Lexington (horse) - Stud Record

Stud Record

He stood for a time at the Nantura Stock Farm of Uncle John Harper in Midway, Kentucky, along with the famous racer and sire, Glencoe. Sold to Robert A. Alexander for $15,000 in 1858, reportedly the then highest price ever paid for an American horse, Lexington was sent to Alexander's Woodburn Stud at Spring Station, Kentucky.

Called "The Blind Hero of Woodburn," Lexington became the Leading sire in North America sixteen times, from 1861 through 1874, and then again in 1876 and 1878. Lexington was the sire of the undefeated Asteroid and Norfolk. Nine of the first fifteen Travers Stakes were won by one of his sons or daughters, a list that included:

• Belle Of Nelson (won Kentucky Oaks)
• Cincinnati, General Ulysses S. Grant's favorite horse. Cincinnati was depicted in numerous statues of Grant that remain to this day.
• Duke of Magenta (won the Travers Stakes in 1878...as well as the Withers Stakes, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes)
• General Duke (won Belmont Stakes)
• Harry Bassett (won Belmont Stakes and 14 consecutive races)
• Kentucky (owned by William Travers himself), the first Travers Stakes winner in 1864
• Kingfisher (Belmont Stakes)
• Neecy Hale (Kentucky Oaks)
• Shirley Preakness Stakes (1876)
• Tom Ochiltree Preakness Stakes (1875)

His three Preakness Stakes winners equalled the record of another great sire, Broomstick.

In all Lexington sired 236 winners who won 1,176 races, ran second 348 times and third 42 times for $1,159,321 in prizemoney.

During the American Civil War, horses were forcibly conscripted from the Kentucky Farms to serve as mounts in the bloody fray. Lexington, 15 years old and blind, had to be hidden away to save him from such a fate.

He died at Woodburn on July 1, 1875, and was buried in a casket in front of the stables. A few years later, in 1878, his owner, through the auspices of Dr. J.M. Toner, donated the horse's bones to the U.S. National Museum (the Smithsonian Institution). The pioneering taxidermist Henry Augustus Ward of Ward's Natural Science in Rochester, New York, was called in to supervise the disinterment and preparation of the skeleton. For many years the specimen was exhibited in the Osteology Hall of the National Museum of Natural History. In 1999, Lexington was part of the exhibition "On Time," at the National Museum of American History, where he helped illustrate the history of the first mass-produced stopwatch that split time into fractions of seconds--which was supposedly developed to document Lexington's feats on the race course. In 2010, Smithsonian conservators prepared the skeleton for loan to the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky, in time for the World Equestrian Games in Kentucky, the first time these games had been held outside of Europe.

Lexington's dominance in the pedigrees of American-bred Thoroughbreds, and the fact that the British Thoroughbred breeders considered him not a purebred, was a large factor in the so-called Jersey Act of 1913, where the British Jockey Club limited the registration of horses not traced completely to horses in the General Stud Book.