Vermont Magazine Summer 19 | Page 6

W hen traveling down the back roads in rural Weybridge, visitors are often awestruck when the countryside opens up to a verdant, sweeping lawn and the farm’s stunning, white Victorian barn. A life-size bronze statue of ‘Figure’ stands proud before the home of the oldest, continuous Morgan horse breeding farm in the world. Middlebury, Vermont publisher Joseph Battell commissioned the Weybridge Stock Farm in 1878 By Margot Smithson This Page: Photo by Margot Smithson 4 Vermont Magazine Summer 2019 to house his collection of the era’s finest Morgans. Joseph spent years researching and recording Morgan horse lineage, publishing the first Morgan Horse Registry, a document of Morgan bloodlines without which the integrity of the breed would have dissolved over time. Their reputation as preferred cavalry horses led the U.S. government to mandate the creation of a Morgan remount program in 1904, and Joseph seized the opportunity to continue his breeding program.