April 2026 Issue

April 2026 | EAST COAST EQUESTRIAN 4 By L.A. Berry To Lord Tennyson, spring lightly turns a young man’s fancy to thoughts of love. In Maryland horse country, spring turns thoughts elsewhere—toward timber. Specifically toward the heart-pounding, palm-sweating four-mile test known as the Maryland Hunt Cup, where horses and riders gallop across open countryside and meet twen- ty-two solid timber fences built of oak rails that neither bend nor forgive. Across rolling pastures and hedgerowed hunt country, riders come at those fences at racing speed, knowing that the tallest obstacle on the course—Fence Six, rising four feet ten inches high—has ended many hopeful afternoons before the finish line ever comes into view. Inmany runnings, fewer than half the starters complete the course. The fences do not give. The horses must be bold, the riders precise, and both must possess the rare athleticism required to clear four miles of timber at full gallop. In this landscape of open fields and long galloping ground, the Maryland Hunt Cup has grown into something larger than a sporting contest. It is, quite literally, a story of timber and trees—of fences built from oak rails and family trees whose branches have shaped the race for more than a century. Traditionally held on the last Saturday in April, the Hunt Cup began in 1894, when ama- teur riders from the Elkridge Fox Hunting Club challenged fellow horsemen from the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club to a race over natural foxhunting country at the end of the hunting sea- son to determine whose horses were the fittest. The inaugural victory went to JohnMcHenry, riding his bay hunter JohnnyMiller, remembered as “short on speed but long on jump.” “The first race was so successful that,” chronicler George Brown Jr. wrote, “another was held the next year.” And the year after that. Save for an honorable pause duringWorldWar II, the race has endured ever since. April 2026 marks the 129th running, and from those deep roots has grown not merely a race but a living in- heritance—one shaped by families whose names return again and again to the timber course. A Dynastic Commitment “The Hunt Cup is somewhat a family affair,” Margaret Worrall wrote in 100 Runnings of the MarylandHunt Cup (1997), and no phrase better captures the race’s peculiar continuity. A glance through the records reveals fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, siblings and cousins, all returning to the same timber course decade after decade. Among the most visible of these lineages is the family of Charles C. “Cuppy” Fenwick, longtime Hunt Cup director. His son, Charles C. “Charlie” Fenwick Jr., won the race five times (1977–79, 1983, 1987), and grandson Charles C. Fenwick III added another victory in 2008. In the modern era, Joe Davies won three times (1998, 2000, 2005), and his son Teddy Davies set a course record winning at age eighteen in 2022. Teddy’s mother, Blythe (née Miller) Davies, had already won the race herself in 2011. Where timber racing grows, family branches tend to follow. Bonsal “I was born on a horse,” Frank A. Bonsal Jr. once said—a line that might as well serve as the family motto. His father, FrankAdair “Downey” Bonsal, won the Hunt Cup twice, in 1927 and 1928, aboard Bon Master, owned by C.L.A. Heiser. Nearly three decades later the family repeated itself when Frank Jr. won the 1956 race on Lancrel, owned by Hugh J. O’Donovan. “Downey went on to spend his life in farm management and racehorse training,” Worrall noted, “but son Frank has become an investment broker and remains in the horse game for the sport of the thing.” The Bonsal story also catches the race at a cultural turning point. In 1972, The Maryland Horse asked Bonsal Jr. what he thought of Kathy Kusner, the Olympic show jumper who had ridden Whackerjack to sixth place in the 1971 Hunt Cup after winning a landmark 1968 lawsuit that forced theMaryland Racing Commission to issue her a jockey’s license. “We wouldn’t want some nice young woman to go out on a bad horse and get beaten up for life,” he said. History, as it often does, moved faster than opinion. By 1979, the Hunt Cup had formally opened itself to women. That year Toinette (née Jackson) Neilson rode in the race. The following spring, Joy Slater won it. Of Timber & Trees The Maryland Hunt Cup as Family Business For more than a century, the Maryland Hunt Cup has been shaped by families—riders, trainers, breeders and foxhunters whose names appear again and again over decades “The Hunt Cup is somewhat a family affair.” — Margaret Worrall Continued on page 28 With permission from the Alex Brown archives, all rights reserved.