North? South? At Tryon’s old Block House racecourse,
it was both
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Discover the history of – and a few surprising secrets about – the Carolina tradition that returns on Saturday
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From before the time Cherokee natives warily eyed British settlers that appropriated the steeply rolling Blue Ridge foothills in the 1700s, the area around what eventually became Tryon, North Carolina has always been prime real estate. For the original occupants, the hills and creeks slicing them provided abundant hunting land and natural protection in a relatively mild clime. For colonists, the region represented a rich paradise, easily accessible from the bustling young cities on the Atlantic coast as railroads began to lace the fledgling nation.
When a 17-pound gold nugget was discovered in a creek a couple counties east of Polk County in 1799, more were drawn to the area, dragging with them traditions and pastimes like foxhunting and horse racing.
Informal point-to-points started in the 1830s when low country plantation owners flocked to the foothills late spring to early fall, attracted by the cooling elevation and open spaces of western North Carolina, and ported there on the new Cincinnati-to-Charleston railroad line.
Sportsmen and women from the midwest soon joined them, finding almost irresistible, informal race paths along the broad, cleared strips of land making way for the Spartanburg-to-Asheville railroad spur.
Part of the midwestern influx, college dropout and entrepreneur Carter Brown made his way to Tryon in 1917, adopting the sleepy southern town, its ample land and sporting traditions that suited his developing vision of an equestrian mecca.
Hear how a series of seemingly unrelated choices leads from the beginning of time to tomorrow’s Tryon Block House Steeplechase, a tale peppered with intrigue.
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Race director of the 74th annual Tryon Block House Races, Toby Edwards recognizes he’s a smaller part of a bigger picture, a sporting tradition of western North Carolina that reaches farther back than even the 1947 origins of the meet that ran for decades at the eponymous property near the village.
“I never got to ride at the original Block House,” says Edwards, who retired from the saddle in 2001. “I look at these types of courses – more rolling, up and down, up and down – as ‘riders’ courses.’ They make you think, they make you sit up and ride.”
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Edwards (Tod Marks photo, right) says the original Block House course was steeply pitched and tight, a half-mile track that put jumps on turns and hurdles on hills – including the one famously positioned on the North Carolina-South Carolina border.
The FENCE course, second home to the meet – 1987 to 2016, was a few miles northwest, slightly less steep but with a stout climb past the wire to the back straight.
The new Green Creek course – a mile and an eighth around and in use since 2017, Edwards calls a perfect mix.
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Tryon's Green Creek course, in its first year
of use in 2017.
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“Personally, I would have loved to have ridden at Green Creek,” says Edwards, who doubled at the April 21, 2001 FENCE meet just before he retired, partnering hurdle stake winner Brown Lad. “Now, we have a (newer) group of riders on the circuit, and most of them won’t have ridden around (the Green Creek course) before.
“It’ll be fun to see who figures it out, how to use the ups and downs and straights and turns to your advantage.”
Nine miles west of Tryon near the Tryon International Equestrian Center, the right-handed Green Creek course is fully irrigated, managed and manicured by TIEC full-time agronomist Dan Fradley. Fradley also oversees golf courses, a combined driving field, jump derby fields and the extensive cross-country courses at the main facility a few miles north.
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The World Equestrian Games were held at the Tryon International Equestrian Center in 2018. Turf management at TIEC and the nearby Green Creek racecourse are handled by Dan Fradley.
Photo by Betsy Burke Parker
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Green Creek hosted racing in 2017 and 2018 but postponed the 2019 meet because of turf growth woes, and the 2020 races were canceled by Covid.
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TIEC equestrian director Molly Oakman (Tod Marks photo, left) says what the race committee, property owners and managers are feeling as race day approaches is, mostly, relief. “We are especially thankful to finally be hosting the 73rd Tryon Block House Races this year,” after two years away for unexpected reasons, Oakman says. “The history and legacy of this steeplechase is so important to our community, and it is an honor to continue the tradition that Tryon Riding and Hunt Club started generations ago.
“We extend a special thank you to Roger and Jennifer Smith for their vision for the Green Creek racecourse and their role in the preservation of equestrian sport.”
The Smiths, she says, are the most recent in a long line of Tryon sportsmen and women who have carried the ball for jump racing since the first one ran for a tin cup at the old Harmon Field in town.
