The Preakness Stakes

The Preakness Stakes was first run in 1873 at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s rich history started at the behest of Maryland’s Horseman-Governor Oden Bowie who organized the inaugural Preakness Stakes in honor of Pimlico’s first-ever spring racing meet. Pimlico Race Course had opened just three years earlier in 1870 and the horse that won the opening day’s feature race, The Dinner Party Stakes (now known as the Dixie Handicap or Dixie), was a horse named Preakness. That horse, derided as a “cart horse” before the running, went on become one of the first horses exported from American to Britain for breeding purposes, an amazing turn of events that shows how far American breeding programs had matured from their originally British roots.

The Dinner Party Stakes, which provided the avenue for the immortality of Preakness, has an interesting history of it’s own. The original race was proposed in 1868 at a sophisticated dinner party hosted by Milton H. Sanford, a wealthy man due to interests in blanket sales during the Civil War. Included among the guests were wealthy horsemen including John Hunter of New York and Governor Bowie of Maryland. The race was to be a two-miler for three-year-olds with a purse of $15,000, the then-staggering amount was proposed by Gov. Bowie, who used the occasion to launch the building of Pimlico Race Course so the race, to be dubbed The Dinner Party Stakes, could be run in Maryland.

The opening day at Pimlico in 1870 started many traditions that still endure in modern-era racing. The running of The Dinner Party Stakes not only produced recognition for the great horse Preakness, which would be forever immortalized by the second jewel of the Triple Crown being run in his honor every Spring, it also is said to have started the use of the “wire”, as in “the race came down to the wire” and the use of the term “the purse” to refer to the prize money awarded to winning horses and their owners, trainers, and jockeys. According to accounts at the time a string was pulled taut across the track somewhere past the finish line with a silken bag tied so as to dangle above the center of the track at horse-head level. The bag was filled with gold coins and the winning jockey had the privilege of retrieving the “purse” as reward for a job well done.

The name Preakness actually derives from an Indian word, Pra-qua-les, meaning “quail woods”. It was in these New Jersey woods that George Washington and his troops wintered in 1776-77, referred to in the general’s journal as “Preckiness”. Future spellings eventually came to the accepted name Preakness we use today. The “quail woods” became the home of a thoroughbred farm owned by Milton Sanford, a guest at the original dinner party. Another of Sanford’s farms, in Kentucky, was the actual birthplace of the horse Preakness.

The first Preakness Stakes in 1873 was watched by a crowd of 12,000 who saw Survivor win the field of seven by 10 lengths over the 1-1/2 mile course for a purse of $2,050. The Preakness Stakes was run seventeen years in a row at Pimlico before financial difficulties forced the race to be run in 1890 at Morris Park in New York and then for 15 years, of and on, at Gravesend track in Brooklyn, New York.

The Preakness Stakes returned home to Pimlico Race Course in 1909. The return home prompted the traditions of the singing of “Maryland My Maryland” before the race and “the painting of the colors” where the winning stable’s colors are painted atop the course’s symbolic weather vane. The 1909 race was 1 mile. That was increased to 1-1/8 miles in 1911 and then updated to the current 1-3/16 miles distance in 1925.

The Preakness Stakes is said to be more about the horses than the crowd. In reference to the pageantry involved with the Kentucky Derby the great poet Ogden Nash, who called Baltimore home, wrote, “The Derby is a race of aristocratic sleekness, for horses of birth to prove their worth to run in the Preakness”. This may be true from the athletic point of view as Pimlico track features a shorter run with tighter turns and longer straightaways, providing exciting runs for the wire every year. Regardless, The Preakness has plenty of pageantry of its own. Weather vanes are symbolically painted and Lord Baltimore’s ancient colors of black and yellow, in the form of Maryland’s state flower, the Black-eyed Susan, adorn the victory blanket worn by the winner of this second jewel in thoroughbred horse racing’s Triple Crown. The City of Baltimore faithfully keeps it’s share of racing history in the limelight and every Spring the state’s history is proudly put on display with the running of The Preakness Stakes.