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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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