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The Virginia of Caroline County—acres of porous soil and roughly tree-mantled countryside—is not the Old South of cotton farms and magnolias under moonlight and willowy, straight-backed women drifting among the lawns and gardens of the Tidewater. This is not the Virginia where buses stop at overlooks on any of the approved tours, lying outside the limits of the Tidewater and far to the southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley, with its pungent orchards and its own haunting song.

Caroline County seems closer in spirit to Stephen Crane than Stephen Foster—a starker and less storybook Virginia than the mountains and the valleys, a place where old times are often just as well forgotten. It is tomato and melon country—watermelons and muskmelons—and it has fields for grazing horses and cattle and cultivated stretches for growing corn and soybeans, but it was not always so prosperous or so peaceful there.

The Meadow is part of a neck of land almost midway between Richmond and Washington. For four years, two armies crawled around it feeling for each other’s jugular. The fighting began just seventy miles to the north, at Bull Run, and it ended not far to the southwest, at Appomattox Court House. The Morris family, living on The Meadow at the time, hid the family silver in the well. Some of the largest set-piece battles of the war, with their cavalry sweeps and scouting parties, took place nearby. The land, and whatever civilization had been built on it, came out of the war years badly gored.

The war radically altered the course of the lives of the people who somehow survived it and left James Hollis Chenery the sole male support of three families, including the Morrises of The Meadow. The war had left the Morrises and other families nearly destitute, though it did not destroy them. Chenery ended up as a clerk in a dry goods store in Richmond.

The war also picked up Richard Johnson Hancock in the Deep South, marched him into Virginia, and then left him nearly dead outside a city in the Shenandoah Valley. Hancock was born in Alabama, the son of a farmer, but he was raised and ultimately orphaned in Louisiana, where he joined the Bossier Volunteers when the war broke out. Hancock’s unit was ordered to Virginia and eventually came under the command of Stonewall Jackson. Hancock was wounded three times in the next two years, the first time superficially at the Second Battle of Manassas on August 30, 1862.

The second wound gave him a limp, but it also remade him into a Virginian and in time led him to found what would become one of the largest and most important thoroughbred breeding establishments in the world. In July of 1863, Hancock was jumping a fence in an assault on Cemetery Ridge during the Battle of Gettysburg when a Union soldier turned on him and fired. The ball struck Hancock in the hip. He was dispatched to a Confederate hospital in Charlottesville. While convalescing, Hancock often attended Sunday services at the Christian Church, and one morning he met Thomasia Overton Harris. She was the daughter of John Harris, a prominent landowner on whose 1450-acre farm, called Ellerslie, about one hundred slaves bred and raised livestock and planted corn and tobacco.

The courtship that developed was interrupted when Hancock, recovered from the hip wound, rejoined the Bossier Volunteers. The fighting in the months that followed carried him to the mountains, to the Shenandoah Valley beyond the mountains, and finally to the city of Winchester in the valley. There, on September 19, 1864, a Union soldier shot him in the stomach as he and other members of the unit retreated south from the city. He was a prisoner of war and badly wounded, though he was not either very long. Hancock, with some help, contrived to escape, slipping away unseen and skirting Sheridan’s right flank at Cedar Creek, making his way to the Confederate lines and then on to Ellerslie. There, in November of 1864, he and Miss Harris were married. Richard Hancock had always liked thoroughbreds, and when he returned to the farm after the war, one of the things he wanted to do was raise them at Ellerslie.

James Hollis Chenery had no such visions. He was only sixteen years old when he started work at the dry goods store in Richmond. Sixteen years later, when he was thirty-two years old, Chenery married his second cousin—it was in the family tradition—Ida Burnley Taylor. They had six children, one of whom died young. Ida Chenery, a disciplinarian, pushed and raised and shaped them.

The oldest boy, William, went through journalism school and rose to be the editor of the Rocky Mountain News and then an editor at Collier’s magazine. A daughter, Blanche, attended the University of Chicago, married an advertising man, and settled down in Pelham Manor, New York, where practically the whole family wound up living at one time. The youngest boy, Alan Chenery, went through Richmond Medical School and became a urologist with a practice in Washington, D.C. Charlie, the only one of the children who did not go to college, eventually worked for his brother Chris. And there was Chris.

Christopher Tompkins Chenery became what he set out to become—a man of substance and horses and a part of the landed gentry. He was born in Richmond on September 19, 1886, but his parents soon moved to Ashland, north of Richmond and just south of The Meadow, where he acquired a feeling for the land and place that never left him.

