A Rampart Of Pedigree

Bothering nobody, the little country town of Middleburg (pop. 700) sits athwart the Robert E. Lee- Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway in the undulant bluegrass meadows and farmlands of northern Virginia. Alongside the road—called Washington Street within the city limits—there are only a couple or three filling stations, only one sizable grocery store, one cafe, a telephone-pole Greyhound bus stop and a dilapidating, shut-down movie theater. If ever there was a one-horse town, this has to be it.

But hold the phone. This same tiny village is also chockablock with interior decorating and antique shops (Mrs. Greer's sells a nice little porcelain figure of a jockey on a Thoroughbred with his silks colored to your liking for $525), and it has an inn with a French chef (who cooked a saucy dinner recently when Hodding Carter's son married the daughter of the State Department's George McGhee), the editorial offices of a nationally and fashionably circulated horse magazine, a liquor store that is awash with a vast, nonrural inventory of highfalutin imported booze and last year did a $400,000 business, Foxcroft, the horsy girls' school, and a half-million-dollar community center where farmers and their wives go bowling, ladies and gentlemen attend black-tie hunt balls and the President of the U.S. goes to Mass. Forty miles west of Washington, this is the stratified, socially correct home of the red fox, the pedigreed horse, the pedigreed hound and the pedigreed person. "Oh, sure, I suppose we live in a rather unusual community," says a longtime resident, "but really, all things considered, we're pretty ordinary people."

He means that in Middleburg and the surrounding pastoral countryside of Loudoun and Fauquier counties, it is perfectly ordinary to be named Mellon, Phipps, Iselin, Du Pont or Jack Kennedy, and that it is downright commonplace to think and to talk about the horse most of the livelong day. Horses outnumber people in Middleburg just as they do in Outer Mongolia, and the minority wouldn't upset the imbalance for the world. "Take away the horse and do you know what's left?" challenges the president of the Middleburg National Bank, Mr. Donald F. MacKenzie. "Nothing!"

The horse is king in Middleburg, and his subjects show their obeisance by riding horses, playing polo on horses, hunting foxes with horses, breeding and training horses, buying and selling horses, racing horses, betting on horses or simply leaning on gateposts gazing fondly at horses. If a Middleburg citizen dies while riding a horse, as an interesting number have done, many count this a stroke of remarkable good fortune and dwell on the matter for years afterward. And when a Middleburg horse passes on—provided he has led a useful and worthy life in the field—he, too, achieves a kind of immortality: he is fed to the foxhounds of his old hunt. "It is an honorable, fitting end," says a Middleburg lady. "Why," says another resident, "I think you can say we pay far more attention to our horses than we do to one another. Since there's very little to do here, there is plenty of time for sociability, but friendship rarely runs very deep and seldom crosses caste lines."

The same may be said of marriage, which in Middleburg is not the most rock-steady institution. A devoted resident of the area makes this observation in Merriman Smith's new book, The Good New Days: "Some of these wonderful people spend so much time breeding horses that they tend to confuse themselves with their animals and this is not always conducive to marital stability as many of us know it." If you should visit Middleburg and fail to meet somebody's first wife or stepson by midmorning, you're probably not getting around with the right crowd.

What horses and their owners are doing in Middleburg—and other places where it matters—is carefully recorded by the horse-set handbook, The Chronicle of the Horse, published every Friday in Middleburg. The Chronicle, which today has 9,700 on its subscription list, was established in 1937 by two Middleburg men—one the great-grandson of Jefferson Davis, one the husband of Rachel (Bunny) Lambert. She is an heiress to the Listerine and Gillette fortune and is now the second wife of Multimillionaire Paul Mellon, whose first wife, Mary Conover Brown, was fatally stricken with a heart attack while horseback riding one morning near Middleburg.

The current editor, Alexander Mackay-Smith, is a cordial host, a frank, sometimes dispassionate observer of horses and horse people, and is a New York-born, Harvard-educated Virginian who came to Middleburg 30 years ago to ride and write. In a recent editorial he wrote that the job of a master of foxhounds, the preeminent rank in any horse-set community, might well be compared with that of a city recreation director. Consequently, it ought not to be considered the frivolous pastime of privileged playboy sportsmen and owes apology to no one. For example, the editorial continued, a well-to-do master need not think that "he should also have some sort of paying job—an idea which harks back to frontier days." Mackay-Smith, a past master of foxhounds around Middleburg, would lift the anxiety of other masters so the sport will continue to prosper in the days of the New Frontier. But he admits he may be talking to himself. "I leaned rather toward the liberal point of view at Harvard, and I still carry a United Mine Workers card. I suppose, therefore, that I give more thought to justifying a way of life that depends upon money and leisure than do some of my neighbors. They probably never give it a thought." (Mackay-Smith's second wife, Jean Bowman, hopes they never do. A horse portraitist, she sells up to $20,000 in paintings every year to members of the crowd, who frequently are portrayed along with their favorite mounts. The demand for her work is explained by another artist patronized by the horse set, who has said: "Would one, ever, want portraits of one's family sitting in, or draped about, the motorcar?")

Since the horse supplies Middleburg's primary social and commercial adhesive, it is logical for him to give the community its recreation which, fall, winter and spring, is fox hunting—or fox chasing, as some prefer, because of the comparative infrequency with which the fox actually is caught and killed by the hounds. Encouraged by the rolling country, the good pasturage and the large, wood-fenced estates, fox hunting has been the area's game since Thomas, sixth Lord of Fairfax, introduced it in the early 1700s and taught its technique to his American-born neighbors, including young George Washington. Like yachting, fox hunting cannot be done in a few minutes and with a handful of change. Depending upon one's zealousness or outside distractions, the time given over to fox hunting in Middleburg can be as much as six hours a day, six days a week, six months a year. (Mackay-Smith rides or hunts about four hours a day, puts out his Chronicle in the time remaining.) The expense is quite as formidable. Costumes for the hunt, unchanged through centuries of tradition, cost about $1,500, and good hunting horses—at least three are required to keep the active fox hunter in the saddle—run in the neighborhood of $2,500 apiece. Add to that the expense of helping support the hunt's kennel of hounds, the subscription fees for the several area hunts (for yourself as well as your groom), salaries for stable hands and the cost of running a farm. Says one resident, blandly showing off a quantity of fox heads accumulated over the past 50 years and now mounted in his hallway: "They represent a couple of hundred thousand dollars, is all."

With fox hunting demanding so much time and money, there is an appreciable interest around Middleburg, as you may imagine, in tax rates, dividend announcements and bond maturities. Understandably, too, Middleburg's hunt set is, as a rule, middle-aged or older. "You don't see the young, because they really can't afford it," says an older lady who can. "And besides, I don't think the place is particularly wholesome for youngsters. The base of our society is scarcely broad enough for them to find out very much about life in the raw."

Geographically, Middleburg has existed since 1787, when one Leven Powell, a politician and Revolutionary War officer who fell sick at Valley Forge and went home, founded and subdivided the town and named its streets after every Federalist he could think of. Middleburg still hews to Powell's politics, going Republican in the last four presidential elections, but Miss Eleonora Sears is allowed to raise racehorses with impunity on a Middleburg farm despite the fact she is a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, whom Powell could not abide.