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The History of the Chincoteague Pony Swim
On the island of Chincoteague on the Eastern Shore of
Virginia there is a festival which has its origins to about 1800.
The present celebration dates back to 1925. Each year the wild
horses are rounded up on Assateague Island in the Chincoteague
National Wildlife Refuge and then swam across the channel to
Chincoteague Island where the young horses are auctioned off as
fundraiser for the local fire department.
In 1835, Dr. Thompson Holmes, who owned a plantation
on the mainland bordering Chincoteague Bay and a house on
Chincoteague Island observed an early pony penning on the island of
Assateague marked with a great feast of local seafood and fowl and
the drinking of "exhilarating liquor":
"...the rustic splendor, the crowds, and wild
festivity of the Assateague horse pennings, scarcely retain a shadow
of their ancient glory. The multitudes of both sexes that formerly
attended those occasions of festal mirth, were astonishing.
The adjoining islands were literally emptied of their
simple and frolic-loving inhabitants, and the peninsula itself
contributed to swell the crowd for fifty miles above and below the
point of meeting...the thousand half-frenzied spectators, crowding
into a solid mass around the enclosure, to behold the beautiful wild
horse, in all his native vigor subdued by man." Today, nearly 50,000
come from all over the U.S. and Canada to witness the event held the
last week of July. |
From Scribner's
Monthly, April, 1877
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
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