Sun Down's Morgan Horse Club of the West Trophy

Sun Down Morgan in the pasture at El Rancho Poco,
Monrovia/Duarte, California, in the 1940s.

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about the "Parade Morgan" bookend by Dodge, Inc., designed in 1946 by Gladys Brown Edwards.

The W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library at Cal Poly Pomona holds the papers of Cecil and Gladys Brown Edwards. 

In a January 1949 letter to The Morgan Horse magazine, Cecil (Gladys' husband at the time) stated that the Morgan Horse Association (he used the word "Club") of the West used this design as its official trophy. 

GBE's design was based on the Morgan stallion Abbott.

This letter from Cecil Edwards to The Morgan Horse magazine
is part of the collection at the W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library at Cal Poly Pomona.

Western Livestock Journal had run a photograph of the trophy version of the bookend design in 1947.

The caption notes that it was one of the trophies sponsored by the Morgan Horse Association of the West, presented to winners in Morgan breeding classes at the Los Angeles County Spring Fair in Bellflower, California.

The Spring Fair must have been an impressive event. The Los Angeles Times reported that it featured a parade of more than a thousand horses of many breeds moving through the streets of the city, before the horse show began.

Los Angeles Times, 15 June 1947

The champion Morgan stallion at the show was Merle Little's Sun Down Morgan (dark brown horse, foaled April 8, 1933, Raven Chief x Texsky). 

The Morgan Horse magazine's August 1947 issue carried the results of the show; the classes were quite large.

The Morgan Horse magazine, August 1947.

The Morgan Horse magazine, 1947

The 1947 edition of the book Here's Who in Horses of the Pacific Coast, published by Joe Droeger, also recorded a summary of the results:

And because members of the Little family saved it for all these years, we know what one of the actual trophies looked like.  I'd never seen one before in person. The base makes it taller than the bookend.

Here's the inscription on the front:

Merle made notes on the back of the wooden base in pencil. (He noted there were 19 horses in Sun Down's class; the magazine said there were 17, but either way there was a lot of competition!)

They also saved a copy of the photo of Sun Down's win.

Sun Down Morgan's name is often spelled Sundown Morgan; if we zoom in on his Morgan Horse Club registration papers, we see that his name was indeed three words:

I'll add more to the story of Sun Down Morgan in a future blog post. 

Here's a link to my earlier post on the origin of the GBE "Parade Morgan" bookend design:

https://californiahorsehistory.blogspot.com/2021/04/all-together-now-parade-morgan-bookends.html