From his hilltop manor house, J. W. Y. "Duck" Martin Jr. surveys his family's breathtaking domain: the 605-acre Worthington Farms, a verdant bowl of pastureland just north of Baltimore in the heart of Maryland's horse country.
Every spring, as sure as thoroughbred foals grace these fields, red and white flags appear atop the Martins' post-and-rail
fences. Their Worthington Valley pastures become the site of America's toughest steeplechase and one of Maryland's toniest social events.
The Maryland Hunt Cup, a grueling timber race over four miles of turf studded with 22 unforgiving fences, marks its 100th anniversary tomorrow. Racegoers picnic on champagne and potato salad spread out on tailgates of Volvo wagons and on hoods of Merce-des sedans.
Started in 1894 as a challenge between fox-hunting clubs, the race and the life of the horsy set that sponsors it have changed remarkably little. "Gentlemen jockeys" have piloted their jumpers over this same dandelion-dotted ground near Glyndon since 1922 except for a three-year suspension during World War II.
The Hunt Cup exudes tradition -- a single race run at 4 p.m. the last Saturday in April, with neither pari-mutuel wagering nor major commercial sponsors. All riders are amateurs. It's usually over in less than nine minutes. Then the silver cup is awarded from a hay wagon.
"It's the Kentucky Derby of steeplechase," said Mr. Martin, who won the Hunt Cup in 1972. "You can see the whole race from this hill. It might be the best race to see in the country."
The race spurs a yearly gathering of the landed gentry -- a tweedy crowd that knows the bloodlines of owners and riders at least as well as those of horses -- and an exclusive $150-a-person Hunt Cup ball to which fox-hunting men wear scarlet tail coats.
The event is also a barometer of the Baltimore County hunt country's ability to resist development pressures and to preserve a tradition in which children ride almost as soon as they walk.
But for the people at the center of the Maryland Hunt Cup, the race is above all an affirmation of their passion for horses and a celebration of century-old family ties.
At 54, Mr. Martin, a shy, unpretentious man, has made his life in this valley's barns and pastures breeding race horses. He is master at the Green Spring Valley Hounds, whose 125 member families fox-hunt fall and winter across much of northern Baltimore County and form the core of horse people who keep the Hunt Cup alive.
Literally to the manor born, Mr. Martin is heir to Chicago and Pittsburgh fortunes in finance and steel. He married the former Glenn Reynolds, a tobacco and metals heiress.
But mention the social aspects of the Hunt Cup to Mr. Martin and he winces. "It's about the horses and the land," he said, "not the parties."
The affluent up-country locales known generically as the Valley include, from south to north, the Green Spring, Caves, Worthington, Western Run and Belfast valleys. They are home to 20,000 residents, of whom less than 10 percent are part of traditional Valley society.
The area's Colonial settlers date to the late 17th century, when they paid the Lord Baltimore 200 pounds of tobacco for every 100 acres of virgin soil granted them. But it was not until the 19th century, as wealthy Baltimore industrialists joined the local gentry on the land, that the Valley became the pocket of privilege that endures to this day.
In the Valley, impeccable breeding is not a prerequisite for Maryland Hunt Cup horses or people. But it doesn't hurt in either case.
Slow thoroughbreds
The horses, as a rule, are thoroughbreds too slow to win on the flat track. By age 6 or so, a properly trained animal with the right mix of size, stamina, jumping ability, headiness and courage might turn into a noble enough steed to be deemed a "Maryland Hunt Cup horse."
As for riders, D. M. "Mikey" Smithwick, 65, whose six Hunt Cup victories are the most by any jockey, was not born into Valley society. He is the son of an Irish immigrant horse trader whose skill won him entree into equine circles. He now trains horses for the race.
But more typical of Hunt Cup bloodlines is Sanna Neilson, 25, last year's winning rider (and the third woman to win since gender barriers came down in 1971). She can trace her pedigree to the first Maryland Hunt Cup.
Ms. Neilson's great-great-grandfather, C. Morton Stewart, a Baltimore shipping magnate, bought a Valley mansion just after the Civil War, where he entertained the likes of Charles Dickens and Cardinal Gibbons.
