Background
Justin Morgan was born on February 28, 1747, in West Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of Isaac Morgan, II and Thankful Morgan (Day).
composer educator horse breeder
Justin Morgan was born on February 28, 1747, in West Springfield, Massachusetts, the son of Isaac Morgan, II and Thankful Morgan (Day).
Morgan acquired a common-school education.
Being always too sickly for physical labor, he supported himself and his family as best he could by giving lessons in singing and penmanship, at which he excelled. For a time he kept a wayside tavern, and for several years had charge of horses kept for stud service.
In 1788 he removed to Randolph, Vermont, where he was elected lister and later town clerk.
In 1795 Morgan made a trip to the old home in West Springfield to collect a debt, but instead of the money he received two young horses, one of which, a colt then two years old. Though a mere pony in size - he was little more than fourteen hands (fifty-six inches) high - he was thick-set, docile, quick, and intensely energetic, and could outpull some of the largest horses to be found.
When Morgan died at the home of William Rice, in Randolph, Vermont, on March 22, 1798, this horse was apparently his only remaining possession. To compensate Rice for expenses incurred in connection with his last illness, Morgan made the horse over to him. Long after "the Justin Morgan Horse, " as he came to be known, had died of neglect at the age of twenty-nine, it became apparent that he was one of those rare animals having the power to project his own characteristics through succeeding generations to remote descendants. Before the middle of the nineteenth century Morgan horses had become a distinct type or breed, famed throughout the country for their attractive appearance and their endurance, docility, and utility as driving, riding, cavalry, stage, and general-purpose horses. The very popularity of the tribe almost compassed its ruin, through widespread and long-continued use of the best stallions for improving the common horse stock of the new West without perpetuating the original type from mares of their own kind. Representative specimens were fast disappearing when in 1906 the United States Department of Agriculture and the Vermont State Experiment Station began to assemble a small band of Morgan mares at Burlington.
In the same year Joseph Battell, historian of the breed, who had collected a stud on his extensive farm near Middlebury, Vermont, presented a farm to the United States government, to which the mares were removed in 1907. The establishment, to which Battell added another farm in 1908, became the United States Morgan Horse Farm, operated by the Department of Agriculture for the purpose of reviving and preserving the early Morgan type and distributing surplus stock to foreign and domestic breeders.
In 1774 Justin Morgan married Martha Day. The couple had several children.