The Narragansett Pacer
Where and How It Evolved, Flourished, and Died Out
One of the founding breeds of the Standardbred, the Narragansett Pacer has been extinct
since the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet the Pacer was ubiquitous in colonial North
America—as popular in its native Rhode Island as it was in South Carolina and the Caribbean.
Oxen were used for heavy work and horses for transportation; this type was prized as a saddle
horse for the ease of its gait, its surefootedness, and speed.
The Narragansett pacers were small by modern standards, frequently listed in newspapers
as no higher than fourteen hands, which is less than five feet at the withers, the highest point on
the horse’s back. These horses were lively and spirited, possessing tremendous stamina and
endurance.
In color they were usually sorrel or light chestnut, liberally splashed with white
markings—stars and blazes on their faces, stockings and boots on their feet, and spots and
patches on their sides. The Narragansetts had breedy heads, held high on long thin necks. Their
lines were slim: their limbs delicate, thin, and tapered. All written descriptions of these horses
seem to suggest a pretty, little but altogether marvelous horse that performed beautifully: a
smallish equine Rolls Royce, bred for the travelling conditions of the time.
Unfortunately, the origins of the once popular Narragansett Pacer are completely
obscured. No studbook for the breed exists, nor are there any contemporary paintings or
drawings. Some of the explanations of its foundations, though romantic and colorful, are the
stuff of myth and legend. Nevertheless, some prepotent sire, such as Justin Morgan’s stud, must
have existed.
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One of the most famous of the legendary sires was “Old Snip,” said to be an Andalusian
stallion found swimming at sea off the coast of Africa. According to the tale, he was taken
aboard a sailing ship, brought to Narragansett and allowed to run wild on Point Judith. Yet
another Andalusian stallion was said to have been imported by Deputy-Governor William
Robinson. Another contributing strain was said to be the Irish hobby horse because of its similar
size, gait, and color.
Whatever the origins, the breed had developed and was recognized in 1700. And by that
time, the Narragansett Planters, who had developed the breed, had already established breeding
farms and trading ties with the ready markets in the South and the Caribbean.
Named for its inherent gait and the area in which it evolved, the Narragansett Pacer
paced. In a trot, the horse’s legs move diagonally; in a pace, both legs on one side move at the
same time. The Pacer did not trot at all. In fact, a purebred could not. Writing in the nineteenth
century, Isaac Peace Hazard, whose father raised Pacers, noted that the backbone of the horse
moved in a straight line. The rider did not post but merely sat to the easy, gliding action of the
animal below. There was no movement from side to side nor any jarring from a trot or jog.
The rider could spend hours in the saddle, even all day, and often did. Before roads were
built, overland transportation consisted of following rough trails, pathways, and Indian traces.
“Carriages were unknown,” wrote one chronicler of eighteenth-century life in southern Rhode
Island. “And the public roads were not so good….all the riding was done on horseback.”
In 1704, Mrs. Sarah Kemble Knight, who taught the young Benjamin Franklin in her
school in Boston, journeyed from that city to New York. At the time, she was thirty-nine years
old and had been widowed for a year. She covered the two hundred and seventy miles by
horseback, accompanied by postmen and hired guides.
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In the course of her trip, she had to ford rivers with her horse, cross a deep swamp, and
ride in the dark. Her account of the experience reveals the necessity during that period for a
sensible, hardy, surefooted mount.
James Fenimoore Cooper seats his heroine, Alice Munro, on a Narragansett Pacer in The
Last of the Mohicans. As Cooper states, the Narragansetts were “sure of foot” and “greatly
sought by females who were obliged to travel over roots and holes in the ‘new countries.’”
No rider wants to be mounted on a horse with a bumpy gait or one that stumbles or trips,
especially a woman riding side saddle through the woods on urgent family business or enroute to
some large social function.
When Mrs. Anstis Lee was a young woman of twenty-six, she travelled with her brother
Daniel Updike from the family home near Wickford, Rhode Island, to Hartford, Connecticut.
She was eighty when she wrote about the journey which took place in May of 1791. “I was
mounted on a fine Narragansett pacer of easy carriage and great fleetness.”
Returning home, she and her brother rode forty miles on the first day and fifty-seven on
the second. Though she was tired from so long a ride, she recalled, “But for the great ease, with
which my pacer carried me, I could not have performed it.”
In advertising the services of a stallion in the Maryland Journal and Baltimore
Advertiser on April 2, 1794, overseer Patrick Hayley mentions that the Narragansett Traveller “is
a remarkably fine horse for the road, both as to gait and security.” Hayley also adds that
Traveller “can pace 12 to 14 miles in the hour; and goes uncommonly easy to himself and the
rider at 8 miles in the hour.”
The characteristic that gave the Pacer added popularity among the colonists, however was
“Fletnefs and fwist Pacing.” These progenitors of today’s pacing and trotting breeds raced on
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ready made tracks provided by New England’s shorelines—Revere Beach in Massachusetts and
in Rhode Land on Easton’s Beach in Newport and the beach at Narragansett. All races were pace
races; “genteel horses were pacers.” Trotting horses were deemed a base breed.
