Okay, alright, sorry, I lied to you. There we go. Okay, it goes on for a while. So that'll give you a sense of his music. He probably wrote this one shortly after his wife's passing. I don't know, you probably couldn't understand the lyrics, but death's like an overflowing stream leaves us awake, life's a dream. It's really kind of a sad song, a sad hymn. In the late 1780s, Justin Morgan makes a significant life change. Just mentioned Randolph. He is going to move from West Springfield to Randolph Vermont. Very close to where we are now, probably on the Randolph Brookfield border. This is a big leap, but it's not that far out of the realm of possibility. A couple of his brothers had already moved from West Springfield. And remember, there were a lot of them. Had already moved from West Springfield to Randolph. And at this time, right, this is a late 18th century, Vermont is seen as the quote unquote frontier of New England. He went from a portion of a barn, the right to cross the barnyard, to his own actual acreage in Vermont, because land was significantly less expensive. It was also full of rocks and trees. So it's hard work to farm. It's still hard work to farm in Vermont. But it's especially hard work at this time period. And I do have to note that although this part of the world was perceived as the unoccupied frontier free for the taking, it was, of course not. It had been historically inhabited by the Abnaki people. And that is a whole nother talk on the early settlement of Vermont that we can do. But I do have to mention it. The Vermont he thought he was coming to was very much one that was promulgated as an open free for the taking Vermont. So he moves to Randolph, Vermont. And he sort of moves his family slowly. He goes up. He works on the land for a little while. He goes back to West Springfield. He brings his wife and children there. He's going to go back to West Springfield a few times to take care of business and things like that. But he is actively farming his own land in Randolph. And in the meantime, while he's making this move, we see this newspaper advertisement appear. This is the first stallion advertisement for the horse that will become known as the Morgan Horse. Advertising figure, a beautiful bay horse, 15 hands high and at the bottom there, you'll notice he is being advertised by a man named Samuel Whitman in Hartford, Connecticut. So we don't entirely know how this happens, but we're pretty sure this is the same horse for a couple of reasons. The name and physical description match, although figure is not an unthink, figure is like a fine figure of a horse. It's not the most original name ever. So a couple of things lead us to believe this is the same horse. The timing works out, the name and physical description match. Samuel Whitman and Justin Morgan had previously both advertised the same stallions, so we believe there was a business connection between the two men they had traded stallions back and forth. And Hartford, Connecticut is actually pretty close to West Springfield, and horses that Justin Morgan had advertised had gone back and forth. He had gotten horses from Hartford, he had sent horses to Hartford. So there is a geographical sense there. So we believe this to be, the horse would have been two years old at the time and starting his stud career. And we're going to jump forward to April of 1793. This is the first time that Justin Morgan and the horse that would eventually bear his name are officially linked together in the historical record. This is a stallion advertisement from April 1793 for the famous horse figure from Hartford in Connecticut. There's another reason we think it's the same one. He is standing in Randolph in Lebanon, New Hampshire. You can either pay in cash or a grain at the cash price. Said horse's beauty, strength and activity, the subscriber flatters himself. The curious will be left satisfied to come and see. And he's being advertised by Justin Morgan in April of 1793. So what happened in the meantime? There are a number of different stories about how Justin Morgan came into possession of this horse. The popular story, the one that's retold in Margaret Henry's book, is that he collected this horse in payment for a debt on one of his trips back to West Springfield from Vermont. That certainly is told a couple of times in the contemporary accounts. He may have always owned the horse. If he did in fact breed this horse, which most people believe he did, he may have simply left it in West Springfield, leased it out to Samuel Whitman in an inverse of the same relationship he's had with Whitman in the past, so that he didn't have to worry about dealing with that while he was making this big move from Massachusetts to Vermont. He may have sold the horse and then bought the horse back. We actually don't know. What we do know is that they officially, legally, does come into possession of this horse in Vermont about a month before this advertisement. And why we know is one of those fun little history bits because that winter, the Vermont State Legislature had passed a law requiring you to report as part of your grand list accounting of property any breeding stallions that you owned at a certain prescribed legal value. Today we mostly think of the grand list as like your house and they added breeding stallion because that was a valuable economic commodity. So we see Justin Morgan faithfully reports that his grand list personal property value jumps by the precise amount of a breeding stallion in the spring of 1793 and then shortly afterwards he is advertising figure at stud. Now at one point people were trying to say, oh, this is the only known image of Justin Morgan and his horse figure