The Middleburg Spring Races has a lively and fascinating history. Daniel Cox Sands, the famous Middleburg sportsman who for four decades was Master of Fox Hounds (MFH) of the Middleburg Hunt, organized the first Middleburg race meet in 1911.

Sands described the first meet to author Kitty Slater, which she relates in her book, "Hunt Country of America" (Cornwall Books, 1967).

"It was planned primarily for the entertainment of the farmers, over whose land we hunted and who sometimes were not easy to pacify when galloping hooves crushed crops in the ground or when foxes raided their chicken yards," said Sands to Slater.


Photo by Raymond Utz Whole families came from miles around - on horseback, in buckboards, spring wagons, and buggies, and some drove tandems. Everybody brought picnic baskets, and you never saw so much fried chicken in your life."

By the next year the National Steeplechase and Hunt Association had sanctioned the Middleburg Race Meet, a full 11 years before the first running of the Warrenton Gold Cup (the Middleburg Hunt Cup, however, was not organized until 1921).Steeplechasing continued annually until World War I; after a hiatus during the war years, it resumed in 1921 with the Middleburg Hunt Cup and the Farmers race held on the estates of Sands and his neighbor, William F. Hitt.


Slater says in her book that by the 1930s, the Middleburg Race Meet was prestigious indeed, with 11 races listed in 1933 on its first two-day card. The year before, in 1932, the famous Glenwood Park was built with provisions for timber, brush, hurdle and flat races.

"The thousands of race goers coming to Middleburg April 16 for the 12th running of the Middleburg Hunt Race Meet will find a racing park declared by horsemen who have viewed it to be the most elaborate and unique of its kind in America," writes a Fauquier-Democrat newspaper reported on April 9, 1932. "Since the running of the 1931 event, in which Sea Soldier flashed past the judges stand a winner, money has been spent lavishly in improvements to the course."

The improvements included a flat turf track, a new paddock and saddling stalls constructed near the tiers of boxes and grandstands. "The new course will be a real test to a jumper and hunter as one of the jumps is so constructed that the horses must clear a flowing stream of water, dammed up to give it the proper width. A Liverpool and open ditch jumps have also been provided," state the Nov. 4, 1936 Fauquier-Democrat - "approximately 2,000 turf folk representing high society of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and Virginia." The racing conditions, however, were dismal; ten scratched due to hard, bumpy conditions. Jim Ryan, Paul Mellon's trainer, rode Drinmore Land to victory over William Ewing's Kilmalogyue by 20 lengths, with the only other starter, Grown-Up, 50 lengths behind.

Another race in 1940 was just plain odd. "The feature event of the Middleburg Race Meet Saturday, the Glenwood National Steeplechase, ended in confusion as one horse in the three-horse race ran off course, one was pulled up and a third was claimed to have finished the wrong course," reports the Nov. 13, 1940 Democrat.


Racing continued throughout the decades under the tutelage of Daniel Sands. Such notables as President John F. Kennedy even took in a race; the president breezed in and out of the paddock so fast that few even noticed him. His wife, the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, was a race-goer regular.
Photo by Howard Allen