The lame foundation sire
by Lisa Harkema
The colt had talent, but had inherited his sire’s poor feet and was rushed too early to the races and as a result barely raced because of his lameness. Showing exceptional speed, his new owner decided to gamble on the six-year-old colt at stud. Virtually everybody thought it was a ridiculous folly of judgment. However, John Shults had the last laugh as Axworthy turned out to be one of the foundation sires of the standardbreds.
The story of Axworthy starts with the syndication of his sire Axtell in 1889, which was headed by John Conley of Chicago. One of his friends was Alfred B. Darling of New York City, owner of the famous Fifth Avenue Hotel as well as the Darlington stud farm in New Jersey. Several years prior, Darling had acquired Old Daisy, a grey mare of unknown origins known for tremendous speed as a road horse. He resorted to breeding the mare to the best stallions. Old Daisy was first bred to the very fast Strideaway. The resulting mare, Young Daisy, was deemed so valuable she went straight into the broodmare band at the farm and bred at 3.
In 1873 Darling bought the three-year-old Kentucky Prince, a paternal grandson of Mambrino Chief and whose pedigree had a mix of Morgan and thoroughbred blood without a trace of Hambletonian. The horse was sold five years later and ended up at the famous Stony Ford farm, where he would prove his worth as a sire of speed. Though the stallion was gone, Darling had kept several of his daughters. One was the 1876 filly Marguerite, whose dam was Young Daisy. Come 1890, Marguerite was one of two mares sent from the Darlington farm to Indiana to be bred to Axtell. So pleasing were the foals that Marguerite actually had seven foals by Axtell. The first foal died at two, while of the remaining six, five took records.