GOUGH AND MILLER IMPORTATIONS. 157' 



but, of more consequence, differing in the breeds of the cattle so 

 imported. As they took place nearly ninety, and down to about 

 eighty years ago, the accounts given of them were for many years 

 only of oral transmission, and perhaps of somewhat imperfect recol- 

 lection by the several parties relating them. We find these accounts 

 recorded in print only after the years 1835 to 1840, at a lapse of 

 nearly or quite half a century after the importations occurred, when 

 probably the importers of the original stock as well as some of the 

 owners of a portion of the descendants of the originals had passed 

 off the stage of action. Yet some of their survivors, venerable in 

 age and character in Kentucky and Ohio, still remain, whose recol- 

 lections run into the earlier years of the present century, and from 

 these several accounts our history is drawn. 



According to these accounts in the year 1783 a Mr. Miller, of Vir- 

 ginia, in connection with Mr. Gough, made an importation into 

 Baltimore (probably) of some English cattle, of two different breeds. 

 We infer that the cattle were taken into the fine grazing section of 

 Northern Virginia, in the valley of the South branch of the Potomac 

 river, where they were bred together, as well as the bulls bred to the 

 native cows of the country. They were designated, one as the 

 "Milk breed," the other as the "Beef breed." The former were 

 described as having short horns, heavy carcasses, compact in shape, 

 red, red and white, and roan in color, the cows excellent milkers in 

 all probability, Short-horns. The latter were longer horned, rangy in 

 form, fatted well at maturity, not so smoothly built as the others, and 

 the cows producing less milk than the others. These were, prob- 

 ably, the old fashioned, unimproved stock, coarser and rougher 

 in appearance, but still of the Short-horn race then common in the 

 Holderness district of Yorkshire. Sometime afterwards one, or both, 

 of the previously named gentlemen whether in conjunction, or sep- 

 arately, is not r^aj;eo> about the years 1790 to 1795, made other 

 importations of nearly the same classes of cattle, a part of, or all of 

 which, probably went into the South branch valley, or elsewhere not 

 far distant from the first importation. We hear nothing of these 

 cattle or their descendants as Virginia stock ; but two years after the 

 first importation, in the year 1785, two sons, and a son-in-law (Mr 

 Gay) of Mr. Matthew Patton, then a resident of Virginia, took into 

 Clark county, Kentucky (as related by Dr. Samuel D. Mentin, still 

 living there), one of its fine blue-grass localities, a young bull, and 

 several heifers, half-blooded (and they could only have been calves, 

 or less than yearlings), of their then called " English " cattle. These 



