Oldstyle Morgans

05/23/2025

Honoring Oldstyle Morgans' half-Lippitt stallion, Oldstyle Sport (Madrona Ethan Ash x Susans Chelsea). Sport won VHSA year-end Morgan Stallion and Justin Morgan Standard conformation championships as a juvenile and sired a bay c**t as a young stud before we left Vermont.

Sport was a using stallion: he participated in both small group rides and huge wagon train / trail rides events alongside mares in heat, without making a peep or dropping his unit. He was quite kind to the mares he bred.

Sport traversed rough mountain terrain, willingly jumped logs and crossed waterways. Sport also performed in various breed demonstrations / exhibitions and parades, provided pony rides and served as a lesson horse. Like many Morgans, he adored little kids. Sport was shown under saddle both Hunt seat and Western Pleasure.

I used dressage techniques to school and condition my Morgans, which built upon Sport's natural self-carriage. Others who rode him exclaimed how light he was to the aids and had such comfortable gaits.

My Oldstyle Morgans were very typy yet quite versatile. Sport was gelded due to no fault of his own, just adjusting to the horse holocaust of the 2008 recession.

Sport was a millennium foal, thus turns 25 today. He was integral to Oldstyle Morgans' breeding program and competitiveness within the showring. Sport lives in Frostproof FL with the lady who has owned him since 2018. Happy Birthday, Oldstyle Sport.

05/03/2025

Post time for the 151st running of the Kentucky Derby is 7:02 p.m. ET TODAY on Saturday, May 3. Sharing 2025 Kentucky Derby picks from my pal who is a horse judge, equine book author, and TB breeder:

Top three are (in no particular order):
-- Burnham Square
-- Sandman
-- Coal Battle

Says, Coal Battle and his crew are the true fairytale story.

My comment, a wet racetrack favors a 'mudder' (racehorse that does well on a wet and/or downright sloppy track).

May all the horses and jockeys make it safely around the Run for the Roses. Photo from Sports Illustrated.

03/30/2025

Between the Ears: early spring in the bosque along the Rio Grande River, South Valley NM. One of my very typey Morgan horses. Oh how I miss those days, the heyday of Oldstyle Morgans while we were in the Land of Enchantment.

02/18/2025

Heck yeah, back when Morgans were TYPEY: compact powerhouses, with plenty of bone so to stay sound for decades of use. That's what we aimed for at Oldstyle Morgans and our horses were athletic, versatile, competitive in the ring both as conformation champions and performance classes -- and a ton of fun as all-terrain vehicles.

As Morgan kids growing up in the New England heartland, or so we believed, of Morgan breeding in the 1950s, I doubt that many of us could have found Kansas on a map.

The idea that people from “out west” were breeding hundreds of elite horses like The Brown Falcon here, bred by Stuart Hazard in Topeka, Kansas, would have seemed foreign to our collectively provincial outlook.

The Brown Falcon, a foal of 1954, was the foundation sire of the Funquest breeding program, and he sired 137 registered Morgans. Such a great type---.

https://www.allbreedpedigree.com/the+brown+falcon

02/14/2025

Valentine's Day greetings, as borrowed from Judi Whipple, of Breckenridge Farm, "💕 The World needs all our Love! ❤️". Nothing like a furry pony to provide the stuff to make a heart.
Kiss your equines on the snoot today, cherish them while you got em.

11/11/2024

Our matriarch mare, Susans Chelsea, was known to bear our American flag at events and parade on the Fourth of July to honor our country. Celebrating our U.S. veterans for their service today.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17JpdjNaeE/

A big thank you today to all the veterans that make it possible to have the freedoms we all enjoy! 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

09/14/2024

Justin Morgan Had a Horse … audio book

https://www.facebook.com/100064389595562/posts/26739901538958843/?mibextid=l2hJJHjNVOBSwHk4

There's more to imagine when you listen

http://adbl.co/startlistening

08/30/2024

We have been huge fans of Secretariat, yet never knew about his stunning Appy cross son. Enjoy …

https://www.facebook.com/100093016316575/posts/398576349919572/?mibextid=l2hJJHjNVOBSwHk4

Thought you might enjoy:
The Story of ‘First Secretary’
No one knew for sure if Secretariat would produce offspring. Lab results found the Triple Crown winner and Throughbred legend had "immature s***m in differing amounts." So the Claiborne Farm staff decided to test breed the stallion. By chance, they chose a nurse mare named Leola, an Appaloosa. Secretariat was fertile, and the breeding took.

