In the Scent of Horses, Hay, and Old Barns

  The Story of Eleanor Prince

  Intrepid American Horsemanship Educator

  PAMELA GALBREATH

  First published in 2025 by

  Four-in-Hand Press

  an imprint of Trafalgar Square Books

  The Stable Book Group

  32 Court Street, Suite 2109

  Brooklyn, NY, 11201

  Copyright © 2025 Pamela Galbreath.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, by any means, without written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer quoting brief excerpts for a review in a magazine, newspaper, or website.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2025946051

  ISBN: 978-1-64601-301-2

  eISBN: 978-1-64601-302-9

  Photos: Unless otherwise noted, photographs are courtesy of Carl Prince.

  Interior design: Abbey Gregory

  Cover design: RM Didier

  Printed in

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Disclaimer of Liability

  The author and publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book. While the book is as accurate as the author can make it, there may be errors, omissions, and inaccuracies.

  Any use of this publication to train artificial intelligence, large language models, or other machine learning operations to generate text is expressly prohibited.

  This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as the author has remembered them, to the best of her ability. However, some names, identities, and circumstances have been changed in order to protect the privacy and/or anonymity of particular individuals involved.

  Author’s Note: Misremembering is a part of the recounting of our lives. Ellie Prince, all those interviewed, and I did our best, they to accurately recall, I to accurately weave the narrative.

  A version of Michelle’s story from chapter 22, “Travels and Horse Treats,” was originally published as “Time for Wyoming Horses” in the February 2024 issue (Vol. 70, No. 1, Linden Press Inc., Fort Collins, CO) of WREN Magazine.

  For

  Carl and Lynn

  In Memory of

  Bill Prince

  August 21, 1925 – April 21, 2012

  George Prince

  April 9, 1958 – February 3, 2012

  Eleanor Fracker Prince

  November 17, 1926 – March 19, 2024

  “You’re like me, Henry,” [Jake] continued,

  “as long as there’s a breath left in your body,

  you’ll want to be around horses

  and nothing in this world will keep you from ’em.”

  ~ The Black Stallion, by Walter Farley

  “One night I went down to the barn around 10:30 to join Ellie, and we sat talking, waiting, chilly, but wrapped in the scent of horse and hay and old wood. In the quiet night hours with the mare, my Peggy, and Ellie’s Minx and Scamper, we girls talked intimately of our dreams, hopes, and disappointments.”

  ~ Just Beyond Harmony, by Gaydell Collier

  Contents

  1  I Want a Horse

  2  Sammy

  3  Assuring More Than One Horse

  4  A Freedom Feeling

  5  West Via East

  6  Just Up Route 230

  7  Getting Something Going

  8  I Had This Teacher in Wyoming

  9  Sodergreen Horsemanship School

  10 So I Just Did

  11 Flavoring People’s Lives

  12 Family, Inherited

  13 Ticks and Old Wood

  14 Cattle, Cats, and Confrontations

  15 Horses Were to Hug and to Love

  16 New Chapters

  17 Higher Ed Horsemanship

  18 The Sires of Sodergreen

  19 Liabilities, Lightning, and Losses

  20 For Those Who Can’t Get Enough

  21 Connected Community

  22 Travels and Horse Treats

  23 The Last Horse

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I Want a Horse

  Chapter 1

  ASK THOSE WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES TO THE LOVE OF HORSES TO RECALL when it all started. They will perhaps say that it was in those first moments in the saddle or bareback, when with a simple command or the tug of a lead rope, the magnificent animal began to move forward. His strong muscles rippled, his ears twitched forward and back, and the movement of his head and neck gently invited the new rider to give and take the reins, and to be one as horse and rider.

  That wasn’t the case for a four-year-old girl named Eleanor Harmon Fracker, who wore on a particular day a special dress of tatting and frills for the purpose of visiting, with her parents and sister, close friends who were to be addressed by the children as Aunt Emma and Uncle George. The Frackers had traveled twenty miles from their home in Melrose, Massachusetts to Cape Cod for the special visit. On that summer day in 1931, early model cars and horse-drawn buggies were equally represented on the streets, and Aunt Emma and Uncle George’s lane was certainly no exception. Outside their home, someone had parked a buggy. The horse in harness, securely tied to a post, had a reputation, according to his owners, for being at minimum cantankerous and unpredictable—with a predisposition to kick whenever he felt the urge to do so.

  It might be accurate to say that at some point, with the adult conversation a dull droning in her ears, little Eleanor, named after Eleanor Roosevelt, took a walk toward her destiny. More likely, boredom sparked curiosity, and she wandered until she spied that most magnificent animal. To the buggy she fearlessly marched. When her parents found her, Eleanor was sitting calmly on the ground between and just behind the two front legs of the horse. The animal was calm as well. An observer might suggest that the two seemed to trust one another. Unbeknownst to the little girl, her passion and life’s work had begun, and she would never be deterred.

