THE BLACK HAWK OR MORGAN FAMILY. 377 



mare ever produced anything else, either by the original Morgan 

 or by any other horse. 



BLACK HAWK. As his name indicates, this horse was a jet 

 black, and was something over fifteen hands high. He was 

 foaled 1833, was got by Sherman Morgan, and was bred by Ben- 

 jamin Kelly, of Durham, New Hampshire. As the question of his 

 paternity has been the subject of a great deal of bitter con- 

 troversy, continued through many years, and participated in by 

 men of intelligence, on both sides, I must give the history, as I 

 understand it. Mr. Kelly kept a tavern at Durham and Mr. 

 Bellows, the owner of Sherman Morgan, made this house one of 

 his points of stopping as he traveled his horse, in his circuit of 

 the season. Along with Sherman he had another horse called 

 Paddy, black as a raven, that did some service at seven dollars, 

 while the price for Sherman was fourteen dollars. On one of 

 his visits, Mr.- Kelly's black mare, called "Old Narragansett" 

 was bred to Sherman and proved to be in foal. Not long after 

 this Mr. Kelly sold the mare to Mr. Shade Twombly, living 

 about two miles from Durham, and a part of the agreement was 

 that if the mare should prove to be with foal, Mr. Twombly was 

 to pay for the services of the horse. The next spring the mare 

 dropped a fine black horse colt, and Mr. Twombly claimed the 

 colt was by Paddy and not by Sherman, hence, he. refused to pay 

 fourteen dollars for the services of Sherman, but was willing to 

 pay seven dollars for the services of Paddy. This resulted in a 

 lawsuit in which it was proved that Sherman was the sire of the 

 colt, and Mr. Twombly's estate had to pay the money. The colt 

 was kept by Mr. Twombly's heirs, at pasture in Greenland, New 

 Hampshire, till he was about two years old, when he was sold at 

 auction to Albert Mathes, of Durham, for seventy dollars and 

 from him he passed to Benjamin Thurston, of Lowell, for two 

 hundred dollars. In Thurston's hands he became quite noted, 

 locally, as a trotter, and in 1844 he became the property of David 

 Hill, of Bridport, Vermont, where he became altogether the most 

 popular stallion in the United States, and died -there November, 

 1856. He was the first horse to command one hundred dollars 

 for his services; and many of the great mares of the country 

 were sent to his embrace, among them the world-renowned Lady 

 Suffolk, but unfortunately she failed to produce. 



To understand why the fight against the Sherman Morgan 

 paternity of this horse should have been so bitter and so per- 



