Audley farm holds on to its past and races to the future

Virginia’s leading Thoroughbred breeding farm, located in Berryville, has a remarkable history dating back to colonial times.
Story by Vinnie Perrone

It sweetens deep springs and silky pastures, helps wood to sigh and brick to yield. Before even the colonies aligned, it had rooted in sketchy furrows; across the centuries, it would fortify man and horse, fetch faraway strangers, enchant them, impel them.

Tradition has been tended at Audley Farm since 1749, its shoots ever reaching, its blossoms changing. Eleanor Parke “Nellie” Custis, George Washington’s adopted daughter, made her home at young Audley, then a genteel plantation. Union and rebel soldiers tramped its hilly fields, leaving bullets, belt buckles, everything, to the rich Virginia earth. Sir Barton, the colt time would hail the first Triple Crown winner, rendered stud duty there in the 1920s during Audley’s horse-farm ascension. Audley proprietors Montfort and Bernard B. Jones, linked by blood and Oklahoma oil wealth, led the nation’s Thoroughbred owners in race victories at Depression’s edge, twice took the Kentucky Oaks (with Princess Doreen and Sir Barton’s daugher Easter Stockings) and bred the winners of a gaudy 677 races over the 1930 and ’31 seasons, tops in the nation. (Audley ranked second from 1932 to ’34.) Successor James F. Edwards outdid every North American stable in wins from ’71 through ’73.

Under general manager Jens von Lepel, existent Audley Farm has downplayed racing to enhance yet its stately lot of 24 broodmares, which claims Manduria, dam of million-dollar earner Mandy’s Gold, and May Star, 4-year-old half-sister to Unbridled’s Song. The net effect: title as Virginia’s breeder of the year in 2002 and three times since 1995.

In conceiving a logo for its 2003 farm prospectus, von Lepel had a nursing foal etched above the line TRADITION * BREEDING * PERFORMANCE. Tradition had to lead, he said, “Because we are always thinking long-term. . . Where are these good families coming from? You create them, and our people before us created them.”

Pedigree. Lineage. Horses. People. Families. George Washington, a crack horseman in a restless age, presumably steered coach and riding chair to Audley to visit Nellie, the blood granddaughter of wife Martha from her first marriage. “In school you learn George Washington at a very low class,” von Lepel said; in his case, war-torn Germany.

So dazzles another colorful panel in the Audley quilt: for its lush, sharply American heritage, the farm grows still as a nationally stylish breeder of Thor-oughbreds under a man whose father fought and died for Adolf Hitler.

For nearly 700 years, von Lepels had farmed ancestral land on the East German peninsula of Pommern, once Pomerania, near the brink of the Baltic Sea. Longevity praised their means: the lowlands cast in sandy, marshy soil, the von Lepel grange nonetheless encompassed 10,000 largely giving acres and four other farms. Von Lepel cabbage, potatoes, sugar beets were routinely hauled across the way to workers at a missile manufacturing plant. It was 1941. World War II was on and soon to rage.

Jens von Lepel’s father Hen-ning, a soldier in duty only, fulfilled his military mandate with millions of other German males past their teens. But Hitler’s epic misgauge, his winter thrust into Russia, begat the von Lepels’ piercing heartbreak, a 1941 tank assault that took Lt. von Lepel’s life.

Jens was 4 when his father died. Four springs later, the Russian army closing on Berlin and Hitler a tyrant no more, the von Lepels fled their farm. Sanctuary lay on smaller cropland, west of the coming “Stone Wall,” Jens’s words, that would sever Ger-many. There, young Jens cultivated his love of agriculture and, at 10 or 11, learned to horseback.

At the University of Hann-over in Lower Saxony, von Lepel committed to agronomy until he took a course in veterinary medicine. There was no going back: he earned a veterinary degree, in 1972 won a three-month scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veteri-nary Medicine at New Bolton Center and later interned at Kentucky’s acclaimed Hagyard-Davidson-McGee veterinary clinic, equine reproduction his concentration. In Germany, he’d mostly studied dressage and event types; his first exposures to Thoroughbreds moved him.
At work in Germany, the newly stamped veterinarian began seeing racing’s Thoroughbred patients and soon engaged a juicy offer to manage the formidable Roettgen Stud.

