Texas-breds were hot items at horse sales in New York and Chicago during the early 1900s, and they didn’t have an ounce of quarter horse breeding.
These Texas blue-bloods were trotters from the famous Electrite line, bred by Col. Henry Exall on his Lomo Alto Stock Farm, now the site of North Dallas’ affluent Highland Park residential area.
Exall, a native Virginian, who at 15 was one of the youngest soldiers to serve in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, came to Texas in 1876 Â and by the mid-1880s, he had become a prominent North Texas real estate broker and banker.
In 1889, with the backing of a group of investors from Philadelphia, Exall purchased land along Turtle Creek, four miles north of downtown Dallas, with the intention of turning it into an exclusive residential development patterned after a similar one in Philadelphia. He had already built roads and dammed Turtle Creek to create a lake, when the Panic of 1893 brought a halt to his plans.
Instead of Philadelphia Place, Exall used the 1,400 acres as Lomo Alto Stock Farm, where he bred trotting horses sired by Electrite, a son of the Standardbred stallion Electioneer, owned by nineteenth century industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University and Palo Alto Stock Farm, Santa Clara County, Calif.
Virtually every top Standardbred today traces to Electioneer in his male line.
In 1906, Exall sold Lomo Alto Farm to John Armstrong, who proceeded to develop it under the name of Highland Park. Wilbur David Cook, the landscape designer who had planned Beverly Hills, Calif., and George Kessler, who had planned Fair Park and most of downtown Dallas, were hired to design the overall layout.
Highland Park quickly became one of the wealthiest communities per capita in America. In December 2010, the average price of a home on the market in Highland Park was $1.2 million.
It was Leland Stanford, by the way, who commissioned Eadweard Muybridge, in 1872, to use newly invented photographic technology to establish whether a galloping horse ever has all four feet off the ground at the same time. The project, which illustrated motion through a series of still images viewed together, was a forerunner of motion picture technology.