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As writer Libbie Johnson noted in her book, “Tryon Style: Horses and Humans in a Foothills Community,” Carter Brown was certainly not the first Midwesterner to come to Tryon, but he’s credited as transforming the rural landscape around the small southern town into an attractive winter home for newly-mobile Northerners, and an appealing summer home - because of its 1,000-feet-plus elevation and cooling mountain breezes - for newly-mobile Southerners.
Tryon owes a lot to the railroad.
In the words of the late historian and former Block House race chairman Charles Ross, Johnson wrote, Carter Brown was “the man who put Tryon on the map as a horse center.”
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When Brown stepped off the train from Michigan in 1917, he didn’t exactly envision the equestrian mecca Tryon eventually became, rather he was thinking of opening a business. By trade a hotelier, Brown had left the University of Illinois three months shy of graduation to buy Castle Rock Cottages in Castle Park, Michigan, which he developed into the tony Castle Park Inn.
He aspired to more.
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The village of Tryon grew up around a stopping point of construction of a railroad line from the coast to Asheville. Work halted on the Southern Railway for two years, with workers and trades taking root and staying after construction resumed on the most complicated part of the project: The railroad grade from Tryon up to Saluda is the steepest east of the Rockies.
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An aunt who once visited Tryon had told him about an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium perched on a hill overlooking the charming town. The space had been vacant for several years, and she told her enterprising young nephew she thought it could be converted into another pleasant rural inn.
Thus, Carter Brown headed to Tryon. He redeveloped the Pine Crest Inn into a handsome, low-slung hotel with cottages scattered fetchingly around the cool and shaded grounds, adding expansive stabling for visitors who’d bring foxhunters and point-to-pointers for the season.
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Tryon’s who’s who (And what’s with the wooden horse?)
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Tryon has witnessed a rotation of impressive guests to, and residents of, the town, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, President Coolidge’s wife, Grace, and one of the original Three Stooges – Kenneth Lackey.
Eleanor Vance and Charlotte Yale, known as the Tryon Toymakers, settled in Tryon in 1915 after retiring from working at Asheville’s Biltmore Estate. Vance and Yale built the original Tryon mascot – Morris the Horse, today a 22-hand-high dotted dapple gray that welcomes visitors to the two-block long downtown.
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The original Morris was destroyed in the 1930s when the building in which he was stored burned. The next Tryon Horse was ravaged in 1946 when he was kidnapped. The third succumbed to age and weather in the 1960s.
Today’s Morris was totally restored in 1983, when he acquired a fiberglass body made by a boat builder.
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The Pine Crest Inn welcomes guests to this day. Jackie Burke photo
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Brown founded the Tryon Riding and Hunt Club in 1925 and organized the Tryon Hounds the following year. Brown rode in the fledgling Carolina Cup in Camden in the early 1930s and was inspired to host a jump race at Harmon Field in 1934.
He called it “The March Hare,” run over timber and brush through what was then mostly fallow cornfields in a creek bottom near downtown.
A tin cup served as the prize.
The March Hare continued to the outbreak of World War II when racing was suspended.
After the war, racing returned in 1947 at the new Block House course a few miles west of Harmon Field, with Brown’s supervision but with an added champion.
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Carter Brown with his son, an accomplished equestrian in his own right, Austin Brown. Photo courtesy of the Tryon Riding and Hunt Club.
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Alfred Plamondon, wartime industrialist and founder of Indiana Steel Products that manufactured, among other things, industrial magnets, had visited Tryon in 1942. He’d stayed at the Pine Crest and struck up kinship and friendship with Carter Brown.
When Plamondon mentioned he’d like to have a hunt box in the area, Brown purchased the Block House for him and set about refurbishing what had fallen to shambles over the years.
Brown had no formal training in architecture – he’d been an ag student, Johnson wrote, but he was motivated to make Block House into a thing of beauty. Brown was a deeply spiritual man and a devout Christian Scientist who believed that a higher power, rather than formal training, was responsible for the success of any human endeavor.
In short, Brown believed he could do it, so he did it.
His first step in reviving the Block House was to move the main building to higher ground several hundred yards to the west. A stone marker was placed at the original site, the actual state line and site where three county lines meet.
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Plamondon planned to graze cattle on the property, and he imported a herd of black Angus from Lexington, Kentucky. He’d heard lamentations about the abandonment of the races once held at Harmon Field, so Plamondon suggested Brown to create a new course on his property.
