Sign for Perry Hall, near Baltimore Maryland
There is a commemorative plaque about 13 miles north of Baltimore harbor on U.S. route 1 (formerly the Bel-Air Road) informing any curious passer-by that it stands at what was the entrance to Perry Hall, one the greatest houses in eighteenth-century Maryland, the home of Harry Dorsey Gough. Unmentioned that it was also the home of the first imported breed of improved cattle into America: Shorthorns.
By the eighteenth century, the expansion of agricultural production was a concern to every educated person. There were predictions of widespread famine as the world’s population increased, and laborers began to leave farms at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The challenge to improve agricultural production was taken up by many individuals, especially in Britain’s Anglo-Atlantic agricultural network that extended from the British Isles to the West Indies to the eastern shores of the North Atlantic. Among the better-known improvers was tenant farmer Robert Bakewell of Dishley Grange in Leicestershire with his Longhorn cattle and Dishley sheep (now known as Improved Leicester or Leicester Longwool). Bakewell had many admirers, among them was Harry Gough.
In North America prior to the American Revolution there was general indifference to either livestock production or the cultivation of crops beyond tobacco, the primary interest of many colonial proprietors. Horses, cattle, and swine foraged in the forests and only sheep, who suffered from the ravages of wolves, received close attention, but they were relatively few. Cattle in colonial America have called forth little comment. In New England they were Devons from southwest England, Dutch cattle were introduced into New York, and in the southern regions were Spanish influenced cattle. There were few efforts at management and the cattle pastured in the woodlands.
After 1783 and the colonists’ victory in the War of Independence, the population of the United States began to increase rapidly. To give an example, the demographic center of the United States in 1790 was 8 miles east of Baltimore Harbor, but ten years later that center had shifted 18 miles to the west of the harbor. The growing population needed food.
May 10, 1798 entry in Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser
One response was the importation of improved livestock. The first to do this in the United States was Baltimore businessman and plantation owner Harry Gough, who gave the date of his importation in a statement of his breeding philosophy to the Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser (May 10, 1798): “In the year 1785, I imported from England three cows and a bull . . . The cows were all in calf when exported and calved after they arrived in this country. . .”
Gough’s neighbor Richard Parkinson remarked: “Gough, at Perry Hall . . . has procured some imported cattle from near York, in England, something of the Teeswater kind”. “Teeswater” is one of several names given to what later became known as “Shorthorn” cattle. Parkinson did not approve of them and sniped that Gough was “distinguished for breeding short-horned and large cattle; although very improper for America, as no poor land ought to have large animals upon it.”
Gough expected to make money from his imported cattle, and he held the first auction of Shorthorns outside the British Isles in 1788 at Perry Hall as announced in the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser (October 18, 1788):
“To be sold, at Perry Hall, Baltimore County, on Tuesday the 28th instant, about twelve o’clock, several remarkable fine young bulls, from Mr. Gough’s imported English cattle, among which is one that weighed at six weeks, 253 lb.”
The sale was a failure, and the explanation was given in the same newspaper three days later:
“As the day appointed for the sale of Mr. Gough’s stock, at Perry Hall, proved rainy, there was none of it disposed of. – It will be offered for sale on Thursday the 6th day of November next at twelve o’clock. If that day should be unfavourable, on account of rain, the next fair day. – On yesterday two of Mr. Gough’s bull calves, from his imported English cattle, were weighed, one of which was 24 weeks and 4 days old, and weighed 420 lb. the other, about two weeks older, weighed 432 lb.”
Gough did not abandon auctions, but he sought other venues. He placed the following notice in Edwards’s Baltimore Daily Advertiser for March 31,1794:
“I have by Importations from England, Persia, etc., stocked my farm at Perry-Hall with a very superior breed of CATTLE and SHEEP, and propose raising Calves and Lambs for sale. I have now a number of both kinds, which I will deliver in Baltimore-town, to the order of such who may apply, which must be done in six weeks from this date, directing to whom they are to be delivered. The price of the Calves is from [$] 7.10 to 17.15, and the price of the Lambs from 8 to 20 Dollars.”
Those prices were steep. Parkinson claimed that fat calves, for example, sold between $4-8. For Gough there were two other enticements: temperament and transportation.
The temperament of animals was a concern in a country as large as America. Cattle left unattended and grazing over vast distances could become too wild to be handled. Gough’s hero Robert Bakewell had made the docility of his beasts famous, and Gough imitated him, as can be seen in the notice that appeared in the Federal Gazette for July 17, 1800:
“For Sale, Several valuable young BULLS & HEIFERS, of my noted English breed; the bulls fit for immediate use. They are perfectly docile and can with ease be taken from Baltimore by water or by land from Perry Hall, to any part of the United States.”
