A Coming Of Age

It was a good-sized foal. Gentry called Wood to his side. They pulled together for several moments. As the foal came out and Gentry saw the size of the shoulders and the size of the bones, he feared that it might have hips so wide they would have trouble clearing the opening. When the rib cage cleared, Gentry guided the hips, the mare needing help.

Then he was out, lying on the bed of straw, and the mare was panting and sweating and Gentry was asking Southworth for the cup of iodine. Southworth broke the umbilical by pulling the foal around to the mare's head so she could lick him, and Gentry cauterized the wound with iodine. He then gave the foal four ccs. of the antibiotics as a precautionary measure. Southworth rubbed him down with a dry towel to stimulate circulation of the blood. The colt was chestnut, with three white feet.

The Virginia of Caroline County, of Meadow Stud, does not recall the Old South of cotton plantations and magnolias under moonlight and willowy, straight-backed women drifting about the lawns and gardens of the Tidewater. Caroline County seems closer in spirit to Stephen Crane than Stephen Foster, a starker and less storybook Virginia than the mountains and the valleys, a place where old times are often just as well forgotten. It is tomato and melon country now, watermelons and muskmelons, and fields for grazing horses and cattle and cultivated stretches for corn and soybeans. It was not always so prosperous or so peaceful.

Set in a line between Washington and Richmond, The Meadow was once part of a neck of land that joined a nation with two heads. In consequence, the land and whatever civilization had been built on it came out of the Civil War years badly gored. The fighting began just 70 miles to the north, at Bull Run, and it ended not far to the southwest, at Appomattox Court House. The Morris family, living on The Meadow at the time, hid the family silver in the well.

The Chenerys and their relatives were the residents of The Meadow by the end of the century, leading a hardscrabble existence. There was little money in the family until Christopher Tompkins Chenery became what he set out to be—a man of substance and horses and part of the landed gentry. As a young man he switched from engineering to finance and by the late 1920s had begun to climb to the presidency of a string of utility companies. He became wealthy quickly and moved to Pelham Manor, N.Y. Up North he founded the Boulder Brook Club, a riding club in Scarsdale. He played some polo. He hunted with the Goldens Bridge Hounds. He had an office in Manhattan. And he sent his children to good schools. He was enough of a sentimentalist, though, to want to return to The Meadow someday, and in 1935 he did, on a trip to see a prospective boarding school for his daughter. Penny Chenery Tweedy would recall the day many years later. "I guess I expected a plantation with white pillars, but it was an unpainted, three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house," she said. "A mongrel dog lay under the porch, and chickens pecked around the steps."

Chris Chenery's car nosed into the yard. There was a silence, and Penny Tweedy recalls her father looking perplexed, then angry. He told his wife and daughter to remain in the car, that the house might be ridden with lice. He went inside, but did not stay long, and he said nothing when he came back to the car, started it up and drove to a house across the road.

There the Chenerys called on Hardenia Hunter Ferguson, a cousin. She had managed to hold on to her land even through the Depression, and she talked as if all the surrounding places would somehow come back to the family. Penny remembered, "She cocked her head almost coquettishly and said, 'Chris, don't those lovely elm trees arch prettily over the old house there? Such a pity it had to pass from family hands! That did it. To my mother's despair he bought The Meadow a year later."

The foal subsisted on Somethingroyal's milk for the first 35 days of his life. Then the youngster's regimen was supplemented with grain, preparing him for weaning; the mare was tied in the stall and the colt given small portions of crushed oats and sweet feed. He grew quickly as the summer passed, grew to the day when Christopher Chenery's executive secretary for 33 years, Elizabeth Ham, visited the farm and looked at the foals. Miss Ham noted in her log on July 28, 1970:

"Ch. c Bold Ruler—Somethingroyal

Three white stockings—well-made Colt—Might be a little light under the knees—Stands well on pasterns—Good straight hind leg—Good shoulders and hindquarters—You would have to like him."