Helen (Penny) Chenery Tweedy, Christopher Chenery’s youngest daughter, once wrote in a personal family history that poverty was a central emptiness in their lives:

The boys went barefoot from March first to October first to save their shoes. They did not have servants other than a cook, but they were too proud to admit it, so Chris would wait until after dark to carry the laundry in a wagon down to a colored washerwoman so the neighbors wouldn’t know. The best Christmas present was a tangerine in the toe of their stockings—a rare luxury. But they were a close family, fiercely fond of each other and fearful of insult…. Each of the boys grew up craving something—mostly to be relieved of poverty. Bill wanted books, Charlie, the third son, loved cards and girls, but Chris loved horses. A distant cousin, Bernard Doswell, still had a half-mile track at his place adjoining The Meadow, and when they weren’t out in Caroline, Chris would walk the seven miles to exercise the few remaining horses. He not only loved them, but they became a symbol to him of all the things he couldn’t have…. His mother kept his feet on the ground, however, and ruled him and his brothers with a magnificent and ladylike temper. If they got out of line, they spent a week in the yard or cut an extra cord of wood. There was no appealing for clemency or using boyish charm with her. She stiffened their spines and sent them out into the world with a great sense of family obligation.

The children shared their opportunities for education. Each boy was allowed to attend Randolph-Macon College in Ashland for two years, but was then expected to quit and work three years to allow another of the boys his two years of study. And that is what sent Chris Chenery into the mountainous terrain of West Virginia when still a boy of sixteen.

By then he had already finished two years of college at Randolph-Macon, and he had taken a job as a surveyor with an engineering party laying tracks for the Virginian Railroad, one of America’s largest lines of coal carriers. He worked there for three years, and when he left, in 1907, he took with him enough money to return to college, this time to study engineering at Washington and Lee. Scholastically, he behaved like a man possessed, poring over the texts, teaching a course in engineering, and pushing himself to the top of his class. By the time he graduated in 1909, he had acquired a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a taste for wild adventure that sent him west, beyond the Appalachians to the Pacific. There he joined another engineering party that reconnoitered the uncharted interior of Alaska by pack train, looking for potential railroad routes from Cook inlet to the Yukon. The job involved surveying 600 miles of land in difficult weather. “It took two polar bears to live through one winter,” said turfwriter Charles Hatton, a friend of Chenery. The terrain was hazardous, the mosquitoes in the summer malevolent.

In idle moments Chenery read and reread the complete works of William Shakespeare and the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and in later years he quoted liberally from both, especially when he was with people educated in the arts and letters he had missed.

“When he got back to Oregon,” Penny Tweedy wrote, “he was quite a ‘hell-raiser’ and the minister’s daughter he wooed in Portland spurned him. Later he found her again in Chicago, and after two stormy, indecisive years they were married.” Her name was Helen Bates, and she descended from a long line of New England homeopaths who moved slowly from the east coast to the west, by way of Rochester, Minnesota. Helen Bates was pretty, resented her richer cousins’ hand-me-downs, and found a favorite uncle who sent her to Smith College. She went to Chicago to strike out on her own and improve herself, there married Chenery and left Chicago when America entered World War I:

Christopher “joined up” right after they were married in 1917. Helen did not relish living with her mother-in-law in Ashland. Mrs. Chenery had remarked, hearing that Chris was engaged to an Oregon girl, “I thought they only had barmaids out there.” But these two strong-minded women survived, and Chris survived the war—spent ignominiously teaching cavalrymen to ride at nearby Fort Belvoir.

Chenery left the service in 1918, and in the next decade he switched from engineering to finance and began one of those inexorable American climbs to the presidency of a string of utility companies. In 1927 he quickly became wealthy and began to acquire all the accoutrements of money and position and substance as they had been defined for him and as he had defined them for himself. He moved to Pelham Manor, New York, and founded the Boulder Brook Club—a riding club—in Scarsdale. He played some polo and fox hunted with the Goldens Bridge Hounds. He had an office in Manhattan. And he sent his children to good schools. Chenery was never a haughty man, never a man who flaunted his wealth, and he was enough of a romantic and sentimentalist to want to finally return to The Meadow.

One day, in 1935, he took his daughter Penny and his wife Helen to see a boarding school that Penny would attend in Washington, D.C. She would recall the day many years later, picture it as she and her father and mother drove south toward Richmond from Washington and bumped toward The Meadow, where he had spent summers as a youngster, toward Ashland where he had grown up and learned to know the country to which he was returning now:

We drove south for several hours that day, on narrow roads that went up and down like a roller coaster over countless hills. The brown winter woods and the sluggish creeks had a sameness that depressed me; they were so unlike the twisting roads and sudden vistas of my familiar New England, but I was excited to be going back to dad’s home—not really his, but his cousin’s, where he had spent his happiest summers.