The final sentence is important, for water transportation implies substantial distances to be travelled. As will be shown, this was precisely what Gough intended.
Before animals could be sold, buyers had to be found. This was accomplished through the newspapers in brief “information” pieces probably written by Gough. Two pieces that appeared in newspapers along the Atlantic coast during the year 1796 are illuminating examples. The first appeared in Kline’s Carlisle [PA] Weekly Gazette on May 1, 1796, with the title “Encouragement for Farmers:”
“A calf was sold yesterday for two hundred dollars. The animal was raised by Harry D. Gough, Esq. and sold by him to Mr. Ashbel Welles, who means to send it to Boston. It is 14 months old, and weighs one thousand and twenty-two pounds.”
Ashbel Welles (1734-1806) of West Hartford, Connecticut, was a Revolutionary War hero who served with Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. This piece was reprinted in the Boston Gazette and Weekly Republican Journal on June 13; and in the Rutland (Vermont) Herald on June 20. The information could vary, and the Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser (May 27) increased the weight of the bull to 2,022 pounds while the Augusta (Georgia) Chronicle (June 11) decreased the selling price to $100.
Gough was apparently satisfied because several months later the American Intelligence
Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser (September 22, 1796) announced that an “Importation Society” had been organized in Baltimore for the purpose of bringing into the country the best animals from England. Once again, the information was quickly reprinted by newspapers along the Atlantic coast. The Philadelphia Gazette printed the item the following day, the Newport (Rhode Island) Mercury published it on October 4, the American Telegraph and Fairfield Co. (of Bridgeport, CT) Gazette printed it on October 19, the Norwich (Connecticut) Packet published it on November 3, and the Medley or Newbedford (sic) Maine Journal printed it on November 4.
Gough boasted about the area over which his livestock sold. In addition to Welles there was Joseph Rice of Fauquier County, Virginia. On October 26, 1797, he sold a 3-year-old bull purchased from Gough for $100 when 5 months old that, supposedly, weighed 688 pounds. In the afore-mentioned news item/memoir from the Federal Gazette and Baltimore Daily Advertiser, Gough names several of his more important customers including former president George Washington and Captain (later Congressional Representative) Jeremiah Wadsworth (1743-1804 of Hartford, Connecticut) in addition to buyers from Maryland that included his brother-in-law Charles Ridgely of Hampton. He concluded by giving notice of a sale of 21 calves to be held on June 21 with the suggestion that some of the calves would weigh 100 pounds for each month of age.
A legacy of Gough’s Shorthorns are the so-called Gough and Miller cattle. Their history can be traced using, first, a memoir published a dozen years after Gough’s death by veteran stockman William Steenbergen of Virginia in The American Farmer for 27 July 1821 (page 140). Originally from Moorefield on the South Branch of the Potomac, Steenbergen relocated to ‘Dunmore Mt. Airy’ near Mount Jackson, Virginia, circa 1795. He claimed that cattle imported from England were introduced to his area of Virginia some 30 to 35 years earlier by a man named Matthew Patton who took them first to the South Branch of the Potomac (Augusta County in what is now West Virginia) and then to Kentucky; Gough is mentioned in an aside. The chronology given by Steenburgen encompasses the time of Gough’s first sale of livestock. Calculating from the longer of the two durations—35 years, from the year of the journal’s publication (1821)—yields the year 1786, while the shorter span gives a date of 1791. According to Steenburgen, Patton’s improved bull sired calves out of the native cows that so impressed his neighbors that a Mr. Miller purchased either the bull or some calves and then began his own importations. Steenburgen did not like the imported cattle and claimed that they had a detrimental effect on the native stock. The first cross produced good cattle, he wrote, but subsequent linebreeding resulted in a beast that was large, gained weight slowly, and whose beef was coarse and unsaleable.