and I thought that would have been really fun so I spent a lot of time reading old newspaper stallion advertisements which are just a lot of fun anyway. That's definitely a stock image. That's like the clip art you go to the newspaper office and you say, I like that one. Put that with my classified ad. So it's a good one, it's a slightly less used one but it is a stock image. Interestingly this is also an advertisement in the Rutland Herald. So this is getting some reach. So the horse is anywhere from Lebanon to Randolph. It's being advertised in Rutland. There's movement going on here. Here's next year's advertisement for this horse figure. Now he is in Randolph and Royalton. He's still being bred. He's still owned by Justin Morgan who's still living in Randolph. And here's another year forward. This is April of 1795. Now figure is in Williston and in Heinsberg. He is being handled or living with a man named Samuel Allen in Williston. This is the last time this horse is linked with Justin Morgan in the historical record. It's been three years. The next time this horse is advertised at Stud and I apologize I don't have a picture of it but it is by Samuel Allen himself who appears to have purchased the horse in 1798. Sometime late in 1795 or early 1796. Justin Morgan himself is going to pass away just a few years later of probably what we believe to be tuberculosis although we don't know for sure. Some of the stories about the end of Justin Morgan's life say that he traded his horse, his stallion, to another man named William Rice as payment for William Rice taking care of him and his final illness. We have no record of that. That doesn't appear in his will. Which went before probate court so we have the contents of it. That story was most told by his son who was not living with him at the time and had not been living with him for a couple of years. His wife had passed away a few years early and he had dispersed his children to mostly his brothers and family friends. He was living by himself in a rented room very ill at the end of his life. His son was not living with him at the end of his life. I don't think necessarily we considered a reliable source for his father's activities at the time. And Betty Bandel in her biography has done some really excellent archival research that strongly suggests Morgan received a portion of land in Moortown that had previously belonged to Samuel Allen. Right around the time Samuel Allen says, I have a new horse named Figure in Williston. So the archival evidence, again we have no like written, I traded this horse to Samuel Allen for land, but the archival evidence strongly suggests that Justin Morgan traded away this breeding stallion which was a valuable horse. For land in Moortown, Bandel believes he wanted to leave that land to his children because he had by this point was no longer able to farm his own land and that was going to be his own legacy. And you can't leave, I think his son was, I think 10 years old at this time, like a 10 year old boy cannot manage the business around a breeding stallion. Legacy to leave. So let's talk a little bit more about the horse itself. This is a sketch done, this is like the police witness suspect sketch of Figure that was done by Daniel Chipman Linsley. Basically went to an artist and said, here's how people described the horse. Do up a picture for me. And then he passed that picture around to other people who supposedly had known the horse and they say, it's the spinning image. I think it's kind of ugly. But it does capture some of what we think of as like a Morgan horse phenotype today or physical characteristics. It's got that upright strong neck leading into a good strong shoulder. It's got that sort of shorter back, that nice close coupled hind end. They most often still today come in bay and black and this horse was apparently a very dark bay. The head is not great, but it still shows a fine figured head, which is usually a Morgan characteristic as well. A very sort of lighter, fancier head. And a very stocky horse, not large. The original Morgan horse was at best 15 hands. For non-horse people, a hand is four inches. So we're talking about that tall, right? Yeah, about that tall. Just a little over pony height, but pound per pound a solid horse. And we're going to tell a couple of stories about this horse. A lot of the stories about this first horse come from or are told about the time in which he belonged to Justin Morgan. And a lot of them fall into that same line as what I described as his superhero origin story. Because one of my sort of things I want to try to communicate with you for this talk is that the ways we talk about this horse reinforce the ways we talk about the early Vermont history. In particular, those first few decades of the 19th century that are a sort of myth-making era. This is the Vermont we want to remember. This is the way we want to remember ourselves as Vermonters. The same thing is happening at the national level for the American Republic. This is the same time period when stories like George Washington cutting down the cherry tree are being circulated to school children. It is the generation, the moment in time when the generation of those who fought in the Revolutionary War are passing away. And people are looking around saying, how do we tell this story of this new state and this new nation and who do we want to be and how do we want the stories we tell to reflect that. So a couple of stories are told about the horse during this early Vermont frontier period. One of them is reflected here. This is actually an illustration from the Margaret Henry book by Wesley Dennis. Supposedly this was a horse who could do anything. He