The shipping king's son, the strong-jawed Redmond C. Stewart, a legendary fox hunter, had much to do with creating the horse-loving Valley society that patronizes the Hunt Cup today. (He rode in the original 1894 race, losing by half a length.)
In 1892, Redmond Stewart founded the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club, at Garrison Forest and Green Spring Valley roads. It became the area's premier social institution and nourished the Valley's clubby insularity that tolerates outsiders but doesn't encourage their presence.
"The Valley is a simple place, and quite simply private. Or snooty," wrote Sophy Doub Burnham, a Valley native, in "The Landed Gentry" (1978).
In 1925, Mr. Stewart led the club's fox hunters north to the more open country of the Worthington Valley. The "Upper Club" remains there on a 165-acre tract. Many of the horsy set never venture south to the "Lower Club" in the more populated Green Spring Valley for golf or tennis.
Stewart descendants dominated the 1993 Hunt Cup triumph. Ann Stewart Fenwick, a granddaughter of Redmond Stewart, trained the winning horse. Landslide Farm (named for Mr. Stewart's 1904 Hunt Cup winner) owned it. The owners included Mrs. Fenwick's cousins Redmond C. S. Finney, a former Gilman School headmaster, and Jervis Spencer Finney, a former U.S. attorney.
A cherished mantle
A cluster of families -- Bonsals, Bosleys, Brewsters, Elders, Fishers, Fenwicks, Griswolds, Hannums, Janneys, Martins, Merrymans, Stewarts and others -- have long Hunt Cup histories and not a few intermarriages.
Their chiseled features, polished manners and prep school airs are redolent of the British Isles. (Valley people are particularly proud of thetwo Maryland Hunt Cup horses that won the famous English Grand National steeplechase.) They are lawyers, bankers, brokers, business people, and horse breeders and trainers.
Some Valley people, like former U.S. Sen. Daniel B. Brewster or the Finney brothers, have made their mark in public service. But in philanthropy and the arts, the horse country society has had less impact than the Jewish newcomers at the Valley's southern fringe.
About 700 subscribers and patrons underwrite the Hunt Cup's $30,000 purse, says Charles C. "Cuppy" Fenwick Sr., long-time race chairman and owner of 285 acres next to the Martin place. Only some of them ride regularly. Fewer still fox-hunt: 30 to 40 riders assemble on a winter morning to follow the excited cries of the Upper Club's scores of hounds.
Yet those numbers have held steady in recent years, and 13-year-old boys and girls still dream of riding in the Maryland Hunt Cup.
"For some reason, people look at the Maryland Hunt Cup as a cherished mantle to be passed from generation to generation," said Louis "Paddy" Neilson III, Sanna's father and a three-time Hunt Cup winner.
With characteristic reserve, Valley horse people are about as likely to share their innermost feelings as they are their income tax returns. But it is clear that winning the Hunt Cup, whose high, hard fences test the mettle of both horse and rider, is a badge of honor that people spend lifetimes trying to attain.
It can be an expensive pursuit. Owners spend anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $25,000 or more for a horse, which typically costs $1,000 a month to board and train, according to Charles T. Colgan, of the National Steeplechase and Hunt Association in Fair Hill.
Family is persistent
The Griswolds, major shareholders in the Alex. Brown & Sons brokerage, have owned or ridden horses in the race for more than half a century. They have never won. But they persist.
"It's probably a little bit like trying to get pregnant," Jack S. Griswold, an investment banker and 16-time Hunt Cup rider, said gamely. "Once you stop trying, you seem to get pregnant. I expect we'll keep on trying."
Stiles T. Colwill, a Baltimore antiques dealer and decorator, said the Maryland Hunt Cup was a defining event for his late father, J. Fred Colwill. The elder Colwill won aboard Blockade in 1938-1940, the only rider to win three consecutive years on the same horse.
Fred Colwill grew up in Pikesville, was an employee in a dry goods business and didn't own a horse. Winning the Hunt Cup "changed his life," Stiles Colwill said. The champion rider married the daughter of a Valley family, bought a farm and raised horses.
