G.T.T.

Those initials, G.T.T, Gone to Texas, were left on abandoned farms all over Tennessee in the 1830's, letting passers by know that the family had pulled up stakes to start a new life in Texas.

Two Corollas will be G.T.T. today as they are heading out to a new life at Karma Farms in Marshall, Texas. Vickie Ives has been involved in Corolla preservation and off site breeding for several years now. There is no one around that knows how to promote these horses the way that Vickie and her family and friends do.

This is a great development for the future of these horses.

(No, that is not a Corolla pictured above. He is Medicine Iron, a great Chinco-Stang that we bred here.)

Another Clarification

The house pictured in the previous post is NOT the 16700's era farm house that I speak of constructing in the previous post. That is the Little House, where my mother was born and is currently the center for our program. It contains our library and the art program is housed upstairs. It is only about 120-140 years old

Baby Steps

If everything could go exactly as I wanted it we would be a center for the preservation of nearly extinct colonial livestock and a center for education. I do not mean this so much in the class room sense, but more a matter of experiential learning, where participants are exposed to history, natural horse care, natural horsemanship, experimental archeology, stone age technology, animal husbandry agriculture, and the host of other topics that should come to mind to my riders and even to visitors making their first trip to the see the horses.

I have had white relatives living within a 20 mile circle of the Little House (shown above)since 1674. My Indian ancestors may have moved into the Tidewater region around 500 A.D.

A small colonial dwelling with a few meager out buildings, a food garden patch, a tobacco patch, and a host of authentic colonial livestock appropriate to the late 1600's exists in a small 4 or 5 acre patch close by. Too close, in fact. At the moment it lives only in my mind. I wish that I could take you all there to see it because it is a fascinating place. It isn't a Colonial mansion or a southern plantation. It is just a little patch of land where an indentured servant, just freed from his bondage on the Peninsula, has moved, hoping to make a better life each year and waiting for Sarah Jane to end her indenture so that they can be married and she can join him on the thing that he holds dear--his home, his land. No one in his family in England had ever owned land, but here he was 22 years old, owning land and having more freedom than life across the Ocean could ever have afforded him.

To move the farm out of my mind and into my pasture will be a difficult process. I will have to take things one step at a time, never biting off more than I can chew. I am starting to think about my first steps. Baby steps.

I am working on obtaining Spanish goats and some very unusual looking pigs now. I do not want to rush things but I do not want to put it off too long. Such things can never be calculated with precision, but if one multiplies my very low triglyceride levels with my very low cholesterol levels and divides that by how poorly I pay attention while driving, I probably have more than a dozen years to get this all done.

Family Horses IV

 

Here is a shot of my wife, Beth, and our grand daughter in line to ride in the parade. My granddaughter is riding Wind In His Hair, a Chincoteague

Team Work

 

This is a shot of our riders at the Christmas Parade. We received the Second Place Trophy. There were many unusual things about our group. There were four generations of my family riding. The youngest rider was three and the oldest rider was 73. We had riders and rider's families participating, both as riders and walkers. I especially like the fact that some many family members of our riders joined in. Bill and Lea looked great in their Indian attire and each lead the parade riding formerly wild Corolla Spanish mustangs, with Lea riding a stallion. Our group included three formerly wild Corolla stallions and two mares that will produce this some of this spring's new foals for the Corolla off site breeding program. We had the largest group of riders among all of the horse groups and we rode all but four or five of the horses there and home.

We had about 18 riders and every horse in our group was trained by my riders and me. This is how we do things--together as a team.