could plow your field. He could be gentle and take your children on pony rides. He was fancy enough to pull your buggy to church on Sunday. Supposedly Justin Morgan himself, a road figure from church to church when he was doing the singing master work. And one of the best stories is that, and it's fun telling this like not far from where it probably would have happened, is one of my favorites is, so he was primarily throughout this horse's life, he was a breeding and sort of riding and driving stallion during the spring, summer and fall. And then he was often leased out to be a workhorse over the winter. And he was leased one winter by a man named Robert Evans, who was a hired man who had been hired to clear land in Randolph or Brookfield by clear land cutting down the trees, hauling away the logs, hauling up the stumps, grading the land a little bit. And so Evans was working him hard and they reached the end of one very long day and they came down into town. Over near where apparently there was a sawmill and what they saw when they came to town was two very exhausted enormous draft horses trying to pull an enormous log, the last couple hundred yards to the sawmill. And they were, they were done. They couldn't get it any further. Everyone was standing around going, what are we going to do now? We got to get this to the sawmill. And Evans pulls up with this horse who has been working the fields all day and he says, my horse has it. Please just go home and let us figure this out. And he says, no, on top of that, why don't you put everyone here on that log, sit on top of that log and if my horse gets it, you owe me a jug of whiskey. And they're like, okay. We have nothing to lose, we have nothing else. And the story goes, they take these draft horses out of the hitch, they hitch figure up to the hitch and he pulls this enormous log straight through to the sawmill, no hesitation, no problems at all. So, one of the things I always say is like everyone who has like read the Margaret Henry book or loves Morgan Horse history, you all have your favorite story, I'm fine with that. In history it's almost impossible to prove a negative. I'm not going to tell you this didn't happen. What I will tell you is the fact that people told and repeated this story says something about how they wanted to remember life in this place, in this moment. And how they wanted to remember the horses emblematic of that life. This horse will work the fields all day if he can do things that you wouldn't expect, he can do things that those horses that were supposed to be doing that work couldn't even do. And the next story I want to tell about this horse too, this one's not far from here either, who knows where the Morgan Mile is today. There we go, okay. So, the next story I'll tell you again, please keep believing this if you want to, this is one of my favorites is that Justin Morgan one day is, I don't know, he's riding his horse out and about, and he comes across these two fine New York gentlemen who have, for some reason stopped in the area with two New York race horses. Two purebred New York race horses whose only job is to be a race horse, and they're like taking a break for something like that, and they are just making a little extra money on the side by saying, anyone who wants, go ahead, race your horses against our horse and we'll just pick up a little extra betting money on the side on our way to wherever we're going next. And so Justin Morgan immediately, of course, jumps right in and says, absolutely my horse can beat both of your horses. And so as the story goes, of course he does. This horse beats both of these fancy New York purebred race horses in a race on the Morgan Mile, not far from today, and they still do a Morgan horse race on that road today to commemorate this story. Again, I'm not going to tell you it didn't happen. What I want you to think about is what it says about what we want to remember about that. He beats two fancy New York race horses right in the late 18th century purebred New York race horses, when no one is really sure where this horse came from. Again, Justin Morgan just like showed up. This isn't his job. His job is to be a workhorse in a breeding stallion, and he beats these horse for whose job it is to race. There's a lot going on there, right? Like this is a great Vermont story. And we sort of put it on to this horse. This horse holds these stories for us that we tell about early Vermont history. So we just saw a stallion advertisement from figure being advertised by Justin Morgan in 1795. Here is the next time this horse shows up in the historical record. It's back in Randolph. The Morgan horse will stand for covering this season at the stable of John Goss in Randolph May 1st in 1807. We have jumped 12 years. We have changed owners, and sometime in those 12 years it's gone from figure owned by Justin Morgan to the Morgan horse. The myth has been created to a certain extent, and this is how this horse is now known and called. So what's happened in those 12 years? We are not a thousand percent sure. You'll see if you Google, like there's going to be lists of this person owned him and did this with him, and this person owned him and did this with them. One of my projects and one of the reasons this story fascinates me is because so much of the story of this horse has gotten tangled up with repeated history with ways that we can't prove in any kind of like court record property transfer and newspaper, like the traditional ways in which we would prove history. Some of it has been flat out disproven, but still gets told again and again. Some of it has been very clearly borrowed from fiction and just has made its way somehow into