Thirty-Three Years for Amwell Valley Hounds Pony Club Horse Trials and Combined Test: A Love Story

The Amwell Valley Hounds Pony Club Horse Trials was held for 33 years in New Jersey from 1974 to 2007. In this article Pam Johnson, who organized Amwell for 15 years, chronicles the history of the event from its early start to the very last ribbon in 2007. Although, Amwell might not be well-known, the event has a lot of history. The article has been broken down into a five-part-series. A new part will be posted each week on the Eventing USA blog.
Part 5
To read Part 4 of the Amwell Story click here.
The move to Lockatong Creek Farm brought a whole new group of faces to the community that formed to renew the horse trials. The news that we were going to be able to run all three phases again brought some of the old-timers out to help. Mary Weeden showed up to help with cleaning up the grounds, as I had done at her farm for so many years, and Lisa Stockman, former Jt-DC, whose children were long gone from Pony Club, came back to serve as dressage scribe almost every year. People who already knew how cool it was to be involved in this special kind of drama showed up, and some of the new Pony Club parents who wanted to help, even though they didn’t really know what it was all about, showed up, too. Notable among those was Susan Smith, an attorney in real life, she learned to find, organize, equip, and supervise the fence judges in the most reliable, efficient way.
But we always had parents who were skeptical about getting involved with this undertaking. My husband’s story is an extreme example. Not a horse person and knowing nothing about eventing, when we were first asked to come out to Meadowberry Farm in 1985 and groom cross country jumps for the horse trials, Jim’s response was that he had plenty to do at our own farm and didn’t have time to go mow or weed whack at someone else’s. So I went without him. After a year or so went by, he saw that our daughter was getting something really worthwhile out of riding and Pony Club, and when I asked for help loading a riding mower to trailer up to Meadowberry to mow the stadium warm-up and vendor village area for the horse trials one year, he offered to help mow. That was the beginning of a long slippery slope that led to more mowing, moving stadium jumps, becoming the horse trials announcer (following a three year stint by Brian O’Connor), buying a farm to host the horse trials, building about 20 cross country jumps over the years (the other 40 jumps I designed were done by Pony Club dads, especially John O’Leary and Marty Schmidt - Marty would finish the list of jumps to build/repair, trees to trim, or paths to clear, then come ask me what more needed to be done, and what more, and more, until event day when he and his wife would show up and fence judge!), developing cross country galloping paths out of swamp land, then mowing, rolling, and grooming the galloping paths about 18 hours a week from April to July, once we moved to Lockatong Creek Farm. On event weekend, he parked 40 trailers at a time on 2 acres. Of course, by the time we were doing this at our own farm, our daughter was long out of the nest and out of Pony Club. But, when the last trials was over, there was no one sadder to see it go than Jim. Some version of this story was repeated over and over again as Pony Club parents joined the club and slowly got sucked into the magic of the horse trials. And once sucked in, people brought their friends and relatives to help, too. My brother, Rowland Bennett, in no way a horse person, came and lived with us event week every year we were at Lockatong Creek Farm to groom and build cross country jumps, set up tents and café tables, plant flowers, pull weeds, and serve as our announcer and chief timer for a few years He even got a friend to help him build a much needed food stand, the Amwell Café, all on a volunteer basis. (The Kozoh family dished up memorable horse trials food out of the café, too! And before them John Brogan and his sons.) In addition, my brother often wrote a check to sponsor a stadium jump. He told me once, that the horse trials date was the first one he put in his planner every year. He loved to be involved.

And that was the thing. We loved this event. There was the yearly drama of the preparation climaxing in the excitement of the horses and riders competing, there was the fellowship of the workers, and there was the tradition. I especially think of the victory gallops. We never gave out dressage ribbons, just the over-all ribbons all 33 years, and we always had a victory gallop to music at the end of each division. Even though we never went above Preliminary in the trials and never above Intermediate in the Combined Test, we felt like we had an important role. Now we have a wonderful collection of memories and good times to look back on. Farewell, Amwell.