One of the founding breeds of the Standardbred, the Narragansett Pacer has been extinct since the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet the Pacer was ubiquitous in colonial North America—as popular in its native Rhode Island as it was in South Carolina and the Caribbean. Oxen were used for heavy work and horses for transportation; this type was prized as a saddle horse for the ease of its gait, its surefootedness, and speed.
The Narragansett Pacers were small by modern standards, frequently listed in newspapers as no higher than fourteen hands, which is less than five feet at the withers, the highest point on the horse’s back. While small in size, these horses were lively and spirited, possessing tremendous stamina and endurance.
In color they were usually sorrel or light chestnut, liberally splashed with white markings—stars and blazes on their faces, stockings and boots on their feet, and spots and patches on their sides. The Narragansett Pacers had breedy heads, held high on long thin necks. Their lines were slim; their limbs delicate, thin, and tapered. All written descriptions of these horses seem to suggest a pretty, little but altogether marvelous horse that performed beautifully. They were the modern equivalent of a smallish Rolls Royce, bred for the travelling conditions of the time.
Unfortunately, the origins of the once popular Narragansett Pacer are completely obscure. No studbook for the breed exists, nor are there any contemporary paintings or drawings. Some of the explanations of its foundations, though romantic and colorful, are the stuff of myth and legend. Nevertheless, some prepotent sire, such as Justin Morgan’s stud, must have existed.
Advertisement to buy horses for export (Providence Gazette, Jan. 1764)
One of the most famous of the legendary sires was “Old Snip,” said to be a stallion from Andalusia in Spain found swimming at sea off the coast of Africa. According to the tale, he was taken aboard a sailing ship, brought to Narragansett and allowed to run wild on Point Judith. Yet another Andalusian stallion was said to have been imported by Deputy-Governor William Robinson of South Kingstown. Another contributing strain was said to be the Irish hobby horse because of its similar size, gait, and color.
Whatever the origins, the breed had developed and was recognized by 1700 by the Narragansett Planters, who had developed the breed, had already established breeding farms and developed trading ties with the ready markets in the South and the Caribbean. In 1734 and 1735 in the South Carolina Gazette, for example, there were two advertisements each year for the sale of “Rhode Island Stallions, natural pacers.”
Named for its inherent gait and the area in which it evolved, the Narragansett Pacer paced. In a trot, the horse’s legs move diagonally; in a pace, both legs on one side move at the same time. The Pacer did not trot at all. In fact, a purebred could not. Writing in the nineteenth century, Isaac Peace Hazard, whose father raised Pacers, noted that the backbone of the horse moved in a straight line. The rider did not post but merely sat to the easy, gliding action of the animal below. There was no movement from side to side nor any jarring from a trot or jog.
The rider could spend hours in the saddle, even all day, and often did. Before roads were built, overland transportation consisted of following rough trails, pathways, and Indian traces. “Carriages were unknown,” wrote one chronicler of eighteenth-century life in southern Rhode Island. “And the public roads were not so good . . . . all the riding was done on horseback.”
James Fenimoore Cooper, in his classic, The Last of the Mohicans, seats his heroine, Alice Munro, on a Narragansett Pacer. As Cooper states, the Narragansetts were “sure of foot” and “greatly sought by females who were obliged to travel over roots and holes in the ‘new countries” [meaning recently-settled frontier lands].”
No rider wants to be mounted on a horse with a bumpy gait or one that stumbles or trips, especially a woman riding side saddle through the woods on urgent family business or en route to some large social function.
When Mrs. Anstis Lee was a young woman of twenty-six, she travelled with her brother Daniel Updike from the family home near Wickford, Rhode Island, to Hartford, Connecticut. She was eighty when she wrote about the journey which took place in May of 1791. “I was mounted on a fine Narragansett pacer of easy carriage and great fleetness.” Returning home, she and her brother rode forty miles on the first day and fifty-seven on the second. Though she was tired from so long a ride, she recalled, “But for the great ease, with which my pacer carried me, I could not have performed it.”
In advertising the services of a stallion in the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser on April 2, 1794, overseer Patrick Hayley mentions that the Narragansett Traveler (another term for a Pacer) “is a remarkably fine horse for the road, both as to gait and security.” Hayley added that a Traveler “can pace 12 to 14 miles in the hour; and goes uncommonly easy to himself and the rider at 8 miles in the hour.”
The characteristic that gave the Pacer added popularity among the colonists was “Fleetness and swift Pacing.” These progenitors of today’s pacing and trotting breeds raced on ready made tracks provided by New England’s shorelines—Revere Beach in Massachusetts and in Rhode Island on Easton’s Beach in Newport and the beach at Narragansett. All races were pace races; “genteel horses were pacers.” Trotting horses were deemed a base breed.
