Background
One of the last by the great foundation stallion, blind Lexington, still standing at what by then was A. J. Alexander's Woodburn Stud in Kentucky, Tom Ochiltree was an enormous colt, eventually reaching 16 hands 2½ inches high with a girth of 76 inches.
Purchased by J. F. Chamberlain at the 1872 Woodburn yearling sale for $500, he eventually found himself at age four in the hands of the tobacco heir George Lynde Lorillard (who also owned Duke of Magenta). Trained by Hall of Fame conditioner Wyndham Walden (founder of Bowling Brook Farm in Carroll County, Maryland), Tom Ochiltree won the Preakness Stakes in the last days of the great match races and the very year the Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks were first run: 1875.
In the same year as Tom Ochiltree was foaled, another horse was born at the neighboring Nantura Stock Farm that would prove to be one of Tom Ochiltree's greatest rivals, Ten Broeck. One year later, 1873, a third horse was born, Parole (bred by the brother of Tom Ochiltree's owner, Pierre Lorillard IV) who would become a rival to both Tom Ochiltree and Ten Broeck, just as the brothers were intense rivals on the track. In 1877, with the addition of the younger Parole, these three would ignite the racing world in one of its biggest match races.
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