“That was, for me, jumping in cold water,” von Lepel said, not as resident vet but manager of 40 broodmares and a vibrant racing operation. Twelve years later, in 1986, German pharmaceutical scion and racing zealot Hubertus Liebrecht hired von Lepel to oversee Gestut Erlenhof, an historic stud farm he leased near Frankfurt. The job would nourish von Lepel, and gird him.

Scouting American bloodstock in 1978, Liebrecht coursed the straight country roads across the Shenandoah foothills to Berryville, Va., turned off Route 7 onto a tree-trimmed drive, passed burnished fences marking vast, grassy paddocks and approached Audley’s white colonial outbuildings enraptured. He’d come for broodmares; he bought the farm.

Liebrecht’s predominantly German mares promised sound and lasting offspring but not the flash to make them highly racing—or breeding—keen outside Europe. By relieving Edwards of Audley Farm, he figured he could easier send his broodmares to United States stallions for wanted speed and precocity. Or, as one-time farm general manager Jill Gordon-Moore said, the German mares “were warhorse types” whose produce Liebrecht sought to pretty.

Liebrecht remained in Ger-many, left Audley to Ameri-can managers, visited maybe twice a year. Unmarried and fervently private, he so determined to maintain Audley’s native flavor that he forbade Gordon-Moore to buy an Isuzu truck she’d measured.

“He said, ‘No. Buy Ameri-can,’” Gordon-Moore said. “He really wanted to be involved with the local economy, even if it meant spending more. He did not want to stick out and be somebody different.” She said she never sensed “any local antagonism at all” toward the German owner.
Von Lepel first beheld Audley on a brief trip in 1986, thinking, “These horses are spoiled here.” He expanded, the German alive in his English: “It’s fascinating, the place you have here, the space you have here.” In Germany, he said, cruel winters deny horses overnights outside, even in run-in sheds; from October to March, necessity beds them in stalls. At Audley, the climate more temperate, the pastures more roomy, the run-in sheds more viable, horses choose their want; however, every yearling and weanling whiles in a stall once a day, acquainting them with handling and, von Lepel said, “being in the box.”

While von Lepel minded the German farms, Liebrecht hired Gordon-Moore to manage Audley in 1989. They spoke by phone once a week, in English. “Liebrecht was interested in racing; that was his great enthusiasm,” Gordon-Moore said, one she shared.

Bent on gains on the track and in the sales ring, Liebrecht resolved to invest freely in Audley racing and breeding stock. But other needs arose, Gordon-Moore said: Rents were found in Audley’s olden springs and wells, forcing a massive re-piping in 1990 and ’91 (a project that apparently unearthed shards of the Washingtons’ Mount Vernon pottery). And time, which had so fed Audley’s essence and tradition, was also eating its houses and barns.

“That was interesting,” said Gordon-Moore, who steered the sprucing. “Two hundred-year-old brick walls don’t stand up to a lot of weather.” When the house was measured for storm windows, she said, “The guy kept coming back and saying, ‘Nothing is plumb.’ I said, ‘Guess what? That’s what we have to work with. There are no straight lines.’

Liebrecht spent boldly, all right—on the infrastructure. Gordon-Moore’s once-boundless horse-buying vision snugly capped, she worked value-based angles. When Night Fax, by Known Fact out of the German mare Night Letter (by *Marduk II), failed to jolt the bidding as a weanling and again as a yearling, Gordon-Moore each time reclaimed her for $12,000. The filly won the 1995 Delaware Handicap-G2 and nearly $250,000 with trainer Billy Turner and became one of Audley’s prize broodmares; a yearling of hers by Benny the Dip brought $260,000 at auction.
In 1991, Gordon-Moore said, she visited Liebrecht in Germany, an annual business trip. He was 60 and sick with lung cancer. A week after she returned to the states, he was dead.

The childless Liebrecht left Audley to German-based cousins, and for several years the farm ran as always. But in the mid-1990s, racing-operation chairman Erich von Baumbach and other family members chose not to renew their lease at Gestut Erlenhof and to consolidate their Thoroughbred interests at Audley.
“I don’t have a clue who they are and what they do, and they seem to like it that way,” Virginia Breeders Fund field director Mark Deane said of Audley’s owners. “But you know they’re in it not just to develop the land and sell it and get out. . . I can’t say enough good things about them.”

