Gallery Guide | The Melancholy Museum

The Palo Alto Stock Farm
MAHPIYA VANDERBILT
Stanford ’19
AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD
in 1869, Leland Stanford Sr. was exhausted. His doctor prescribed
a vacation, but instead he purchased Occident, “a little horse that
turned out remarkably fast.” His fascination with horses led to the
establishment of the Palo Alto Stock Farm in 1876, an enterprise that
eventually grew to cover more than eight thousand acres of Santa
Clara Valley land and included barns for colts and trotters in training,
a carriage house with second-floor staff residences, blacksmiths’ and
wheelwrights’ shops, dozens of paddocks, and multiple racetracks.
In winter 1876 Leland Sr. significantly expanded the operation by
acquiring twelve mares and his prize sire, Electioneer, from the New York
stud farm Stony Ford for $41,200. His objective was to set speed records
in harness racing, then the most popular racing sport, by breeding and
training the best trotters in the world. By 1882 there were more than 350
horses on the farm, and by 1891 approximately 750 horses, making it one
of the largest training facilities in the United States. At its peak the Stock
Farm employed almost 150 people, many of them Chinese immigrants,
to feed, train, and care for the horses as well as maintain tracks, farm the
land, and operate and repair equipment.
To this day, the Palo Alto Stock Farm is renowned for its creation
of a new and innovative training system to increase speed. Developed
with trainer Charles Marvin, the method involved running horses in
short bursts starting at a young age. After Leland Sr.’s death in 1893
Jane Stanford continued the farm in her husband’s memory, but she
finally closed it in 1903 and all the horses were auctioned off. Today, its
legacy lives on in the university’s nickname, “The Farm.”
Horse Relics
ALEXANDER VEITCH
Stanford ’19
The Red Barn on the Palo Alto Stock Farm, late 1880s.
Stanford University Archives
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THE PALO ALTO STOCK FARM WAS MORE THAN MERELY THE
precursor of Stanford University; it was the epicenter of a sporting
empire that remains unparalleled in horse racing and beyond. The
farm produced California’s first celebrity athletes—equine rather
than human—many of whose speed records stand unbroken today. In
Leland Stanford Sr.’s estimation, the success of his racing “trotters”
rivaled his achievements as a railroad magnate. Oddly enough, relics
of the Stanfords’ horses expose a great deal about the new Californian
elite of the Victorian era. As products of wealth and science, horses
projected the status of their breeders. Leland Sr. preserved traces
of his most prized horses as instantiations of his own manifest
superiority. These mementos ranged from the artistic and aesthetic to
the anatomical and macabre.
In 1891, the newly mounted skeleton of Electioneer, the farm’s
greatest sire, was readied for display to great fanfare in the Leland
Stanford Junior Museum. A horse that bred but never raced,
Electioneer stood for a perfect genomic type, one that echoed the
racial science of the era. After viewing the skeleton, one journalist
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