On Narragansett Beach the owners entered their fastest mounts for prizes of silver tankards, made locally, and bets were made on speed. Dr. James MacSparran, rector of Narragansett Church from 1721 until 1757, wrote that these “Horses…are exported to all parts of English America,” and he had “seen some of them pace a Mile in little more than two Minutes, a good deal less than three.”
MacSparran’s parishioners were the wealthy Narragansett Planters whose estates consisted of three hundred to two thousand acres, sometimes manned by up to forty slaves. Their society in southern Rhode Island, atypical of the rest of New England, is described by Isaac Peace Hazard, a descendant of that class, as a “horse-racing, fox-hunting, feasting generation.” Their lifestyle was closer to the English country gentlemen who were their forebears or the plantation owners of Virginia and the Carolinas who were their trading partners.
The Planters’ vast estates, called plantations, were noted for livestock production: sheep for wool exported to England and France, goats and cattle for cheese and salted meat, and the famous Narragansett Pacers that were loaded directly onto boats as deck cargo and at South Ferry. When Cuba began to cultivate sugar extensively, its planters sought Pacers for themselves, their wives, and daughters to ride. They wanted horses faster than they could be supplied. The horses were shipped immediately to the southern colonies or the Caribbean via Newport. The breeding and exporting of the Narragansett Pacers was the region’s most lucrative commercial activity, bringing great wealth to Narragansett Country.
Besides the commercial exchange between the southern colonies and Narragansett country, the racing sportsmen of Narragansett even traveled to Virginia with their horses for contests on the turf. Since these visits were reciprocated by Virginians, George Washington’s interest in pace racing is not surprising. On September 29, 1768, he recorded in his diary that he “Went to a Purse Race at Accotink.” Washington entered one of his horses in a pacing race that day and paid Robert Sanford twelve shillings to ride for him.
John Hervey, the author of The American Trotter, tells us that we may assume that the horse was a Narragansett Pacer, “for elsewhere the partiality of the Father of Our Country for that breed is of record.” Washington was supposed to have owned two Narragansett Pacers, one of which caused the first president’s only recorded fall from the saddle.
Another celebrated colonial rider associated with the Narragansett Pacer is Paul Revere. Esther Forbes, his Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, argues forcibly that the horse that Revere rode from Charlestown to Lexington was a Pacer. His mount belonged to John Larkin, one of Charlestown’s wealthiest residents who no doubt had a Narragansett Pacer stable in his barn. He turned over his best horse to Revere to spread the alarm. Given the speed with which Revere covered the twelve miles and the good condition of the horse afterward, one would think the horse was a Narragansett Pacer. [Forbes’s assertion is refuted by David Hackett Fischer in his Paul Revere’s Ride, published by Oxford University Press, 1994.]
Revere was chosen to ride for the Whigs on the night of April 18, 1775, because of his discretion as a messenger and his ability as a horseman. The intrepid Boston silversmith had earlier ridden express for the Whig Party, delivering messages from its members in Boston. On his first mission in that capacity, he traveled from Boston to Philadelphia and back in eleven days, averaging sixty-three miles a day. (As a post rider, he most certainly would have been astride a Pacer.) Despite his equestrian skills, however, the night that Paul Revere rode from Larkin’s barn into the annals of American history, he left home without his spurs.
Eventually, the Narragansett Pacer became extinct. Their decline appears to have been due to three factors: overexportation to the West Indies, a change of public habits in horse usage, and the decline of the Narragansett Planters themselves.
Even as early as 1768, there was enough concern to try and revive interest in maintaining the breed. A race was held on May 5, 1768, for a purse of one hundred dollars. It was open to any horse, mare, or gelding bred in the colony. The race was run, carrying weight for inches, on Easton’s Beach in Newport, and was won by “a Horse belonging to Mr. Samuel Gardiner of South Kingstown.”
Isaac Peace Hazard, the son of a Narragansett Planter, recalled:
One of the causes of the loss of that famous breed here was the great demand for them in Cuba, when the island began to cultivate sugar extensively. The planters suddenly became rich, and wanted pacing horses for themselves and their wives and daughters to ride, faster than we could supply them; and send an agent to this country to purchase them at all events. I have heard my father say he knew the agent very well [and] he never let a good one, that could be purchased, escape him.
The law of primogeniture was never practiced in southern Rhode Island so that the early Planters’ immense estates were divided among all their sons, no longer bequeathed only to the eldest. The smaller farms meant less room for Pacers.
The Revolutionary War cast many American heroes and precipitated the birth of a nation, but it also quickened the demise of the Narragansett Pacer. England had imposed restrictions on trade with its colonies in the West Indies, which continued after the war. The numbers of Pacers fell precipitously.
Probably the most important factor contributing to the breed’s near extinction was the Pacer’s inability to adapt as a carriage horse when roads developed. A Pacer was too small to pull a carriage. Of course, they were too small to use as draught horses as well.