On Narragansett Beach the owners entered their fastest mounts for prizes of silver
tankards, made locally, and bets were made on speed. Dr. James MacSparran, rector of
Narragansett Church from 1721 until 1757, wrote that these “Horfes…are exported to all parts of
English America,” and he had “Feen fome of them pace a Mile in little more than two Minutes, a
good deal lefs than three.”
His parishioners were the wealthy Narragansett Planters whose estates consisted of three
hundred to two thousand acres, sometimes manned by up to forty slaves. Their society, atypical
of the rest of New England, is described by Isaac Peace Hazard, a descendant of that class, as a
“horse-racing, fox-hunting, feasting generation.” Their lifestyle was closer to the English country
gentlemen who were their forebears or the plantation owners of Virginia and the Carolinas who
were their trading partners.
The planters’ vast estates, called plantations, were noted for livestock production: sheep
for wool exported to England and France, goats and cattle for cheese and salted meat, and the
famous Narragansett Pacers that were loaded directly onto boats as deck cargo and at South
Ferry. When Cuba began to cultivate sugar extensively, its planters sought Pacers for
themselves, their wives, and daughters to ride. They wanted horses faster than they could be
supplied. The horses were shipped immediately to the southern colonies or the Caribbean via
Newport. The breeding and exporting of the Narragansett Pacers was the region’s most lucrative
commercial activity, bringing great wealth to Narragansett Country.
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Besides the commercial exchange between the southern colonies and Narragansestt
Country, the racing sportsmen of Narragansett traveled to Virginia with their horses for contests
on the turf. Since these visits were reciprocated by Virginians, George Washington’s interest in
pace racing is not surprising.
On September 29, 1768, he recorded in his diary that he “Went to a Purse Race at
Accotink.” Washington entered one of his horses in a pacing race that day and paid Robert
Sanford twelve shillings to ride for him.
John Hervey, the author of The American Trotter, tells us that we may assume that the
horse was a Narragansett Pacer, “for elsewhere the partiality of the Father of Our Country for
that breed is of record.” Washington was supposed to have owned two Narragansett pacers, one
of which caused the First President’s only recorded fall from the saddle.
Another celebrated colonial rider associated with the Narragansett Pacer is Paul Revere.
Esther Forbes, his Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, argues forcibly that the horse that Revere
rode from Charlestown to Lexington was a Pacer.
His mount belonged to John Larkin, one of Charlestown’s wealthiest residents who no
doubt had a Narragansett stable in his barn. He turned over his best horse to Revere to spread the
alarm. Given the speed with which Revere covered the twelve miles and the good condition of
the horse afterward, one would think the horse was a Narragansett Pacer.
[Forbes’s assertion is refuted by David Hackett Fischer in his Paul Revere’s Ride,
published by Oxford University Press, 1994.]
Revere was chosen to ride for the Whigs on the night of April 18, 1775, because of his
discretion as a messenger and his ability as a horseman. The intrepid Boston silversmith had
earlier ridden express for the Whig Party, delivering messages from its members in Boston. On
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his first mission in that capacity, he traveled from Boston to Philadelphia and back in eleven
days, averaging sixty-three miles a day. (As a post rider, he most certainly would have been
astride a Pacer.) Despite his equestrian skills, however, the night that Paul Revere rode from
Larkin’s barn into the Annals of American history, he left home without his spurs.
The Revolutionary War cast many American heroes and precipitated the birth of a nation,
but it also signaled the demise of the Narragansett Pacer. England had imposed restrictions on
trade with the French in the West Indies, yet another a market for the breed. The numbers of
Pacers fell precipitously. In 1768, however, there was enough concern to try and revive interest
in maintaining the breed. A race was held on May 5, 1768, for a purse of one hundred dollars. It
was open to any horse, mare, or gelding bred in the colony. The race was run, carrying weight
for inches, on Easton’s Beach in Newport.
Another factor contributing to the breed’s near extinction was the Pacer’s inability to
adapt as a carriage horse when roads developed. Furthermore, the law of primogeniture was
repealed so that the early planters’ immense estates were being divided among all their sons, no
longer bequeathed only to the eldest.
Mrs. Anstis Lee, recalling her journey to Hartford in1791 some fifty-four years
afterward, states that her mare, a Narragansett, “was the last of the pure blood and genuine gait
that I have seen.” Indeed, by 1800, there was only one Narragansett Pacer living in Rhode Island.
Two hundred years after the heyday of the Narragansett Pacer there are no reminders of
the greatly touted breed of colonial times in the region where it thrived. Local history buffs
might be aware of the Pacer, as well as some horse lovers, but there isn’t even an historical
marker to note the breed that was so emblematic of the town’s colonial past.
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Bibliography
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Brady, Irene. America’s Horses and Ponies. Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
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Harrison, Fairfax. The St. John’s Island Stud Book. Richmond, Virginia, 1931.
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Articles
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Promise: The 1965-66 Rhode Island Yearbook. Providence: Rhode Island Yearbook
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Harvey, Stephen. “Narragansett Pacer Throwback?” Harness Horseman International,
(February 1980): 36-7.
Miller, William Davis. “The Narragansett Pacer,” South County, Fifth Edition, 1926.
--------. “The Narragansett Planters,” American Antiquarian Society, (1934): 71-81.
Smith, Red. “Moonlight Ride,” The Providence Journal, April 17, 1967, 16.
“The Last Narragansett Pacer,” The Providence Journal, August 12, 1906, 6.