The reemphasizing of Audley in 1997 left von Lepel to replace Gordon-Moore, eight years the general manager. “An education I couldn’t possibly have paid for,” said Gordon-Moore, who used it well. She and husband Ned later founded Corner Farm, a 47-acre Thoroughbred breeding ranch that abuts Audley.

Lacking Liebrecht’s thirst for racing, Audley moved to expand its scope and upgrade its broodmares, keeping their number at 25 to 30. It bought neighboring Monterey Farm to the west and Morgan Springs Farm to the east, its 900 acres now 2,300. Audley also undertook hay and beef-cattle production as alternative revenue founts.

“We’re not living on one leg; we’re living on three,” said von Lepel, husband of Evelies, father of three adult children. “If we get this farm to break even, then I think I have happy owners.”
Although plainly its most expensive and least stable enterprise, Audley’s horse breeding operation remains its soul and its vision. In part, the land decrees it: huge, hilly paddocks coax strong, nimble joints, von Lepel said, and the soil seeps with “very good limestone, very good water,” the very reasons that drew Washington to Mount Vernon.

“Horses from this part of the Shenandoah Valley have always outrun their pedigree,” Gordon-Moore said. “A lot of it has to do with the land; it’s a really good place to grow a horse. I have a friend across the mountain who says, ‘Bring me some rocks the next time you come.’

More and more, von Lepel and his bosses are calling well-pedigreed mares to taste Audley’s grassy goodness and enhance its get. At last November’s Keeneland sale, they paid $500,000 for stakes-winning Smokey Mirage (Holy Bull—Verbasle, by Slewpy) and $360,000 for May Star (Unbridled—Trolley Song, by Caro-Ire), both in foal to Giant’s Causeway. A year earlier, they’d spent $550,000 on multiple graded stakes winner Chip (Norquestor—Big Pride, by Bet Big), in foal to Deputy Minister.

For von Lepel, the bidding pressure was muted: in each case, von Baumbach was next to him at the sales pavilion, nodding.

So the pattern goes: colts produced by Audley mares generally become auctioned yearlings. Certain fillies might be sold as well, potential broodmares bringing a stout reserve.
Chip’s dark bay colt was scheduled to be auctioned at Keeneland last month. Smokey Mirage’s chestnut will go next year. May Star’s chestnut gets no such chance to shine: on his 33rd day, the colt died of a ruptured spleen rather inexplicably in Kentucky, where his dam was being bred to Elusive Quality. Maybe the colt was kicked in the field, von Lepel was told, or in the stall by his mother. There were no outward signs of trauma, he said, and no answers.
“Something like this, it happens, in 10 years, maybe once,” he said, “and always to the best.”
To mate horses, he acknowledged, is to court heartbreak. But Audley’s master plan remains intact.

“I think we realized, now breeding here in America, we should go with more specialized bloodlines which are in demand in America because our main goal is breeding for the market,” von Lepel said. “It’s not always my first choice, my favorite, because I like turf races. But you have to realize we are living in America now, we are breeding here, so that’s where we’re going to earn our money.

“Every year I have to think, ‘Where is the quality?’ For me, breeding means not just mating; breeding, for me, means selecting. And every year you have to say, ‘Is this mare good enough to go on?’ And we found that some of our mares were not good enough for what the market is looking for. These are very tough choices, and you have to do it to survive even if you love this mare, she’s nice, everybody loves her. I have a lot of [employees] who come: ‘You cannot sell this mare. You sell this mare, we will quit.’ I hear that every time.

“The cost to raise a foal and raise a yearling is the same if you raise a poor foal or a high-quality foal, because you give every care to these foals from the start. . . We know that we have to put more money in, hoping that, in the end, it makes more sense to get this quality.”
Von Lepel said he often discusses matings, broodmare considerations and other breeding issues with Peter Pegg of Pegg Thoroughbred Consultants in Middleburg, Va. But it’s not always so meticulously plotted: at the Keeneland November sale in 1997, an unsuspecting von Lepel leafed the catalogue and serendipitously glanced the name Manduria, a race mare he knew from Germany. Manduria was being sold in foal to Gilded Time; von Lepel snared her for $70,000.