the historical records. It's all tangled up and it's going to frankly, we're never going to know exactly what happened. One of the things that I would love to do is go to every place we know the horse was and look through every letter written through those years to see if anyone mentions him. It's been a busy couple of years. I haven't gotten to that. But here's my current best pass. Don't worry about reading all of that text. I see you're all leaning forward to read it. What I want you to think about are the colors there. This is the list of what is often reported to be figures owners. The owners of the horse over the course of his lifetime. It starts there with Samuel Whitman of Hartford, Connecticut and it ends with Levi Bean of Chelsea who was probably his last owner and who owned the farm where the horse was buried not far from here. I've color coded this. Green clearly documented in contemporary sources. At the time someone wrote it down in a newspaper, a court record a book written at the time. So there's not much green there. Right? And it vanishes pretty quickly. Yellow is what I describe as documented multiple times in near contemporary sources. Let's say within like 20 or 30 years and more than one person remembers this being a thing. But we're relying on memory there and we're relying on a distance of multiple decades in some cases. There's a couple of yellow. Red is mentioned only occasionally or almost certainly disproven. Like just didn't happen or the only time it gets mentioned is in like there was a book around 1900 that was one of the first attempts to fictionalize the life of this horse and a couple of those stories get started here in that book. It's online for free if you want to read really trickly early 20th century romanticized history of a horse. Which, you know, I do. So maybe some of you do too. One of those reds, I'm not going to name which one, is the subject of a Vermont State Historical marker today. So this history has gotten all tangled up all confused. And frankly, like this is this is part of the thing about history. This is partly why I framed everything for you today with it is hard to tell the history of a horse. It's always going to stay kind of confused. Which is why I like to tell this story and ask you to think about more the stories we tell and the difficulty of telling the actual on the ground facts of early Vermont history that necessarily take you through this happened and then this happened. Because that's just not as first of all it's difficult and it's not as interesting to me personally. We've got a few more stories to tell though about this horse. Anyone recognize this gentleman? This is one of your more obscure ones. This is President James Monroe. He's not the most recognizable of the presidents. I'll give you that. Who knows their war of 1812 history. And that's sort of 18 teens. Okay. Okay, so the war of 1812 did not go over well in the state of Vermont. I promise I'm getting there. It did not go over. That's putting it very mildly. Again we could do a whole talk here. All of New England actually flirted with the idea of seceding from the brand new United States because of the war of 1812. Mr. Madison's war. So James Monroe comes into the presidency and he says, I'm going to make it up to New England by doing this extensive tour of the states of New England. In fact the sort of period of history is going to be called the era of good feelings which we should definitely bring back as a name for historical eras. So James Monroe travels all over New England day by day. It's really quite extraordinary. He spends months and months just going like old wasn't a whistle stop tour yet. Trains didn't really exist. But you know the version of a whistle stop tour from the late 18 teens. And here's one of our Morgan store stories. Monroe goes to Montpelier and in the story that is told and this is actually how Margaret Henry ends her book for those of you who remember he rides a figure, the first Morgan horse in a parade, a welcoming parade down the streets of Montpelier and there are a couple of versions of this story. He's often said to have gotten off of this horse and said to someone this horse is amazing, where did it come from? Sometimes he says something like, Vermont breeds horses as true as her men or something like that and supposedly he's a Virginian he knows horses this is extra high praise, the president likes our horse this is again it fits perfectly with this like we're bringing Vermont back into the American fold, the president praised him how else would we put our best foot forward than to have him ride this symbol of Vermont the horse was probably in Chelsea at the time and James Monroe wrote not exactly an unexamined historical figure we know what he had for breakfast that morning and he did ride a horse in a parade, if you know Montpelier he wrote it from the corner of state and main down state street to the site of the then state house which is where the Supreme Court building is now but again we know what he had for breakfast that morning we know the, we have the text of the orations given to him from the steps of state house, we know we know almost everything he did that day and none of the contemporary sources none of the letters, none of the newspaper accounts or anything like that say, oh and he rode the Morgan horse it just doesn't show up and the horse would have been in Chelsea at the time so again keep leaving it if you want to, I'm fine with it so the horse figure or Justin Morgan or the Morgan horse as he's known by the end of his life 1821, this is his slightly more modern gravestone the owners of the farm put it by the side of the road so people would stop jumping