  Trust and determination, Eleanor would discover ninety years later in her family genealogy, were significant qualities in her New World ancestry. The ancestral story began in 1630, according to Colonial-era records of Essex County in Massachusetts. Eleanor’s father, William Fracker Jr., was a direct descendant of Thomas Newhall Sr. and his wife Mary Woodland Newhall, participants in the Great Puritan Migration. In 1630, with fifty other male settlers, the Newhalls established the settlement of Lynn, located roughly twelve miles up the coast from central Boston. Thomas Newhall Sr. received thirty acres, which was a small plot of land but nevertheless a plot of land where he determined to build his family’s dream.1

  Almost three hundred years later, Eleanor’s father would be an influential player in his older daughter’s determination to own and work with horses. In 1920, twenty-year-old Walter Fracker Jr. set off, with his father and his best friend Jack, on a road trip out west that took them from some unrecorded town in Colorado to Seattle, Washington. This trip to the great American West revealed, in his penciled journal, a young Walter who was intrepid, inventive, adventurous, and resolute, in spite of a journey of “flat tires all the way.” He could as well have been writing of the eventual westward journey, many years hence—the flat tires metaphorical—of his daughter Eleanor.

  Quite a few of the Fracker party’s automobile parts were lost along the gravel and dirt roads, requiring too-frequent delays and repairs. Harrowing moments involved arguments with other travelers as to who had the right-of-way on the edge of a precipice and the nearly impossible navigation of deeply rutted roads on the west side of the Continental Divide. However, Walter Fracker’s account indicated that he laughed at the hardships, set his eyes on the destination of the day, and was thankful for and content with every mile covered: “The country was beautiful … it made me want to jump off [the vehicle] and stay.” Luckily, the party of three was in no hurry and could be generous with their time and skills in repairs. Walter wrote, “We met [a driver] and cleaned his spark plugs and pushed him up and over a hill. He in return gave us a Bible. God knows we need it.” He also recorded that near Eureka, Washington, he found a job which involved “taking care of nine head of horses.” Acquiring the journal years later, Eleanor discovered in her father’s notes that he justified to the family that for the job, it had been of the utmost importance that he purchase a horse and a saddle, the saddle costing much more than the horse. Savoring both the hardships and joys her father detailed in the journal, Eleanor was sure that “from my dad I got my desire to go west, regardless of hardship, and own horses.”

  The pleasure of the adventurous and fearless Mr. Fracker’s participation in his older daughter’s life began on November 17, 1926, when Eleanor was born in Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Medford, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Her parents brought her home to 11 Kenmore Road, in Malden, and soon after moved to Melrose. The family expanded to include Eleanor’s younger sister Carolyn, and they lived in Melrose until 1952, when Walter then inherited his father’s property in Freedom, New Hampshire.

  Settled in 1682 and incorporated in 1850, the town of Melrose in the 1920s appeared unaffected by the rush of industry into the Boston area, a mere seven miles south. As if the early settlers had drawn up a decree, the city ce
nter remained compact, and the surrounding countryside gave way to well-kept farmland, vast hills, forests, and fells. Numerous healthy ponds included Ell and Spot and the large Crystal Lake. Forests were thick and vast. Main Street and Upham Street were the city’s only main thoroughfares—wide and graveled, displaying in their time trolley, wagon, and Ford tracks. Two- and three-story brick shops, with common walls throughout a block, indicated that store owners and their families lived just above their businesses. Elm trees grew curbside, vying for space with sparsely wired telephone poles before Dutch Elm disease killed the elms.2

  In the 1920s, Melrose, of Middlesex County, boasted an elementary school, just across Upham Street from Norman Road, and a large public library. Edwin Carl Kemp described the town as a quiet community with no major businesses, clean and well-kept. Its population was 20,865, and its dwellings, both modest and mansion-sized, registered 4,449. The train station, built in 1900 by Boston and Maine Railroad, served the town. It was called “Wyoming Station.”3

  Walter Fracker Jr. worked in Melrose for a company that repaired and painted car bodies. Eleanor insisted that “if a car was bashed in, Dad could fix it, and no one would ever know it had been damaged.” He traveled all over the United States to network and demonstrate for the company, Automotive Finishers of Detroit, which eventually was affiliated with Burgess Forbes, a paint manufacturer in Maine. For a time, he even hosted what would now be considered a do-it-yourself radio show. When Eleanor, whose nickname “El” was sticking, announced to her dad that her sixth-grade class was studying Sir Galahad and Lancelot and she therefore needed a shield, he exuberantly led her through the process of making a shield that would be a replica of those of old.

  As El watched, her father cut plywood to scale. The two of them drew the lines for the design. Then, carefully explaining the use and contrast of colors and mixes and types of paint, El’s father suggested that the background of the shield be red. He guided his daughter in using gold leaf to adorn the shield’s edges and its requisite lion. El then patiently applied thirty layers of varnish, lightly sanding each of the dried thirty layers to effect a sheen. The shield looked like glass. Marveling at the finished project and what she had learned, El soon became intrigued with art. She also intuited from her father’s instruction a lesson that she would carry throughout her life: “that I could do just about anything I wanted or needed to do, and the only way to do it was the right way.”

