Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GOLDSMITHS. ALDEN GOLDSMITH. A man he was to all the country dear.—Goldsmith. In 1724, when Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart sovereigns, was on the throne of England, a man named Goldsmith was granted a deed to a plot of land near what is now known as Washingtonville, in Orange County, New York. He became a farmer and stock raiser (although his name would indicate that his ancestors had followed a very different calling), the produce of his farm and the adjoining ones being shipped to New York, which was then, as it is now, the market for everything produced in Orange County, from eggs to race horses. The property included in the original deed passed from generation to generation, through the oldest son, the dark days of the Revolution being passed without a change being made in the ownership of the place, which, at a very early date, became known as Walnut Grove Farm. The home of the Goldsmiths was an old-fashioned farm house, standing on a terrace surrounded by hickories of over a century's growth, and whose shadows fluttered on a lawn sloping to the Otterkill. In this home Alden Goldsmith and his two sons, James and John, were born, two of them died there, and all of them were borne from its portals to the grave. In the seventy-five years which elapsed between Alden Goldsmith's birth, on December 4, 1820, and John Alden Goldsmith's burial, in December, 1895, a new breed of race horses was evolved on the continent of North America, and of all who contributed to the establishing and developing what is now known as the "light harness horse," there is no family that has left so legible an impression on its history from the foundation to the top of the arch as the Goldsmiths. Upon the father was cast the burden to breed and develop a family of horses which, after b...