Brown jumped at the chance, designing a half-mile oval, grading and contouring as much as possible and peppering the fields with brush and timber obstacles. He built a judges’ platform on the roof of the house and called a press conference at the Pine Crest. Newspaper and radio reporters were invited from as far away as Asheville and Charlotte.
Johnson reported that Brown presented the sports and style writers with films and fact sheets about steeplechasing, a sumptuous lunch and an open bar. Unsurprisingly, the media became Brown’s most ardent supporters. Spartanburg's WSPA Radio broadcast the entire race program, live, and Block House was up and running.
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Most of the entries those first few years were local foxhunters, except, notably, Southern Pines trainer Mickey Walsh and Nashville shippers from the already-powerhouse stable of Mason Houghland and his son, jockey Calvin Houghland.
An emergency fund maintained by the old United Hunts Racing Association paid the purses the first couple years, but by 1949, Block House was a cornerstone of the Tryon spring social scene with race sponsors and a full card.
NSA stewards Frank “Whitey” Powers and Stephen Clark came to Tryon in 1949, giving the meet sanction in 1950.
The course was notably “tough,” say riders who to this day recall the tricky, tight turns, steeply rolling terrain and stiff, packed brush hedges.
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Tryon Block House Races 1981 - a horse jumps the brush hedge in The Carter P. Brown hurdle race.
©Hartwell Photography/NSA archives
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Brown had constructed one of the brush fences exactly on the North Carolina-South Carolina border, and it had the effect he’d hoped for: The well-dressed, impeccably mannered crowd would trade decorum for enthusiasm, going literally insane with raucous cheering as horses leaped from one state to another.
The meet was an enormous success, hugely popular with spectators and swiftly became a big part of the Tryon social scene.
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The land and buildings of the Block House have by turns served as a Cherokee hunting ground, a trading post, military outpost, tollhouse, tavern, cock-fighting arena and even a brothel.
The structure dates to the French and Indian War, the protected, hillside property one in a string of forts extending along the foothills of the Blue Ridge from Georgia to Virginia.
The original Block House was built in 1756 as a dog-trot log cabin – two rooms separated by an open passage. The building initially marked the original boundary between North and South Carolina established in 1772.
It was a military outpost for colonists defending the area during the Revolution against British-supported Cherokee raids.
The state line was re-surveyed in 1813, and a marker was placed at the site in 1815. The original property was in three counties – Polk in North Carolina and Spartanburg and Greenville in South Carolina.
The main building was literally, and conveniently, divided in half by the state line. When the Block House building was used as a tavern, it allowed the brawls that broke out occasionally at the pub to step across the room – across the state line – when authorities from one jurisdiction or the other arrived to break up the disagreements.
The Block House served as a brothel in the early 1900s and as a gathering place for cock-fighting.
In 1942, Carter Brown directed the structure moved to its present site, about 300 yards from the original location before he renovated and expanded it as a private residence.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.
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Was it true? We want it to be true.
The famous jump straddling the state line at the old Block House course, was quite a crowd-pleaser, research writer Libbie Johnson reported, though it may not have been on the border at all.
George Bridgeman, Block House estate manager in the 1960s, claimed his father had secretly moved the boundary marker back in the days of cock-fighting at the farm.
Bridgeman said it was because North Carolina’s DOT took better care of the dirt road that ran by the place than South Carolina’s DOT.
The actual state line, Bridgeman said, was some yards distant from the renowned jump.
There wasn't much enthusiasm for checking Bridgeman's story, Johnson wrote, “since a tradition, once established” – especially one so fabulous as a steeplechaser hurdling from one state to another, “is notoriously hard to abandon.”
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The Plamondons sold the Block House property in the mid-1950s, and ownership seemed secure in the hands of Converse College president Oliver Cromwell “Mike” Carmichael, who also served several terms as race chair. Converse used the Block House barn and grounds for its equestrian program.
“Our house literally overlooked the racecourse. Literally,” lifelong foxhunter , eventual member of the show hunter Hall of Fame, and eventual Converse grad Betty Oare recalls the halcyon years of the Tryon meet. “My dad (the late J.Arthur Reynolds, also in the show hunter Hall of Fame and who trained steeplechasers as well as foxhunters and show hunters) would turn out the hunters and let people keep the racehorses in the barn during race week. Those were some good times.
“I feel like I pretty much grew up at the Block House.”
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Betty Reynolds Oare, center, and Ernie Oare have long history with the original Block House property and the race meet held there for
more than 40 years.
