Following is a shameless self-promotion for my book, "The Baylors of
Newmarket: The Decline and Fall of a Virginia Planter Family," which is
available from www.amazon.com <http://www.amazon.com/> .

 

In June 1764, a British merchant ship stuffed with luxury goods sailed up
the muddy Rappahannock River to deliver its precious cargo to Virginia
planters. None was more anxious for the ship's arrival than Col. John Baylor
III (1705-1772), the proud owner of the most expensive and fragile property
on board: Fearnought, a strikingly beautiful bay thoroughbred that had cost
him 1,000 guineas-a staggering sum that was twice what he told his tobacco
merchant to spend. No one in colonial America had ever paid anything close
to that amount for a horse.

 

Col. Baylor, the son of Virginia's largest slave trader, fell in love with
thoroughbreds at Newmarket, England's fabled racing center, while he
attended nearby Cambridge University. Returning to Virginia in the 1720s,
Baylor named his 12,000-acre estate "Newmarket" after the racing course
where he had spent so much of his time and money. Though he was politically
active in the House of Burgesses and in Caroline County where he lived,
Baylor's dominant passion remained elite horseflesh, and he became one of
the most important turfmen in eighteenth-century America. Col. Baylor's
close friend and former military commander, George Washington, sent his
mares to Baylor's legendary stud farm, and Thomas Jefferson's favorite mount
was a grandsire of Fearnought.

 

Col. Baylor's bright but dreamy-headed son, John IV (1750-1808), also
attended Cambridge, but was forced to end his studies early and return to
Newmarket as his father lay dying in April 1772. Unhappy in Virginia, John
Baylor IV returned to England to court his cousin Frances Norton, daughter
of one of London's most successful tobacco merchants, and then embarked on a
mysterious sojourn in France, where he cavorted with American diplomats and
foreign spies-all while buying trunk loads of fine books that would become
one of the largest and most important personal libraries in the Chesapeake.
Despite crushing debts, toward the end of his life John Baylor IV launched a
quixotic scheme to replace his home at Newmarket with what would have been
the largest and most elegant private residence in America, which his
detractors soon called "Baylor's Folly." Baylor's edifice of sublime madness
was never completed, and he died, a beaten and broken man, in the same
debtor's prison his father helped build.

 

Thanks.

 

Thomas Katheder

P.O. Box 22671

Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830

[log in to unmask]

 

 


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