The ‘Woodlawn Vase’: how a silver masterpiece came to be featured at Preakness | GUEST COMMENTARY

The 149th Preakness Stakes will run on Saturday, May 18, at Pimlico Race Course. The winner will walk home with a replica of the historic Woodlawn Vase. The vase, an homage to the 19th-century racehorse and sire Lexington, has weaved its own thread into racing’s grand tapestry.

In June 1860, Robert Aitcheson Alexander, a Thoroughbred breeder in Midway, Kentucky, who stood Lexington at Woodburn Farm, commissioned Tiffany and Company to create a pure silver competition vase for the Woodlawn Association Stakes, a 4-mile heat race in Louisville, Kentucky. Alexander envisioned something in the form of a cup passing down annually to the winners.

He paid $1,500 for the commissioned work. Standing 36 inches high and weighing 400 ounces in pure silver, the vase is a masterpiece of ornate etchings and finely honed silver figurines. At its base are four projecting tack trunks, each containing a horseshoe, racing saddle, whip and jockey’s cap. Above those is a lawn, divided into fields by a planked fence. A stallion stands in one, a mare and foal in the other. The scene is Woodburn Farm. The bowl of the vase contains four shields. A racehorse is engraved on one shield and the Woodlawn Racecourse on another. Two of the shields remained blank to record the name of the initial winner and that racehorse’s image. Separating each shield are four figures of Nike, the goddess of victory, each holding two wreaths upright to the heavens. Above the Nikes are eight engravings of the original members of the Woodlawn Association Course. And finally, on top of the vase is Lexington in full figure under saddle.

The vase was first awarded in 1861, to Capt. T.G. Moore, whose mare Mollie Jackson won the stakes that year. He retained it the next year after another of his mares, Idlewind, took the win.

The cup’s safety became a concern as the Civil War raged, however. Every possession was at risk. There was no guessing at what a Union or Confederate soldier might find appealing enough to take for his own: wallpaper, mattresses, Venetian blinds, hoop dresses made with 12 feet of costly Parisian silk, sheet music, novels, chess sets, birdcages, Bibles, pianos and, of course, those commodities that held their value in sentimentality and monetary significance — silver and gold. Deemed trophies of war, any item had potential value.

So as guerrilla factions plundered Kentucky banks, Kentuckians found safer and more secure methods of protecting their assets. At Woodburn Farm, legend has it, Alexander summoned Nugent, his trusted Irish gardener and a trusted worker, and asked him to go to the flower garden and dig a large hole, as deep as a grave and about as long as one. Alexander then took the Woodlawn Vase, wrapped in cloth, and buried it in the hole.

After the Civil War’s end, Alexander dug up the vase, polished it to sheen, and placed it back into service as a trophy for winners of the Woodlawn Stakes. When Churchill Downs succeeded the Woodlawn Course, the Louisville Jockey Club took possession of the vase, adding it as the prize for the Great American Stallion Stakes. In 1884 and ‘85, the Dwyer Brothers — Phil and Mike — won the vase with their mare, Miss Woodford. The two brothers then donated the vase to the Sheepshead Bay Course in New York as a trophy for the Great Long Island Stakes. Later, horses raced for the vase at New York’s Jerome Park in 1894 and Morris Park in 1901 and ‘02.

The vase eventually fell into the hands of racehorse owner, Thomas C. Clyde, who in 1917 donated it to the Maryland Jockey Club.

The Preakness Stakes, the second jewel of the Triple Crown, is named in honor of Lexington’s son Preakness. Fittingly, the Maryland Jockey Club added the Woodlawn Vase as a prize to each year’s winner of the Preakness Stakes. Initially, the winner retained possession of the Woodlawn Vase until claimed by the next winner. That practice was followed until 1953, when Alfred G. Vanderbilt’s wife refused to accept the vase won by his horse, Native Dancer. She said the vase was far too historical and important to the sport for him to assume the responsibility of its safekeeping. From then on, the Kirk Stieff Company has set aside 12 weeks of the year to design a hand-tooled replica one-third the size of the original, valued at $40,000 each. Each year the winner of the Preakness Stakes is awarded one of these replicas of Alexander’s Woodlawn Vase.

In 1985, Kirk Stieff appraised the Woodlawn Vase at $1 million. Signa Corporation through the Harry Cohen Agency of Baltimore then insured it. The vase has now reached an estimated value of $4 million. The Baltimore Museum of Art retains possession of the Vase, allowing it to leave its premises only once each year— a journey of 6 miles north to Pimlico Race Course on the day of the Preakness Stakes. White-gloved Maryland Army National Guard Soldiers and the Air National Guard Airmen escort the vase.

Once at Pimlico, the Woodlawn Vase shimmers in the winner’s circle. From the vase top, Lexington looks out in the direction of the historic track.

Kim Wickens (X: @WickensKim) is the author of ” Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America’s Legendary Racehorse” (Ballantine Books, 2023).