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By Jackie Burke
Special to the Rappahannock News
At this year’s Upperville Colt and Horse Show, handsome young hunter prospects will stand, prance, or fidget under the shade of the same oak grove that has sheltered crowds of admiring spectators for the past 150 Junes.
Stories about that first Upperville Show vary in detail, but all agree that it was Richard Henry Dulany, later colonel of the 7th Virginia Cavalry, who conceived of and hosted the event at his No. 6 (Grafton) farm.
Dulany encouraged competition by putting up valuable sterling trophies crafted by Louis Tiffany and, with the assistance of the Upperville Union Club for the Improvement of Horses formed soon after, big money prizes. Premiums of $500 were offered in 1859, $2,000 by 1898.
As the area’s largest landowner, and founder in 1840 of the Piedmont Fox Hounds, Dulany was vitally interested in the care and improvement of horses. In particular, he was concerned with the heavy draft horses that worked surrounding fields, and the “quick draft” horses that could be driven, worked, or ridden.
Tb upgrade local stock, Dulany purchased two top stallions and made free service available to his neighbors.
The offspring of Dulanyb stallions, a “Black Hawk” Morgan that won at the Vermont State Fair and a Cleveland Bay that won at England’s Royal Agricultural Fair, came to dominate competition by 1857.
Classes for heavy draft, long important to the agricultural economy of Virginia, remained part of the show right into the 1950s.
Quick draft classes were replaced with those for utility horses, then for halfbreds of either Thoroughbred or Standardbred lineage, then for offspring of Army Remount stallions.
Classes today, open to “other than Thoroughbreds,” are often German breeds — which, until refinement in the 1950s, would have fit neatly into Dulany’s original quick draft category.
Winners of Upperville’s first under saddle classes in 1857 were sons of Messenger, the Thoroughbred that gave rise to the Standardbred and American Saddlebreds. Also popular were offspring of Hiatoga, the pacer who begat the Walking Horse breed.
Back then, proper riding horses covered ground at a smooth dog trot or pacing gait, not the bold trot produced
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