Mrs. Anstis Lee, recalling her journey to Hartford in1791 some fifty-four years afterward, stated that her mare, a Narragansett, “was the last of the pure blood and genuine gait that I have seen.” Indeed, in 1800, Isaac Peace Hazard stated that there was only one full-blooded Narragansett Pacer in Rhode Island. In the War of 1812, a British warship cruised the waters of Narragansett Bay, and its captain reportedly sent out agents to purchase a Pacer as a gift for his wife, but in vain—not one could be found.
Two hundred years after the heyday of the Narragansett Pacer there are no reminders of the greatly touted breed of colonial times in the region where it thrived. Local history buffs, as well as some horse lovers, might be aware of the Pacer, but there isn’t even an historical marker to note the breed that was so emblematic of southern Rhode Island’s colonial past.
The International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky keeps the memory of the Narragansett Pacers alive. Its website, calling Rhode Island “America’s first horse center,” states that the Paso Fino breed “is a direct descendant of the Narragansett and is probably almost the same horse,” and that the Tennessee Walking Horse and the Canadian Pacer evolved as breeds in part from the Narragansett Pacer.
[Banner Image: George F. Morris in 1956 painted this work, imagining what a Narragansett Pacer looked like prancing on a South County beach in the eighteenth century (Pettaquamscutt Historical Society Collections)]
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Hazard, Thomas Robinson. The Jonnycake Papers of “Shepherd Tom.” Boston: Scribners, 1915.
MacSparran, James. A Letter Book and Abstract of Out Services. Boston: 1899.
Washington, George. The Diaries of Washington, George. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925.
Secondary Sources
Akers, Dwight. Drivers Up. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938.
Arnold, Samuel. History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. New York: 1859.
Brady, Irene. America’s Horses and Ponies. Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
Burnham, Francis. The Blooded Horse in Colonial Days. Baltimore: 1922.
Carpenter, Esther Bernon. South County Studies of Some 18th Century Places and Conditions in that Portion of Rhode Island Called Narragansett. Boston: Scribners, 1924.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1928.
Custis, George Washington Parke. Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860.
Denhardt, Robert. The Horse in America. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948.
Downey, Fairfax. Free and Easy: The Story of the Narragansett Pacer. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898.
Earle, Alice Morse. In Old Narragansett. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898.
Fitzpatrick, John C. George Washington Himself. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1933.
Forbes, Esther. Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942.
Glyn, Richard. The World’s Finest Horses and Ponies. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Harrison, Fairfax. The St. John’s Island Stud Book. Richmond, VA, 1931.
Haworth, Paul Leland. George Washington Country Gentleman. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925.
Herbert, Henry William. Frank Forrester’s Field Sports of the United States and the British Provinces. New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1849.
Hervey, John. The American Trotter. New York: Coward McCann, Inc., 1947.
Howard, Robert West. The Horse in America. Chicago: Follett Publishing Company, 1965.
Koopman, Harry. The Narragansett Country. Providence: E. L. Freeman Company, 1926.
McBurney, Christian. “The Rise and Fall of the South Kingstown Planters, 1660 to 1783.” Undergraduate thesis at Brown University, 1985. Available in South Kingstown libraries and the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society.
Parlin, Simon W. The American Trotter: A Treatise on His Origin and Development. Boston, MA: American Horse Breeder Publishing Company, 1905.
Phillips, Deane. Horse Raising in Colonial America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1922.
The Edinburgh Encyclopedia. Philadelphia: Joseph Parker, 1832.
Updike, Wilkins. A History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett. Boston: 1907.
Woodward, Carl R. Plantation in Yankeeland. Chester, CT: Pequot Press, 1971.
Articles
Barnard, George. “Letter to the Editor,” The Spirit of the Times, XVI (1846-7), 499.
Cook, Benjamin Ladd. “The Narragansett Pacer.” In Rhode Island Cradle of Liberty, Land of Promise: The 1965-66 Rhode Island Yearbook. Providence: Rhode Island Yearbook Foundation, 1966.
Harvey, Stephen. “Narragansett Pacer Throwback?,” Harness Horseman International, (February 1980): 36-7.
Miller, William Davis. “The Narragansett Pacer,” South County, Fifth Edition, 1926.
——–. “The Narragansett Planters,” American Antiquarian Society, (1934): 71-81.
Smith, Red. “Moonlight Ride,” Providence Journal, April 17, 1967, 16.
“The Last Narragansett Pacer,” Providence Journal, August 12, 1906, 6.
See articles on Colonial Horses, American Saddlebred, Tennessee Walking Horse and the Canadian Horse at the website for the International Museum of the Horse, www.imh.org (search for term, Narragansett Pacer).
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