Accidents of geology and history made Kentucky’s Inner Bluegrass region into one of the world’s premier areas for raising thoroughbred horses. Limestone-rich soils provided the region’s eponymous grasses with high levels of calcium and other nutrients that resulted in strong and fast-growing horses. Geology, ecological relationships, political economy, and human agency created the Inner Bluegrass in the image of the horse, but the areas of California that became thoroughbred havens did not enjoy the biological and geological advantages that propelled Kentucky to the forefront of the horse industry in the nineteenth century. Instead, twentieth-century California capitalists scooped up horses (because that’s what wealthy people did) and forced the landscape to support them with extreme techno-scientific intervention. With chemical fertilizers, standardized feed, and complex irrigation systems, Californians brought the Bluegrass to the West.
California thoroughbreds embodied many things: social institutions, economic relationships, and chemical research, but they were also products of human imagination. Using a case study of a farm in San Diego County, I argue that wealthy Californians intervened in the material world to make the landscapes of their imaginations. The history of California is the history of land speculation. California was the land of boosters and that proved no different for the horsey set. Thoroughbred owners overcame the limitations of California geography to raise horses that rivalled Kentucky’s thoroughbred crop.