that fence and going up the hill to the original burial site this was erected by the Morgan horse club which is the predecessor to the American Morgan horse association which a little bit ties into do you remember me talking about like what makes a breed it's not just, and this is probably the big Morgan horse myth you'll see it sometimes no matter what mare this stallion was bred to, they all turned out looking exactly like him and he single-handedly created a new breed of horse genetics do not work that way I don't need to tell you that, I also think this makes Vermont farmers look really dumb right, like they know what they're doing they're matching up mayors with this stallion they're not a certain type they already have a type in mind and in fact some very good historians the very good equine and Morgan horse historians actually have a thought that there was kind of a type that lined up with this stallion maybe already existing in Vermont like a small thrifty all-purpose workhorse that this stallion absolutely clearly like left an impact, like he made an impact in people's minds, he made a genetic imprint on the horse in the situation in Vermont but it seems most likely that what he met up with was a type and that everyone went, oh yeah, oh this works really well, this is in fact what we want and need out of an all-purpose small farm workhorse so these are three stallions there are something like seven to nine depending on how you count them breeding stallions that are sons of figure and these are the three that most Morgan horses today trace their lineage back to that's Bullrush, Woodbury and Sherman and you can already see in that first generation they're a little different from each other and they're in fact going to continue to have sort of different lines and different types of Morgans and that's going to continue through till today there are still different types of Morgans today on the left there we have what a lot of people would describe as like a true throwback foundation style Morgan this is still a breeding stallion in Vermont today he's in Weathersfield he is unbelievable in person he has incredible presence on the right there we have a more modern what you would call like a sport type Morgan that is going to be your more typical what you'll see it like a national national Morgan horse show they're both genetically per the stud book lineage-wise Morgan horses but like with any breed you do get variations within that breed by like within 50 years the Woodbury and the Sherman people were getting into fistfights at state fairs over which lineage was better so this is like this is not a new argument this is not a new difference between the two horses the Morgan horse remains today as I'm sure you know the official Vermont state mammal just mammal not animal mammal and it's still although the American Morgan horse association has now moved out of Vermont there still is a Vermont Morgan horse association there are still a ton of Morgan horse breeders in Vermont and a lot of them do specialize in that sort of old foundation style look that you might see on the left of course the UVM Morgan horse farm in waybridge is a breeding center for Morgan horses as well that was actually originally Joseph Betel's breeding farm he both recorded and bred Morgan horses he wasn't we could do a whole talk on him he's an interesting guy the last thing I want to leave you with is this book which is the way that most people learn about Morgan horse history today and I want you to think a little bit because this is just another piece in that storytelling myth-making parts that has become part of the history of this horse this is Margaret Henry's first book about horses she had been writing actually travel books before then and she wanted to write a book about horses she'd always loved the story of the Morgan horse and she starts writing this book I believe in 1942 or 43 she actually comes to Vermont and does research in Vermont to write this book but she publishes it in 1945 that is like the perfect moment in 20th century American history to publish a book telling the story of an American icon an early American republican early state of Vermont patriotic figure and in fact she ends the book with that story of Monroe riding the horse in the parade and in her book if you've read it you know she often has like a small child narrator who is at the center of the story and in that book it's Joel Goss who is one of the names of the people who's supposed to have owned the horse and he's apparently lent his horse to the president to ride afterwards people crowd around him and they say oh they'd forgotten apparently who is this horse where did he come from and the last page of the book Margaret Henry has Joel Goss say to this crowd I guess we'll never know who he really is or where he really came from the important thing is that he's American just like you and me right which just this is literally the last line of the book it just lands that whole story right through so that's what I will leave you with today as the story of this horse in early Vermont history and the role he has played in our Vermont imagination about Vermont history thank you I hope that was worth the wait and I will any questions that anyone has I'm happy to talk about or answer or if you just want to share your own Morgan horse stories those are always great do I you know I usually start by asking how many horse people we have in the audience okay all right more than a few sometimes it's like three quarters and then I get a little worried supposedly yeah for where the homestead was when he moved to Vermont it's an it's an under saddle trotting race for now right am I remembering