The ensuing foal, Mandy’s Gold, didn’t fetch her $29,000 reserve at the ’99 Keeneland September Yearling sale. Von Lepel bought her back, and the chestnut filly eventually sold for $87,000 at Timonium as a 2-year-old. Last year, at 4, she won four straight stakes, appetizers to her Ruffian Handicap-G1. This year she became a million-dollar maker for Steeplechase Farm and trainer Michael Gorham.

Like virtually all Audley’s offspring, Mandy’s Gold was bred in Virginia, the farm’s pregnant mares returning to Berryville to foal each year. Debbie Easter, president of the Virginia Thor-oughbred Association, said the practice lends cachet to Virginia-breds by showing “that people can breed horses in Virginia that can compete on a national level, and compete very well.”
“They’ve put us in the lime--light,” said Mark Deane. “It seems like every year they have a good horse, and if you go over there and look at the farm, you’ll see why.”

Von Lepel also has tried to boost Virginia stallions where possible. In 2002, he sent two mares to Virginia-based House-buster. He said one, 22-year-old Nice Noble, died delivering a stillborn foal. The other, Rain-bow Colors (Pas Seul—Thundering Streak, by Craig-wood), produced a tremendous colt.

Audley has the means to pursue most any stallion, Virginia breeding interests said; that it supports native stallions toasts the farm’s disposal to accommodate, its station as a good neighbor. And the likelihood of an in-state dalliance could strengthen next year if Black Tie Affair (Ire) stands at Blue Ridge Farm as planned.

Audley mares have received such dynamic studs as Cat Thief, Maria’s Mon, Diesis (GB), Silver Deputy, Capote and Sky Classic, but von Lepel said he’s often disinclined to tab the nation’s costliest stallions for financial risk. Other assessments prevail as well, as with Smokey Mirage, the $500,000 acquisition.

Smokey Mirage had a yearling and a foal when she joined Audley. “You have to be a little bit careful to watch her offspring because there was no running horse when we bought her,” von Lepel said. “We thought at that time we could spend $100,000 and go to a proven sire, but if something goes wrong with these first offspring and you spend $100,000 on a stud fee with a chance only to get half that at the sale, you’ll lose a lot of money.”

After Smokey Mirage delivered the Giant’s Causeway colt, von Lepel bred her to 2000 Haskell Invitational-G1 and million-dollar winner Dixie Union, who stands for $30,000 at Lane’s End farm in Kentucky. His first foals are 2003 yearlings.

Von Lepel called him “a very interesting young sire” and said, “It’s a little risky what we’re doing, but we thought, especially with Dixie Union, he’s a nice horse; he’s a very correct horse; we’ve been over to his farm several times.”

Von Lepel too finds truth in not pursuing million-dollar broodmares. “I think, in our position. . . you are better off to buy maybe four mares for that amount,” he said. “Then you get four foals, and maybe two are top and two are not so good. But having one mare is a big risk. If you want to go with quality, you have to go to a certain extent but not overdo it.”

A veterinarian still, von Lepel said he disdains the harsh business tactics that bring young horses to race too early, and hopes outspoken caretakers can somehow effect a change.
“A lot of people buying horses,” he said, “they have no knowledge of what it means to have an athlete and to serve and protect him.”

Meantime, the sleep-robbed days of birthing season don’t dismay him; no, he said, he savors the 3 a.m. calls to the foaling barn. “We make the matings, and with all the expectations, I want to be there when the foal hits the ground,” von Lepel said. “There might be some problems, something I can help [with]. If I’m there, I’m more confident that it will be handled.
“People sometimes ask me, as a vet, ‘Why do most of the mares foal in the night?’ This is a pattern which comes from outside-living horses in the wild—they do it because, when they are foaling in darkness, they are under protection. . . And the foal is able, an hour after birth, to stand up and follow the mare, so when the dawn is coming, the foal is on its feet, and if there’s any danger the mare can escape, and the foal can follow. This is a pattern which is not part of the domestication; it’s the part which is inherited from very earlier times.”
And so he moves in moonlit haste, not far from Nellie Custis Drive, past honored homes and giving fields to the foaling barn, where past and future lie.