Hardships of the colonists—First importations of horses—Racing prevalent in the seventeenth century—Exportation and then importations prohibited—Organized horse racing commenced 1677 and became very general—In 1704 there were many wild horses in Virginia and they were hunted as game—The Chincoteague ponies accounted for—Jones on life in Virginia, 1720—Fast early pacers, Galloways and Irish Hobbies—English race horses imported—Moreton’s Traveler probably the first—Quarter racing prevailed on the Carolina border—Average size and habits of action clearly established—The native pacer thrown in the shade by the imported runner—An Englishman’s prejudices. The colony of Virginia, settled at Jamestown, May 13, 1607, was subjected to a succession of dissensions, privations and disasters extending through a number of years. The elements of which this first plantation was composed were heterogeneous, and many of them wholly unsuited to battle with the hardships and privations of the wilderness. A very large proportion of the adventurers were mere idlers at home, descended from good but impecunious families, and had never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Too proud to labor even if they had known how, hunger and rags soon made them the most unhappy and discontented of mortals. The governmental affairs of the colony fell into confusion, like the people forming it, and we have no official record of what was done for a number of years. All that is known today of what transpired in the early years of the colony has been gleaned from the personal correspondence of actors in the many strifes that came so near destroying them all. These letters are, generally, so strongly imbued with partisan feeling that there seems to be no room left to tell us anything about the industrial growth of the colony, either in planting or breeding. The excerpts, therefore, relating to the early horses of Virginia which I have been able to gather from a great many sources, will fall far short of being complete, but I think they will serve as a basis upon which to form an intelligent estimate of the Virginia horses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as to the nineteenth, the newspapers will furnish everything what is needed. It is evident that the fleet of three vessels which took out to Virginia the first adventurers took also some horses and mares with them; for the governor and council, who went out the next year, in reporting the condition of the colonists to the home company, under date of July 7, 1610, use this language: “Our people, together with the Indians, had, the last winter, destroyed and killed up all our hogs, inasmuch as of five or six hundred, as it is supposed, there was not above one sow that we can hear of left alive, not a hen or a chick in the fort, and our horses and mares they had eaten with the first.”