Iroquois Memorial

Nashville last week made its comeback as a city of fleet horses. On the broad hillsides of Percy Warner Park, ten miles outside the city, 30,000 Tennesseans and their guests gathered to watch a steeplechase run over its brand-new course in the natural amphitheater below. Visitors said it was the most beautiful steeplechase course in the world. Natives were far more excited over the race itself: the inaugural of the Iroquois Memorial Steeplechase, with big-name jumpers competing on Tennessee's own blue grass to revive the Volunteer State's great racing tradition.

For most of the 19th Century--from the early 1800's, when Dr. Redmond Dillon Barry of nearby Gallatin first imported an evergreen grass known as blue from his native Ireland, to 1882, when the great Iroquois (only U.S.-bred horse ever to win the English Derby) was retired to stud at nearby Belle Meade--Nashville was famed as "the cradle of the thoroughbred."

It was there in 1805 that Andrew Jackson sponsored one of the greatest match races of all time: his Truxton v. Lazarus Cotton's Greyhound, with cane-shaking partisans wagering their tobacco crops, stables and plantations on the outcome. It was there in 1843 that Nashville's gentry staged the $35,000 Peyton Produce Stakes, up to that time the world's richest horse race and the forerunner of America's "Futurities" (race in which competitors, now usually two-year-olds, are nominated at birth or before).

Natives claim that the Yankees stole their best thoroughbreds after the Battle of Nashville. In the late '20s, however, when the paper profits of the Rogers Caldwell-Luke Lea "Shares In The South" bubble began to pour into Nashville, its upper crust started ambitious plans to revive Nashville's prestige as a horse-racing center. They formed the elegant Grasslands Hunt Club, invited the East's best jumpers to take part in the "International Steeplechase." After two Internationals, Depression hit Nashville, Caldwell's banking empire came a cropper and Grasslands grew weeds.

But since then Nashville got WPA to build a jumping course in Percy Warner Park (given to the city by Luke Lea as a memorial to his father-in-law). Last week Nashville's steeplechase races were free to anyone who wanted to see them. Only spectators who paid admission were the 150 boxholders whose $30 checks made up the purses for the Iroquois and four lesser events on the program.

Though shorter and less dangerous than the famed Maryland Hunt Cup race, the Iroquois (three miles, 18 jumps) turned out to be tough. Galsac, the favorite, bowed a tendon on the next-to-last jump. Another horse broke a leg, was destroyed. Winner was Rockmayne, a bay gelding racing in the colors of Louisville's Barbara Bullitt, cousin of Ambassador William Bullitt. His time: 5 min., 41 2/5 sec. Her prize: $1,000 and a leg on an old silver cup made in 1820 for the Earl of Coventry.

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