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Unicorn Farm LLC, 416 Mitton Road, Chesapeake City, MD (2026)

09/03/2026

Holly Mitten Jump Clinic coming September 12th & 13th!

09/03/2026

What IS a “Great Horseman/Horswoman?”

Well. I am not sure that I can define that, but I do know who WAS one, and I first met her exactly 70 years ago when we were stabled near each other in the Woodstock Inn Stables for the 1956 GMHA 100 mile trail ride, and we were both riding in the junior division.

Lana DuPont, later Lana Wright, was a couple of years older than me, I think 17 when I was 15, and at that age it seemed a pretty big difference. She was quiet, almost shy, and my main memory of her was that Ruth Ferguson, who ruled that stable with an iron fist, got after her for using too much bedding.

Anyway, I got to know her better seven-eight years later when I was teaching sixth grade at Far Hills Country Day School in NJ, and Lana was training at the USET headquarters in Gladstone, NJ for the 1964 3-day Olympics which were being held in Japan.

Lana was the first woman to ride in 3-day at an Olympics because the grouchy old colonels and generals who ran the sport back then had decided that women were not strong enough to take part.
Lana and Mr. Wister were part of the USET squad which won the silver medal.

Then, many years later, Lana became a champion driver. Then she took up endurance riding, and I finally got to know her well when I rode one of her Arabs, Zion, in a 100 mile endurance ride in Bethune, SC, in 1997.

Lana’s mother owned the champion race horse, Kelso, but it would be a mistake to dismiss Lana’s achievements as anything but hard earned. I never met a harder worker. At endurance rides, she’d always be the first up at 4 AM to feed and get ready. And that intense but quiet drive took her to the pinnacle of three very different horse sports.

The last time I saw Lana was at a little horse show that we ran in Strafford, Vermont, and her granddaughter, Beale, was riding in some little jumping classes. Lana was almost completely blind, but was as smiling and gracious as ever.

She was a Titan, but almost invisibly so because it was never about her, always about her horses.