Both Matthew Patton and Mr. Miller were important figures in livestock history. Matthew Patton was instrumental in introducing Gough’s breeding beyond Baltimore. His father, also named Matthew Patton, operated a mill in what is now West Virginia, close-by Fort Seybert near Franklin, in an area called Buffalo Meadows, where he had a large livestock operation. The younger Matthew moved to Baltimore a few years before the War of Independence. He was a saddler who traded in the partnership of Patton and Coulter, with a shop at the corner of Calvert and Water Streets. Politically, he was a fire-brand agitator for the colonists, joining the Baltimore Independent Cadets in December of 1774. In 1778 he signed oaths of allegiance and fidelity agreeing to manufacture knapsacks and haversacks for the Continental Army. Finally, he enrolled in the Baltimore County Troop of Horse, under the command of Captain Nicholas Ruxton Moore on June 21, 1781. Despite his active service, the post-war years were not kind to Patton. The partnership of Patton and Coulter suffered from the loss of military contracts following the signing of the Treaty of Paris and the firm’s dissolution on December 3, 1785 was noted in the Maryland Gazette of October 31, 1786. Matthew remained in Baltimore for a few more years and his departure can be marked by the birth of his children; in 1788 his twin boys were born in Baltimore, but the next child was born in Kentucky. So, a possible scenario is that Matthew Patton purchased a bull at Gough’s auction of 1788, took it with him when he returned to his family home in Buffalo Meadows, and again when he moved to Kentucky. This would explain why his beasts acquired such notoriety that they were known as “Patton Cattle.”
Turning to Mr. Miller, the other part of the ‘Gough and Miller’ cattle, he was Henry Miller (1732-1796), Patton’s neighbor in Augusta County and the owner of the Mossy Creek iron manufactory. He was also one of the great figures in the history of Shenandoah Valley agriculture and owned about 1100 acres of land. His home, now simply the “Henry Miller House” still stands and is listed on the national register of historic places.
Henry Miller House
In the penultimate decade of the century, he and Matthew Patton were buying cattle in partnership; possibly Miller was supplying the funds for Patton’s purchase of Gough’s cattle. He continued buying cattle after Patton’s departure for Kentucky. Miller employed Richard Sprigg of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, as his agent; Sprigg imported for Miller a Shorthorn cow and a bull, the latter costing one hundred guineas (roughly $30,000 in today’s money).
In addition to Steenbergen’s memoir, another account of the Gough cattle outside of Maryland was written in the mid-nineteenth century by Brutus Clay (a future congressman from Kentucky), who took his information from an elderly informant identified as B. Harrison of Woodford County. This account (“Brief History of Kentucky Cattle,” in Hunt’s Merchants Magazine and Commercial Review 33 (1855) 236) clearly is confused in places but basically agrees with Steenbergen’s information with additional details. According to Clay, Patton was one of the earliest purchasers of Gough’s imported cattle and took six calves by a bull he purchased from Gough with him to Kentucky in 1790. One animal is described as large and coarse, echoing Parkinson’s criticism, with large horns possibly from a cross on a native cow. Five years later he introduced two more animals—a bull and heifer—bred by Gough. The bull was described as deep red in color while the heifer was white. These might be the bull Mars and the heifer Venus that Matthew Patton took across the Alleghany Mountains. Mars (number 1850 in the American Herd Book) was a red bull with a white face and heavy horns. Venus was a white cow with red ears and small horns. After producing two bull calves with Mars, she died. Another, more famous, animal was the bull “Buzzard,” ancestor of the Shorthorns of Kentucky that is described in a laconic entry as “Red, descended from a Bull and Cow imported into the U.S.A. by Mr. Gough, Baltimore” (see Lewis F. Allen, Pedigrees of English Short-Horn Bulls to Which American Pedigrees Trace (Buffalo: Warren, Johnson & Co. 1874) 75, number 3253).
Even before his death, cattle descended from Gough’s importations were making the return journey from the western regions to the towns and cities of the east. History was made in 1805 with the first major cattle drive in the United States. George Renick took 96 head of cattle, descendants of the Gough and Miller breeding, from the Scioto River Valley to Baltimore (his home known as the Renick House or “Paint Hill” still stands in Chillicothe, Ohio). The American Farmer of June 29, 1821 (p. 112) claims “There is not a drove of fat Cattle brought to our market, which may not be recognized as the descendants of the Stock imported from time to time by Mr. Patterson, the late Mr. O’Donnell, Gough, Sprigg and a few others.”
The importation of Shorthorns and their initial distribution required the labor of breeders from all levels of society. Wealthy businessmen, failed shop keepers, and major stockmen were all a part of the story.
Author Profile: Dr. Benjamin Hudson
Benjamin Hudson is professor of history at the Pennsylvania State University, where he specializes in British history. He is a member of the Maryland Shorthorn Association as well as the Heritage Shorthorn Society. Coming from a family associated with Polled Shorthorns since the First World War, he showed Shorthorns in 4H and FFA. His grandfather B.C. “Brownie” Hudson’s Highland Polled Shorthorns showed throughout the Midwest while his father John Hudson judged Polled Shorthorns at the International Livestock Expo, the National Polled Shorthorn show, and the San Antonio Expo as well as numerous state fairs and regional shows.