"It introduced him to a whole new world," he said. "A lot of what I would call outside people -- and I don't mean that unkindly -- look at it as a very closed world, but people in it don't consider it closed at all.
"If you don't have any interest in it, they have no interest in you," Mr. Colwill said. "But if you have interest in horses, it's a very open group of people."
By the 1920s, the Hunt Cup had become a Maryland institution. Crowds exceeded 30,000 in the Depression years of the 1930s, and the race's heyday extended through the 1950s. Newspapers chronicled who came -- the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Cabinet secretaries, diplomats -- and what they wore.
Attendance has declined considerably in recent years, partly by design. Teen-aged drinking, rowdiness and fights in Hunt Cup parking areas were endemic in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, county police requested that admissions be sold only in advance to curb the crowd.
Since 1989, when the policy took effect, crowds have hovered around 5,000, and the event has regained its upscale, family-friendly ambience. The parking areas are once more elegant picnic grounds where food and dress resemble a garden party more than a sporting event.
No need for hype
"They don't have to hype this race," said Dr. John R. S. Fisher, a veterinarian and horse trainer whose family has a distinguished Hunt Cup history. "It's one of the very few things in this world today that hasn't changed -- the same course and basically the same people."
Most essential elements are in place for the Maryland Hunt Cup's immediate future: a supply of moneyed landowners, prosperous horse lovers, capable thoroughbreds (a dozen are entered Saturday) and skilled amateur riders.
But the weakest link in the race's next century -- and the Valley way of life -- is the land itself. Fox hunts, the backbone of the Valley's equine tradition, need open space to survive.
As Valley landowners die, heirs may be forced to sell or develop land to pay inheritance taxes. Farmland preservation programs -- that legally restrict the land's use to agriculture -- ease that pressure by reducing a property's taxable value. But Baltimore County landowners have sold development rights on only 16,000 acres, mostly outside the Valley.
Encroachment on the Hunt Cup property itself has been minor. The race lost some parking space when Oriole shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. built an estate nearby in the late 1980s.
Thanks in part to the clout of big landowners and the advocacy of the private Valleys Planning Council, Baltimore County adopted highly restrictive zoning in 1975 that generally limits development in agricultural areas to one lot per 50 acres.
Yet even dicing the Valley into 50-acre chunks could render it useless for hunt country or traditional agriculture.
Margaret Worrall, a horse fancier and the planning council's executive director, worries that the Valley is "getting 'estate-ized.' We're seeing a lot of these colossal mansions which weren't part of the scene in years gone by," she said.
Hunt Cup devotees pose what-ifs: What if the state widens Tufton Avenue, a cross-county thoroughfare for Hunt Valley commuters that bisects the Martin farm? No such plan has yet prospered.
What if the Martin family sells the land? Worthington Farms is not legally protected from development, but Mr. Martin says he is committed to keeping it as a horse farm.
Advocates of preserving the rolling green valleys stress the positive effects on water and air, the psychological and recreational benefits of having beautiful open space so close to a major city, the horse industry's impact on the local economy and the advantages of preserving fertile soils for farming.
Valley horse people, of course, need no such rationale. To them, the last Saturday in April without the Maryland Hunt Cup is unthinkable.
"I was brought up in this tradition," said Katharine McLane Hoffman, who has attended the Hunt Cup for more than 60 years.
"I think this race will go on," she said, "as long as there are people and horses."
HUNT CUP TICKETS
General admission parking stickers for tomorrow's 100th anniversary Maryland Hunt Cup are sold only in advance. Stickers are on sale today at Alex. Brown & Sons, Inc., 135 E. Baltimore St.; Butler Store and Liquors, 14921 Falls Road; John Brown's Store, Falls and Shawan roads; Valley Motors, 9800 York Road, Cockeysville; Vordemberge Saddlery, 2113 Greenspring Drive, Timonium; and The Wine Merchant, Falls and Joppa roads.
Stickers are $30 per car. Parking lots open at 1 p.m. The race begins at 4 p.m.