  El’s tutelage under her father extended, with less precision and skill, to sports. At some point in El’s early school days, roller skating became the rage. Mr. Fracker stepped forward to tutor El and Carolyn. He chose for the lesson a downhill sidewalk. “It was an easy slope,” El explained, “down by Mrs. Fuller’s place.” Starting out, Mr. Fracker gained the traction that he wanted, but he soon lost control, careened down the hill, and fell into a hedge, badly scraping and cutting his knees. In reminiscent admiration, El said, “And that’s how my father taught me to roller skate.” His fearless escapades soon earned him, among his friends, the nickname “Andy Gump,” after a popular cartoon character whose inventions and escapades often indicated a lack of planning and forethought.

  The days of roller skating may have been short-lived, but Eleanor’s talent for drawing and painting was not. She soon started sketching horses, paying exact attention to the composition of their heads and musculature. All other interests were suddenly adapted to horses, as if her existing world were a funnel to a new world featuring these alluring animals. In fifth grade, yearning for a horse, she read nearly every book in the school library that pertained in some way to horses. My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty, and The Black Stallion were remembered favorites. “Even though school wasn’t my thing,” El said, “I eventually read so many of the library’s horse books that the teacher refused to let me read any more books on that topic.” Her parents stepped in and started buying her the horse books she wanted. However, El’s mother was growing somewhat concerned about her daughter’s development as a young lady. For a subsequent birthday, she bought El books on topics such as, El remembered, “how to conduct oneself.” Oh, how El cried! She hated those books! Her dad whisked her away to the Woolworth’s Five … Ten store to buy whatever Westerns and horse books the store sold.

  “All I wanted at this point,” El said, “was to go west. There were more horses out west than back east. Only rich people had horses in the east. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich either. Besides, where we lived, my parents reasoned that there was just not enough space to keep a horse, and it was too expensive. Maybe the Depression figured into my parents’ stance. I don’t remember. I just know that I was nutty about horses and couldn’t see life any other way.”

  There was certainly no space at 76 Norman Road for a horse, and Melrose’s physical layout was not one that could easily accommodate horses. Close to Boston, the town was bordered by an immaculate golf course, which provided a significant level of quiet. It was not a rich area, but El described it as pleasant and nice. “Even though we didn’t have a lot of money, it didn’t stop us from doing things. It was also a friendly and trusting place. Once, when my parents went to Mexico, Mrs. Fuller, who lived on the corner, invited me to stay at her house. She didn’t need to since I was grown by then. But she did. I think she knew I was feeling a bit lonely for my family. My loneliness was her only concern.”

  El remembered that “we had a big back yard, close to the corner of a larger road, and the house was on a hill, with the city down below. My favorite memory of the city was the Five … Ten. It had a soda fountain, but more importantly, it sold books. All I remember is the book section, especially the Westerns, and of course the books Mom bought me about courtesy and all that stuff.”

  Eleanor could walk or ride her bike the half-mile or more to Winthrop School, grades four through eight, and then later to high school. “One day, on my way home from Winthrop, not thinking of what was around me, probably thinking about horses, my head down, pumping with resolve up the big hill, I rammed into a parked car. It didn’t hurt me, just my ego.”

  El wondered if she might have inherited her dad’s tendency toward accidents. The house in Melrose had brick front steps with no sides. Once, El took a plunge off those steps and landed hard. Her parents thought she had broken her back. The injury was serious enough that El would spend the rest of her life doing exercises to avoid back pain.

  “Another time,” El recalled, “I was coming up the steep basement steps with my bike and wasn’t paying attention as I passed under a part of the stairwell wall that jutted out considerably. I raised my head up so quickly that when my head hit the underside of the wall, it slammed my mouth shut and broke a front tooth. What a mess that was. The dentist had to put black stuff on it until the nerve retreated. That was terrible. I still have a cap on that tooth.

  “I still have the bike, too. It’s interesting what you keep and what gets lost. Some things stay and some things disappear. I don’t know how that works, but I still have the teddy bear that I loved as a child. Thankfully, I grew out of my clumsiness.

  “I remember so much of our house in Melrose,” El said. “Our house was the second house on the corner, and our neighborhood had sidewalks. We often played kickball in the front yard with friends, after supper. There wasn’t much room between the houses and garages. A stand of oak trees was in the back, and we had elm trees until they all died. The life of most of the house was in our big kitchen—ironing, meals, everything. Eventually my mother, clearly out of love, yielded the always-sparkling-clean floor to me. It was where I made belts from leather hides to raise money for my first horse.”

  Mrs. Fracker was an impeccable housekeeper, always making sure that clothing, rooms, and rugs were neat, clean, and organized. She insisted on no shoes in the house. She probably would be mortified to know that El carried all her life this favorite memory: “It was summer, and Mom had left a container of marshmallow fluff on top of the fridge in the back hall when we went to Freedom, New Hampshire, to see our grandparents. It grew too warm in the back hall, causing the top of the container to blow off. There were sticky fluff stalactites and stalagmites in the back hall, all over the shelves, in the pantry, and on the fridge. Fluff was all over the ceiling.” El was fascinated by “the artistry of the small explosion.”