Washington Winter Show 2013

51 This page is sponsored by Pamela Jenkinson Columbia in 1908, and professional live racing came to an abrupt end. The northward-march of housing development and the rise of the automobile, both for transportation and racing, doomed a revival of the racetracks in Washington, D.C. Benning converted to automobile racing, but Thoroughbred training continued at the track into the 1930s. Maryland benefitted from the D.C. ban, as gambling remained legal there. Soon Laurel (1911) and Bowie (1914) opened to accommodate Washington’s bettors. Bowie befell the fate of the old Benning course, to become a training track in 1985. Laurel Park celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2011 and precariously continues in business. In May 1949 Rosecroft Raceway at Fort Washington, Md. opened with 7,500 fans attending. Standardbred harness racing had made the transition after World War II from one-day county and state fair meetings to nightly pari-mutuel raceways. FOX HUNTING Fox hunting in Maryland began more than 350 years ago when Robert Brooke sailed up the Patuxent in 1650 and established De La Brooke Manor on 2,000 acres of land in Calvert County, a gift from his friend Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore. Brooke brought a pack of foxhounds to promote his passion for the sport in America. Fox hunting eventually spread into southern Maryland, the Eastern Shore, the lush valleys of Harford and Baltimore Counties, into Virginia and as far north as Long Island in New York. Foxhunting as an organized sport in Washington began in 1828, when British Minister Sir Charles Vaughn brought together a subscription hunt with his secretaries, Sir Andrew Buchanan and Pitt Adams as general manager and whipper-in. He located the kennels at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue directly across from the Willard Hotel. The hunt roamed the open territory of what now is the Mall Entrance to the White House stables in 1903. Library of Congress. Open stalls in the White House stable for the government’s horses, c. 1905. Library of Congress. Harness room in the Roosevelt stables, 1903. Visible in the case were President Theodore Roosevelt’s harness with his monogram and cockade. Library of Congress.