How my book research revealed a personal connection to the wild horses of the Outer Banks

When you start to dig, you never know what you’ll find. In researching the origins of the wild horses of the Outer Banks of North Carolina for my book, Equus Rising: How the Horse Shaped U.S. History (May 14), I found something, as a Minnesota native, I could hardly believe—a historic personal connection to them.

Legend has it the small, hardy Spanish horses of the Outer Banks swam ashore from sinking Spanish ships in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. This region is the Graveyard of the Atlantic, after all. It’s littered with more than a thousand shipwrecks, and some of those ships carried horses and lost them to storms. It’s a romantic story, but we don’t have evidence to confirm that any horses survived these wrecks, swam ashore, and procreated.

What we do know is that by the 1650s, European settlers started to move into the North Carolina mainland west of the Outer Banks and north of the Albemarle Sound. This area attracted a unique population mix: formerly enslaved peoples, runaways from the law, Native Americans, and Quakers escaping persecution in Virginia. These settlers were mostly small-time farmers. Many owned horses. In the second half of the 1600s, some of them began to use the Outer Banks as pasture to avoid the need for fencing and the tax England began to impose on fencing in 1670. Eventually, these settlers abandoned many of the horses to the wilds of the barrier island.

As I absorbed this information, I realized the description of this interesting community of people near the Albemarle Sound was vaguely familiar. When I got to the word “Quakers,” my brain lit up. I ran to my living room bookshelf and pulled off a book my great aunt wrote about my colonial Quaker ancestors, the Hill family. Sure enough, they were among the first European settlers in the Albemarle region.

I don’t know whether they had horses or whether they pastured them on the Outer Banks, but it’s possible they put some of the first horses there. Certainly their community did. I doubt we’ll ever know one way or another, but this idea alone made me grow even fonder of these horses and their place in history. I look forward to sharing more about the wild horses of our eastern barrier islands with you in Equus Rising when it’s released on May 14 on Amazon.

You can download a free sample chapter of Equus Rising by clicking here and scrolling to the form at the bottom of that page.