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In the 1950s, Converse president Mike Carmichael had married Ernie Oare’s aunt, and through that line of association indirectly and eventually drawing Ernie Oare in as a steeplechase convert.
Carmichael had moved to the area from Indiana, when he first arrived there seeking out a place for his family to ride. He was directed to J.Arthur Reynolds’ barn in Tryon.
Betty Oare says her father urged Carmichael to purchase the Block House when it came up for sale. “My dad was the one who knew everybody and everything that was going on. He pretty much had it sold to Mr. Carmichael before it was even on the market,” in 1956.
Ernie Oare remembers the excitement that same summer with U.S. Olympic three-day event and show jumping squads were in Tryon, prepping for the Stockholm summer games. They held practice events and trials at Cotton Patch Farm next door to Block House. Oare trots out what turned out to be a star-studded lineup: “You had Hugh Wiley, Bill Steinkraus, Frank Chapot and Bert de Nemethy all there in Tryon. It was pretty impressive.”
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1956 Olympic Equestrian Team members Frank Chapot (left) and William Steinkraus with coach Bert DeNemethy (right).
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Ernie Oare says Carmichael continued, and expanded, the Block House race tradition. Converse College sponsored a hunt members’ race, and they started the North Carolina Cup over timber.
When Carmichael moved away, he donated the land to Converse. The college eventually sold the property, and today it remains in private hands.
Visitors can get a look at the historic buildings, and handsome renovations, on the annual tour of homes presented by the Green Blades Garden Club of Tryon.
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Brown died in late 1978, and pressure had already begun mounting from steeplechase horsemen, and officials: With increasingly expensive horses racing for increasingly lucrative purse money, they called for the old “testing” courses to fall into line with National Fences and more traditional tracks.
“As wonderful as it was, and as much as we all loved the old Block House course, it’s really at the end of Melrose Mountain, and not a lot of flat land,” explains Gerald Pack, former master and huntsman of the now-defunct Greenville County Hounds. “It’s like horse showing – there’s a tremendous amount of money tied up in horses these days.
“(It’s) not like years before that when we’d come home from showing at Madison Square Garden and the next weekend we’d be hunting the show horses on a 7-mile point.
“Everything was already getting so serious. They needed to move from Block House.”
Relatives of another Tryon transplant, Ernst Mahler, came to the rescue.
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Ernst Mahler with Carter and Austin Brown and Gordon Wright.
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The Mahlers, who had been supporters of the Block House since Carter Brown's days, owned considerable acreage in the southwest portion of Tryon's old hunt country a few miles from the Block House. Their property's commercial value had been reduced somewhat by the intrusion of I-26 which sliced through the hunt country in the mid-1970s, but, studying the land, they were able to identify an 80-acre portion of it that formed a natural bowl and proved suitable for a racecourse along with infield show rings and permanent stabling.
Additional donated land on the other side of Hunting Country Road was set aside as a nature preserve and education center.
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The stretch drive at the FENCE course at the 2011 Tryon Block House Races.
©Betsy Burke Parker
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The Mahler family donated the land which became the Foothills Equestrian and Nature Center – FENCE. After 40 years at the actual Block House, the Block House races jumped over to the FENCE course in 1987.
Six years ago, development began on a larger track, the Green Creek course, a few miles northwest near Columbus, North Carolina. Racing took place there in 2017 and 2018; Saturday’s races will be the first time horses have raced at Green Creek since.
“It takes years to develop a proper racecourse,” says race director Toby Edwards. “I know everybody is sorry they weren’t able to run last year with Covid, and the year before with awful growing conditions, but it hasn’t been bad at all for the course at all to be left alone, and improved.”
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The Green Creek course before its very first use in April 2017.
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Charlie Burke on Make Your Move in 1964.
Photo courtesy of Betsy Burke Parker
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Tryon took me there, part 1
This one is as personal as it gets: As it turns out, the Block House races have everything to do with the Legends of Steeplechase series you’re reading right now.
Before I was even a twinkle in my father’s eye, in 1964, my dad, Charlie Burke, was a neophyte steeplechase jockey, nervous in the jocks’ room before his first-ever jump race at the famously testing Block House racecourse.
He told me his tale of the kindness of strangers – top professionals of the mid-’60s – and how it ended up leading to his lifelong involvement with the sport that trickled down to me, and, through my own lifelong involvement in steeplechasing to these very words.
