Wilde Fields
Elizabeth Porter started her business “Wilde Fields” at White North Stables July 7th of 1998. Wilde Fields specializes is Hunters and Jumpers in the North East Ohio area.
The History of White North Stables
An excerpt from Nine Legends by: Thomas Vail
“Windsor White was born in Orange, Massachusetts, in 1867. He was the son of Thomas Howard White, who founded the White Sewing Machine Company. Windsor came to Cleveland when his father moved the White Sewing Machine Company to to the city in 1875. Windsor then attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, class of 1890. In 1900 he and two of his brothers founded the White Motor Company of Cleveland, later one of the largest makers of heavy-duty trucks in the United States. Windsor was quiet, attractive-looking, solidly built person about 5’8” tall. Because of a love of sport, particularly fox hunting (a pursuit development by English), he became an ardent Anglophile. Windsor liked everything English. He admired their sporting traditions, which inspired him to found the Chagrin Valley Fox Hounds in 1915, using English rather than American fox hounds. He dressed in English clothes usually made by English tailor, Bernard Weatherhill of New York City and London. Following English tradition, he’d went on several African safaris in the 1920s and ‘30s that provided major animal collections for the Cleveland of Natural History.
Starting in 1915, he began to acquire farms in the Chagrin River Valley, about a 40- minute drive from Cleveland. His real estate representatives bought out farmers whose properties adjoined one another, ultimately assembling more than 1,000 acres for the great sporting estate Windsor envisioned. The magnificent property, which straddled both sides of the Chagrin River and included beautiful streams and waterfalls, ran on the West from Daisy Hill (the famous estate of the Van Sweringen brothers, Cleveland transportation ad real estate tycoons) all the way to the County Line Road on the east. On the north it was bordered by Shaker Boulevard and on the South Woodland Road.
A system of winding roads linked the various sections of the estate, home to huge apple orchards, an extensive diary operation, beef cattle, sheep, 40,000 chickens, a polo stable with 40 stalls and indoor riding ring, plus an outdoor polo field. It was called Halfred Farms, after one of Windsor’s best hunting horses, which he rode to many hunter championships at the Chagrin Valley Hunt Horse Show and elsewhere. No sporting estate near Cleveland could equal it, and few anywhere in the United States between two world wars as extensive or offered as many sporting activities.
A large number of people were required to maintain Halfred Farms. The stable alone had dormitory accommodations for the 18 grooms who worked there during the summer and 13 needed during the winter. The riding head of the stable and the head grooms had their own horses. There were kennels sometimes housing for as many as 50 or 60 dogs (including a pack of harrier hounds), a smithy for shoeing horses, garages for grooms, and a larger garage for the White Motor Company horse van. Below the stable was an extensive horse-jumping course and across the river from the stables a pheasant shoot.”