n 1823, Southern Colonel William Ransom Johnson issued a $20,000 challenge — a monstrous sum at the time — to Northern horsemen. Johnson chose a North Carolina chestnut, Henry, to represent the South.

Henry, bred in Halifax, N.C., was the son of Sir Archie, another Virginia-Carolina horse and the equine superstar of his day. It’s said that in one race Sir Archie so far outdistanced the rest of the field that he walked over the finish line in first place. One day at the Scotland Neck track he ran a four-mile heat in a blistering 7:52 — an average speed just over 30 miles per hour — and was immediately bought and retired to stud by General William Davie, one of the chief founders of the University of North Carolina. "The bloodlines of many later champions, among them Man O’War and Secretariat, can be traced back to Sir Archie," Fulghum says.

Sir Archie’s son Henry faced the North’s horse, Eclipse, on May 27, 1823, in Long Island, New York. Sixty thousand people turned out — more than the population of New York City at the time. The horses ran three heats of four miles each, which Fulghum compares to a modern horse running nine Kentucky Derbies in a single day.

Henry took the first heat. Then Eclipse’s manager decided to change jockeys, giving the reins to Samuel Purdy, a 38-year old retired jockey who had merely been at the race as a spectator. Eclipse then won the second heat.

Fulghum says Henry’s manager Colonel Johnson overindulged on lobsters the night before the race and got so sick that he couldn’t make it to the track. Johnson’s substitute manager decided to replace Henry’s jockey — "the white boy John Walden" — with Johnson’s head trainer, Arthur Taylor, for the third and final heat. Eclipse took heat three, along with Johnson’s $20,000, leaving many to lament "that a plate of lobsters had cost the South the championship of the turf."

y this time, breeders had begun calling the Old North State — particularly Northampton, Warren, and Halifax Counties — "the race-horse region of America."

"North Carolina has all the advantage of both the North and the South, without the disadvantages of either," wrote Wake County’s B.P. Williamson. "Here horses may be run out all the year round, shelter being necessary but only a few days in midwinter." Williamson described Carolina’s air as "dry and pure, with a bracing effect on the lungs."

But by the 1850s, horse racing’s popularity in North Carolina was beginning to decline. Breeding and competitions increasingly centered on today’s hotbeds: New York, Maryland, and Kentucky. The Civil War further crippled racing in the South as money dried up and breeding stock was lost. In 1942 the North Carolina legislature reined in horse racing and gambling, making them illegal in the state.

As recently as 1993, the legislature considered re-establishing horse racing and allowing betting on races, and even put forth a bill to establish a state horse racing commission. Concerns about animal rights and commercial gambling ultimately quashed the bill.

Yet horse racing has never been far from Carolinians’ hearts. Stock car racing, Fulghum says, just might be Southerners’ modern mechanized expression of love for the horse track. Still, Fulghum says, few people today appreciate the deep passions that racing stirred in our ancestors, back when the Sport of Kings reigned in our state.

Fulghum put together "The Sport of Kings," an exhibit that ran in the North Carolina Collection Gallery from January through March 2002.