Here’s the rest of the story as told by my dad. He was a longtime amateur rider, owner-trainer-rider of NSA 1987 timber champ Jaughs and one-time Iroquois race chair. His wife, Dana Burke, is Iroquois clerk of the scales.
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My first jump race of my life was in 1964 over the old Block House course.
I was riding a 3-year-old colt owned by Guilford Dudley and trained by Alan Dufton. This colt had never raced over fences – so imagine a first-time starter and first-time jumps rider. (*Ed. note – this would not be allowed to happen on the 21st century NSA circuit.)
I had lost weight from 153 to 128 to ride at 132, and I must have looked ‘concerned’ in the jocks tent. I was only 22 years old and riding as a true amateur.
Several of the really good professional jockeys came over to me, introduced themselves and said for me to ride straight and that they would help me.
I can't remember for sure, but I believe Dooley Adams, Joe Aitcheson and maybe Paddy Smithwick were in this race. They talked me down to the start, at the drop of the flag got on both sides of my horse and behind me, and, in this way, they escorted Make Your Move and me to the first fence.
It was a really big stiff fence stuffed with live brush. They made sure that I had a clear view of the first.
My colt jumped it well.
Whichever rider, I can't remember who, looked over at me and said, ‘okay, we have that one behind us and it was time to have a horse race,’ and off we went.
Well, nearing the second last, I felt that maybe I could beat a few horses to the finish.
Three of the really great pros came down at the second last. I jumped around them and hustled to the last and then the wire.
I finished third or fourth, but I felt a rush which to this day is still with me as I retell this story.
The pros were so good to me, a green, new rider.
The old Block House course had big stiff fences that really required a horse to jump. I loved that old course.”
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Tryon took me there, part 2
Gregg Ryan also attributes his steeplechase career to Tryon
In the early 1970s, Gregg Ryan’s father, the late John Ryan, purchased a farm on Hunting Country Road near the Block House from the estate of Ernst Mahler. An Austrian immigrant who’d learned to ride in the Austrian cavalry, Mahler is credited with patented work with cellulose cotton wadding for the Kimberly-Clark Corporation that led to trademarked Kleenex and tissue products.
It was the Mahler family that helped establish the well-regarded Foothills Equestrian Trail Association – FETA, a network of public riding trails that cross private properties, and that donated land for the FENCE racecourse.
John Ryan brought his family down to Tryon when Gregg was about 10, Gregg Ryan recalls. “We’d hunt with the (now defunct, territory ceded to the Tryon Hunt) Greenville County Hounds,” he says. “Gerald Pack was our huntsman, and my father was his joint-master.”
“I remember John Ryan, and Gregg,” Pack says. “I put Gregg under my wing (in the hunt field,) and he was like my little pocketknife. I’d say, ‘Gregg, go in there and knock those hounds off,’ and he hustle over and do it.
“When Gregg started wanting to ride races, his father would call me and I’d say, promise me you’ll put him on good jumpers. That’s key.”
Gregg Ryan learned to gallop racehorses at the old Fairview Farms outside of Tryon. He rode under the supervision of trainer Tony Wallace, who’d been at Fort Riley army base in Kansas with USET chef d’equipe Gordon Wright.
“It gave me the racing bug, and watching those jump races at Block House cemented it.”
Tryon was part of the old Midwest Hunt Race Association circuit, and part of the Dixie Circuit that included Camden, Southern Pines, Stoneybrook and Aiken. The Dixie Circuit was sponsored by the Rebel Yell distillery. Ryan says the circuit felt like one, big, traveling family.
“Boy, those were fun, fun days,” Ryan adds. “We’d all stay at the old Pine Crest Inn, everybody at the same place. It was like the old days at Middleburg, where everybody would meet up at Magpie’s. Those were some good times.”
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Ryan (here with Liz McKnight) is now a MFH for the Snickersville Hounds in Middleburg, Va.
©Douglas Lees
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Bringing the Betsy Burke Parker link to Tryon Block House even closer - here's the Block House Races in the fall of 1988, over the new FENCE course. Betsy herself is riding future (1993) Maryland Hunt Cup winner Ivory Poacher - they're jumping over the "p" in "Expect the Best." Ivory Poacher was converted to timber after this race, and piloted by Charlie Fenwick, Jr. and later Sanna Neilson. That's Gregg Ryan in the same race, jumping over the "h," on Opacity.
Jackie Burke (Betsy's mom) photo, via the NSA archives.
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1980 Tryon Block House Races, over the Block House course.
©McCormick/NSA Archives
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