Lippitt Morman

I spent a lot of time thinking about which California horse should be the subject of my first long blog post here, and decided I could do no better than to tell you about the chestnut Morgan stallion Lippitt Morman (chestnut, 14.3hh, 1939-1962).  

His story underscores the popularity of the versatile Morgan, and serves as a reminder of just how "horsey" a place Southern California was in the decades after World War II.

Lippitt Morman (AMHA #8211) was bred by the legendary Robert Lippitt Knight.  The stallion's name was a combination of the names of his sire, Mansfield, and his dam, Lippitt Kate Moro.  (I sometimes see his name misspelled as "Lippitt Mormon.")

Knight sold him to a Canadian, W.A. LeBoeuf, in 1943, and in 1946 LeBoeuf and Lippitt Morman became famous for winning the Hundred Mile Trail Ride in Vermont.  

LeBoeuf sold Lippitt Morman to California Morgan breeder Roland Hill in 1947, and shortly thereafter Hill sold the chestnut stallion to his friend, horse rancher Merle Little, whose family was active in their local Southern California community. At Little's El Rancho Poco, near what is now the intersection of the 210 Freeway and Mountain Avenue along the border between the towns of Monrovia and Duarte, California, Lippitt Morman was a multi-champion show horse, parade horse (in the Tournament of Roses and other Southern California events), and sire.  

Lippitt Morman, Merle Little, and Merle's mare Senorita Morgan were featured
on the cover of the March 1953 issue of The Morgan Horse magazine. 

Members of the Little family on their Morgans, preparing for the 1949 Tournament of Roses Parade. Edna May Little rides Lippitt Morman on the far right. This photo appeared in the December 1948 issue of The Morgan Horse magazine.

Lippitt Morman was Horse of the Month in the March 15, 1949 issue of the Western Livestock Journal.

Like so many of the best horses, the handsome chestnut stallion was also, most definitely, a friend of the Little family, who called him "Lippitt." Folks who knew him well back in that day described him to me a horse who was "just Himself" -- a charismatic, self-possessed creature with a twinkle in his eye.  

My first encounter with Lippitt Morman's legacy came in about 1970, years after the stallion had died.  My fellow model horse collector penpal in Vermont told me about the exceptional ceramic Morgan figurines produced by the California pottery Hagen-Renaker, Inc. It turned out that one of them, designed by artist Maureen Love, was based on the real Lippitt Morman. 

This was not coincidence; the Hagen-Renaker factory was within a few miles of Merle Little's ranch in the town of Monrovia.  Maureen spent years visiting ranches and stables, race tracks and horse shows, documenting what horses looked like in post-war California. She turned many of the sketches into realistic three-dimensional designs for Hagen-Renaker and for her own sculptures. (H-R licensed several of Maureen's designs to Breyer starting in 1975; Breyer mass-produced them in plastic. (You're going to see references to model horse figurines fairly often in this blog. Horse figurines are one of the "gateway drugs" to the appreciation of real horses.) 

I've talked to several people who lived in Monrovia in the early 1950s and are fortunately still here to tell their stories. They have very clear memories of Maureen Love sitting in the pasture at El Rancho Poco with her sketchbooks, day after day, prior to the summer of 1954.  They also remember what an important part Merle Little and his family played in the community life of the adjacent towns of Monrovia and Duarte back then. Horse shows, trail rides, "Monrovia Day" celebrations, parades, holiday festivities -- the Little family was involved. Merle Little was one of the founders and officers of the Morgan Horse Association of the West, which in the late 1940s included members from 11 western US states. 

Model horse hobbyists have written that Maureen identified Lippitt Morman and many of the other horses she drew on the covers of her sketchbooks. 

Head study of the Hagen-Renaker "Lippet" Morgan stallion, 
produced in the late 1950s. This is the chestnut colorway.

The Hagen-Renaker "Lippet" (as the company misspelled it) was first issued in Spring 1959 through Spring 1974 in matte chestnut and matte palomino, then again from Fall 1983 to Spring 1986 in matte and gloss dark bay/brown.  

Many variations of the Hagen-Renaker "Lippet" Morgan stallion. These, photographed in 2018, came from the estate of model horse collector extraordinaire Karen Grimm.

The Hagen-Renaker figurine was advertised in The Morgan Horse magazine in the 1960s.

Many of Maureen Love's original sketches of Lippitt Morman were sold by her estate on eBay in recent years. A small licensed reproduction of one of them from Dawn Sinkovich's Share the Love, along with one of my own H-R "Lippet" figurines, was part of the exhibit "Miniature Menageries: The History and Artists Behind Hagen-Renaker, Inc." at the W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library (WKKAHL) at Cal Poly Pomona in 2018-2019. 

A  touching written tribute to Lippitt Morman came from his former owner, W. E. LeBoeuf, to Merle Little.  The letter is dated January 17, 1948, and is now in the collection of WKKAHL, only a few miles from the site of El Rancho Poco.  It reads, in part:

"Of all the horses that I have own[ed] and will, He will always be the One that I will remember, never again will I have a Horse that I will love so much as I did Morman, not only because he won the hundred miles but because of the so many good qualities in Him that I appreciated so much... As the old saying goes, You could cut the end of the road with him...."

This photo of Lippitt Morman and Merle Little appeared
in the 27 January 1950 edition of the Monrovia News-Post. 

_______________________________________

For more information:

The Morgan Horse magazine, March 1953, is archived here. Lippitt Morman, Merle Little, and the mare Senorita Morgan are on the cover: https://www.morganhorse.com/upload/photos/76726_March1953TMH.pdf

Don McDaniel's excellent article "Merle H. Little: The Man and His Horses" appeared in the April 2009 issue of The Morgan Horse magazine. I wasn't able to find a copy online.

 
The W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library, part of Special 
Collections at the University Library at Cal Poly Pomona, holds some of Merle Little's papers:
https://libguides.library.cpp.edu/wkkahl

I wrote a model horse hobby blog post with more information on Lippitt Morman, with links of interest to horse figurine collectors. If you click on this link, it will give you another link to Dawn Sinkovich's article on Lippitt Morman, with many examples of Maureen Love's sketches of him:  
https://modelhorsehistory.blogspot.com/2018/05/happy-birthday-lippitt-morman.html