Several Appaloosa enthusiasts contacted Claiborne Farm to buy the mare and her unborn foal. John and Lynn Nankivil of Winona, Minnesota, prevailed with an undisclosed amount of money and purchased Leola and the chance that she carried a colored c**t. Even before the foal's birth, several breeders had purchased breeding rights to Secretariat's first foal, without knowing if Leola would produce a c**t.

On the cold Minnesota night of November 15, 1974, Leola produced Secretariat's first foal, a blanketed Appaloosa clone of the great Thoroughbred. First Secretary grew to a full 17 hands, an inch taller than his sire. And like his sire, First Secretary owned a rich red coat, three white socks and a blaze.

The foaling made national news, and even forced President Gerald Ford to apologize for a remark he'd recently made at a Republican fundraising event. He'd said that his critics, like Secretariat, were "fast on their feet but not producing much."

Secretariat had produced something for the Appaloosa world. First Secretary's November birthday made him ineligible to race, so instead his owners used him as a stud. He sired 247 foals including 39 race starters and 33 point earners. First Secretary lived into old age and died in 1993 after suffering from colic.

p.s. - Initially Claiborne refused to acknowledge the paternal parentage of the foal, offering to allow the person who bought it to register the foal with the Appaloosa Horse Club as sired by an "unknown Thoroughbred." The buyer of the c**t countered that they would only do that if they were allowed to register the c**t as sired by an "unknown Thoroughbred Triple Crown winner." (Secretariat was at that time the only American Triple Crown winner alive.) Claiborne finally relented and First Secretary was allowed to be registered as a son of Secretariat.

03/27/2024

BEWARE: scammers are targeting public FB horse farm pages, do not click on any links or engage in any way, just REPORT them to FB. Example of latest attempt on us ...

01/31/2024

Oldstyle Morgans' beloved matriarch mare, Susans Chelsea (Littletown Sport x Seven C Ethan Ann) in Moretown, Vermont. Buff from trotting up mountainous Ward Hill Road on a regular basis (circa 1996?). Champion and grand breed ambassador, 1987-2016.

10/19/2023

SCAM UPDATE: "Right, I don't typically click on any unsolicited links. I typically go to my online accts and log in separately. So I logged into this FB page on a fresh web browser tab (as I refuse to use any FB apps on either my computer or smart phone). I ended up clicking on the link and it seemed to take me to other than a Facebook platform, wanted my email and password, which seemed real suspicious (when one is already logged in). Didn't go any further. Bogus, as I was still able to post on Oldstyle Morgans (thus not actually suspended). And eventually flagged it as spam.

I agree, it's spammers trying to hijack my Oldstyle Morgans profile/page. Had a friend get both her personal FB profile and her art biz profile page hacked; she got shut out and lost all involved. The scammers were then contacting her numerous FB friends. So evil, these hackers."

Dear fans of old type Morgan horses: I am getting inundated with Facebook Suggested content here on my Oldstyle Morgans page that has nothing to do with horses. And now I have received a bizarre suspension/violation notice from Meta (Facebook's parent company). I may have to close out this long-standing and well liked page due to Facebook's unwanted ugly activities. -- J.W.

07/27/2023

The trainer of racehorse champion Maximum Security was sentenced to four years in prison on Wednesday for his role in a widespread international scheme to drug horses to make them race faster. Jason Servis was sentenced by Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil in Manhattan federal court after pleading guilty to o...