An excerpt from Maryjean Wall’s book, “How Kentucky Became
Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers, and
Breeders.” In the early 1900s, Kentucky was beginning to garner
an increasing measure of power in the sport. Some seventy miles
west of Lexington in Louisville, a change in ownership of
Churchill Downs portended of a higher profile for this regional
racecourse. An impresario named Matt Winn took over the
struggling track the year that Sanders Bruce died. Winn began
promoting the Kentucky Derby as something more than a regional
race, an event greater than the race of the West, as New York
papers called it. He said that he had watched the inaugural
derby in 1875 as a thirteen-year-old seated in his father’s
wagon parked in the infield. Although he might not have seen the
possibilities at the time, his vision for the derby was to work
in synergy with the outside capitalists’ expanding investment in
the Bluegrass.