Christopher Chenery

Christopher Chenery (September 16, 1886 – January 3, 1973) was an American engineer, businessman, and owner/breeder of the thoroughbred racehorse Secretariat, a U.S. Triple Crown champion.

Early life and career Christopher Chenery, the son of Ida and James Chenery, was born in Richmond and raised in Ashland, Virginia. He had three brothers, William Ludlow Chenery, who became editor of Collier's, Dr. Alan Chenery, and Charles Morris Chenery. (A fourth brother died young.) Chenery's sister was Blanche Chenery Perrin, a writer of novels and children's books centered on horse racing, such as Born To Race. As a child, Chenery visited relatives at the farm in Doswell, Virginia known as The Meadow where he learned to ride. This was the farm where he later founded Meadow Stable and where Secretariat was born.

He studied at Randolph-Macon College and Washington and Lee University, graduating in 1909 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. In 1936, he became the chairman of the board of another utility, Southern Natural Gas for nearly fifty years from the early 1920s until his hospitalization in 1968, five years before his death. He was an active member of the community, including serving on the vestry of Christ Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church in Pelham. However, he is best known for his 1936 purchase of The Meadow, an ancestral property in Caroline County near his boyhood home in Ashland, Virginia. It was there that he founded Meadow Stud, a stud farm which bred thoroughbreds, and Meadow Stable, under whose colors the horses ran. According to Alan Chenery Jr., Christopher's nephew, the Chenery brothers decided that the horses from Meadow Stable would wear the blue and white colors of their college fraternity, Phi Delta Theta.

Chenery bought "four or five horses for a moderate price" in 1936, and soon afterward "a good 16-year-old horse named Whiskaway for $115". In 1939, he purchased his foundation mare, Hildene, for $750. Hildene would produce two of Chenery's most important horses: Hill Prince, the 1950 American Horse of the Year, and First Landing, champion juvenile in 1958 and third in the 1959 Kentucky Derby. He also owned Cicada, champion filly at two, three, and four and once the world's leading money winner among mares.

In the mid-1950s Chenery was one of three men appointed by the Jockey Club to restructure and restore integrity to New York racing. Along with John W. Hanes and Harry Guggenheim, Chenery organized the non-profit Greater New York Racing Authority, with the novel idea of funneling proceeds to the state. However, it was Chenery who personally obtained the $30 million loan necessary to renovate New York race tracks after banks balked at financing "an enterprise based on gambling".

Honors Christopher Chenery was recognized by the American horse racing industry with a number of laurels including the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Breeder in 1972 and 1973. In 2019 he received its highest honor when the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame made him one of the Pillars of the Turf.