Washington Winter Show 2013

49 This page is sponsored by Jeanette Broz, Brooke Ross, Christine Talieh laid out nearby, extending from the rear of what is now the site of Decatur House at H Street and Jackson Place, crossing Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue to Twentieth Street. “Carriage folk” looked on from the infield and standees ringed the outside of the course. The inaugural meeting held on November 6, 1798, featured a 500-guinea match race between Colonel John Tayloe III’s entry, Lamplighter, against General Charles Ridgeley’s Cincinnatus, contested in one four mile heat won by Lamplighter, a son of the imported English-bred stallion Medley. The course just west of the President’s House was short- lived, as it stood in the path of the implementation of Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan. So, on a tract called Holmead Farm, the Washington Jockey Club, under Tayloe’s leadership, laid out a mile oval track near Meridian Hill, just south of today’s Columbia Road between Fourteenth and Sixteenth Streets. Meetings were held regularly until the invasion of British forces in 1814, during the War of 1812. Although a fall meeting was held just two months after the occupation, there was a long period of inactivity until the revival of a golden age of racing in 1822. Over the next two decades, the Meridian Hill course, just two miles north of the White House, became known officially as the National Course, and it vied with the best tracks in the nation in terms of patronage and the quality of the racing. A nostalgic column in The Washington Post in 1891 recalled the “Sports of Early Days,” noting that Presidents Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, and James K. Polk, with cabinet officials, foreign diplomats, senators, and congressmen came to the National Course. Joined by the landed gentry of Maryland and Virginia, the city’s elite traveled by carriage to the “green hills and dales overlooking the Capitol, and being bewitched by the lovely women, wines of rare vintage, and magnificent thoroughbreds, our public men drank from the cup of the blissful and enchanting elixir of the sporting life.” The National Course witnessed some of the most exciting races and celebrated racehorses of the first half of the nineteenth century, including Eclipse, Fashion, Revenue, Sir Henry, Sir Charles, Sir Archy, Boston, Timoleon, Lexington, Oscar, and Blue Dick. One of the most renowned owners and trainers at the course was President Andrew Jackson, who built a new 10-stall brick-and-stone stable at the White House in 1834 (razed in 1857 to make way for the south wing of the Treasury Department). The National Course began its decline with the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846. Attempts were made to revive race meetings, but the Civil War and its aftermath sealed its demise. A MANIA FOR HARNESS RACING Meanwhile, the growing popularity of harness racing in the country, evidenced by its draw of crowds to county fairs in the nineteenth century, spurred new developments. In 1859, the Crystal Springs Race Track (later renamed Piney Branch and then Brightwood Driving Park) opened in the vicinity of today’s Thirteenth, Sixteenth, Longfellow and Madison streets in Northwest. The racecourse was a part of the Crystal Springs resort that included a hotel and tavern. The trotting oval drew large crowds throughout the nineteenth century but closed in 1909, after Congress banned gambling on races in D.C. The rise in the popularity of harness racing in America after the Civil War was evident in the presidential campaign in 1868. Candidate Ulysses S. Grant persuaded Robert Bonner, the owner of the legendary trotter Dexter, to allow him to take a spin. Currier and Ives captured the scene in a popular 1868 print of the legendary horse at full speed with Grant holding the reins. Grant was an avid horseman and loved to take a light carriage out of the White House stables onto the streets of Washington, occasionally racing his close friend and neighbor on Lafayette Andrew Jackson on horseback, engraving by an unidentified artist, c. 1830. Library of Congress