that correctly yeah and driving and driving okay yep they also do a Justin Morgan contest is not the correct word but like a Justin Morgan anyway challenge at the the Morgan horse show that goes on in Tunbridge every year where you have to ride, drive, pull a stone boat, show in hand I think yeah yeah the three yeah the three things it's meant to it's meant to do that reflect on that same thing that the original horse is supposed to have done he could he could do a little bit of everything and so it's meant to reflect a horse and they have different classes for geldings mayors and stallions to to compete in that today so actually that picture of there he is of that's weathermont Ethan Allen is the name of that stallion that's at Tunbridge so yep so yeah any other questions or more on horse stories yeah I'm just saucy as deep without being taught what made my neighbor who was in a wheelchair from the A&R he at least looked at the paddock and told me the paddock had a slight hill and it was littered and apparently it was an ice slid from the top of that down to the stall to the barn and he said Moses is up there planning it's four feet on the ice which of course never wants to do and he's sliding all the way down the ice over and over and over and over he was he could jump any finch and thrower he was he was simply so much fun very showy very sure that he was the most bored 14-2 he had blue eyes I have often said I have heard often that the Oregon is from the pony in England who ran the sleds in the mines and they all had blue eyes as you say that's a great story I dreamed this horse from the time I was four and I didn't dream of freedom I dreamed of mine I wanted a bad 10 year old boy that kind of guy but out of the blue my daughter just had a horse fever like mad and when she was 12 we were living in Marvel Head which is not a town that she needed never chicken I was at a horse show she was taking lessons from somebody and the mothers were saying oh you can get a horse and I said my horse is more like selfless I think then a kid came up to me and said there's a stalled available at the barn I dropped my dream down to my toe and he just scared me like this and then he turned me with his eyes like mute don't say anything to daddy there's a stalled available at the barn I'll find a horse for $300 Moses the price was $300 and we found him in a week wow that's what I've been dreaming of that's perfect he was up in Hampshire we walked into the barn horse horse horse horse at the far end of the barn we heard this wham! and I came this day with these blue eyes a big crooked white blaze that's him dad how could I know how could they know could I recap until he died with us I just never saw anyone like him and dad does horses all the time he's never seen anything like him that's amazing that's often people say about Morgan horses that they have personality to burn to say the least we've got someone back there they didn't you're talking about the I'm sorry my brain just fizzed out there the grand list property tax values and things like that yeah they are largely not extant today unfortunately largely not extant today largely gone today this is a level that I want to get to the rabbit holes are endless I literally at one night after dinner I was like I'm going to start just going through and writing down the first generation mayors and putting them on a google map and then it was 4 a.m. and I was like okay I'm still not even half done yet and a noddle like you have to Battelle and Lindsay are both making what they have to do which is judgment calls sometimes they're putting a mare in saying reputed to have been a daughter of a figure or out of a Morgan mare or something like that but like we're in the realm of some real fuzziness here it's really hard to track that first generation down as I mentioned before if this horse moves all around the state for 25 years straight people had to have mentioned him in letters in passing and something like that that we don't know about this is part of the pitch for like getting all of our historical records digitized and getting our town records and our local historical society records at least indexed so that you can go and like oh yeah there's a whole cache of letters that cover that time period we're at the level of the unbelievable painstaking work to dig this out any other questions the man is buried in Randolph the horse is buried in Chelsea yeah because the horse gets known by his name by the end of his life yep it is in the Randolph Historical Society actually it's in the Randolph Historical Society I can picture where it is they have a great museum if you ever want to visit it I know it's very early but if you can talk them into opening it for you it's great and the gravestone is in the Randolph Historical Society it's not in great shape so they had removed it to make sure it was safe and put a new one there no it wasn't in great shape and they were worried it would degrade further so yep you may have I don't know when it was moved I have a picture on my phone somewhere I had forgotten it was the original one I had forgotten it was in the Randolph Historical Society and I was there gosh this has been right before COVID researching catamount history because there was a catamount signing in Randolph in the 1940s and they have casts of the prince but I like turned around and there was his gravestone so anyway any other questions or comments yeah which one never happens today yeah I often say there's a certain type of person who just gets it early and can't shake it oh yeah yep the um oh my gosh why can't I remember their name thank you the lipid stock firm yep any other questions alright thank you everyone