Chenery drove farther south, toward the “wooded hills dropping down to deep-cut brown rivers, and wide old fields lying in between,” across the dirt roads climbing to a bridge, high and rickety, that delivered them from Hanover to Caroline County:

Here indeed were the broad fields of the farm, but they were sandy and bare of soil. The car climbed a hill with a commanding view of the river flats to find—a gas station, two old pumps and a shed along side the road. About two hundred yards behind it stood an unpainted three-story, gaunt, old, stark wooden house. It stood amid some handsome old trees but the ground around it was bare. A mongrel dog lay under the porch, the chickens pecked around the steps. My memory fills in tattered children and a few pigs, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

The car nosed into the drive and the yard. There was a silence, and Penny Tweedy recalled her father looking perplexed, then angry:

Still standing were a tall story-and-a-half building at one corner of the yard—the office, he fumed. At the other were two smaller shacklike structures, but with definite architectural details, which were the smoke house and the old kitchen. The remnants of a classic revival cupola capped the well house. Below, in a wide loop of the river, there had once been rich fields. Slave labor had built a dike around them to keep the river out, but after the Civil War, it was breached by high water, and the cove, as it was called, was now covered by an immense tangle of brush, trees and brambles. It had been overgrown even when dad was a boy, and he had heard stories of a runaway slave who lived down in there. No one had ventured down in many years.

Chenery stopped the car in the yard and climbed out, looking at the house and the trees and the land around it. He told his wife and daughter to remain in the car, warning them that the house might be full of lice. Chenery went inside, but he didn’t stay long. Moments later he walked back to the car. He said nothing as he slid inside and drove off to the house across the road. Penny wanted to ask him what The Meadow homestead was like inside, what it looked like, but she saw his expression and decided to say nothing at all. He bought The Meadow a year later.

Thus Christopher T. Chenery had repossessed his childhood, reclaiming some old hills and remembrances and a place to raise horses. But if there was some of the Gatsby romantic in him—something of a man trying to recapture his past—his brothers hardly shared his enthusiasm. They were against his buying back The Meadow, Penny said:

They thought Chris was crazy to buy it back—that was all behind them—and Virginia would never leave the shackles of its backward economy, especially rural Virginia. The Depression was easing, but the specter of poverty never left any of them.

But Chenery had made his money by stringing utilities together, and he was on his way to being a millionaire several times over again. By 1936, he had already been the president of the Federal Water Service Corporation for ten years, and that year he also became chairman and director of Southern Natural Gas Company. Deep in the Depression, Chris Chenery was making money and incorporating his holdings and sharing his stock with the family, and with the gold he set about in earnest to rebuild The Meadow.

He spent thousands of dollars making it a showplace, rebuilding and enlarging and refurnishing it:

He built stables for one hundred horses, a mile training track, breeding sheds, hay barns, and an office—the old one had been beyond repair. The poor country boy eventually spent his winters in Palm Beach buying at auctions the things that were symbols of wealth in his childhood. He first acquired oriental rugs, then turned to nineteenth-century paintings, and finally to jade.

He had earned what he was spending and what he owned. He had a contempt for idle people and for laziness, a disdain for dullness and the weak witted. Education was not what set men apart. What distinguished them was the intensity of the drive and the energy and imagination they possessed and used.

Politically, he was conservative, a staunch anti-Communist—or, as he would prefer to say, an anti-Bolshevik. Financially, he was bold but careful, and when he invested in thoroughbreds in the late 1930s he made small and what appeared to be insignificant acquisitions of blooded horses. “The price does not always represent what a horse is worth,” Chenery once said. “It is only what some fool thinks he is worth.”

Among his first purchases was a filly named Hildene, a daughter of the 1926 Kentucky Derby winner, Bubbling Over. He paid only $600 for her. “Hildene showed speed, but she tired badly eight times in eight races,” he said. So he retired her to the stud, and there she produced a family of some of the finest horses on the American turf.

Sometime during the Depression, when he was getting started in racing, Chenery acquired a set of jockey silks. They were some old silks that had been abandoned, no doubt discarded by some owner who went haywire for a decade and then dropped off into the perpetual twilight that came in October of 1929. The silks were snappy: white and blue blocks on the shirt, and blue and white stripes down the sleeves. And a blue cap.