A Letter from Annie Shields ~

I want to Thank, "Annie Shields" for kindly sharing this very important information about the early days of the Icelandic horse in America.

What were thorse early Icelandic's like?
~Only one horse was rideable. Her name was Mosa, and she was a nice reliable riding horse.
Most of the others had never been handled and none had been ridden.
I had never trained a horse before but I had done a fair amount of riding. My school friends and I "trained" all the horses over a period of two years, or at least got them rideable.
We had no saddles and we used little bits and pieces of bridles thatwe found hanging in Ashelman's barn.
And we would have to stop working with them so they could have babies. All the mares had foals every year for a period of six years until eventually there were a lot of youngsters.
Many were not gaited because Valur, the sire was a three-gaited horse. Ashelman had been told that no gaited stallions were allowed out of the Iceland at that time.

It was difficult for me to learn about Icelandic horses. I had a few conversations with Gunar Bjarnnasson, and that was helpful, but I wanted to learn everything there was to know. I had this idea that I could just go down to the Library of Congress and get all the books about Icelandic horses and then I could just sit there and read all about them. I lived in Washington D.C., not far from the Library of Congress and at that time they had a strict rule about not letting kids in. I was quite tall for my age, though not very mature-looking,so I borrowed some of my mother's grown-up clothes and bicylcled down there and got in without any trouble. I found about 25 titles of articles, books, pamphlets, etc. about Icelandics. I wrote down all their numbers and waited with great anticipation as a boy went down to the "stacks" to get them for me. Imagine my chagrin when they were brought to me and all of them were in Icelandic, German, Dutch and two titles in English. Only two titles in the English language in the year 1960 in a collection of what is supposed to be everything inprint!

What happened to the herd?
Some horses were shipped to Greely, Co and Ashton, MD at approximately the same time in 1960. The Greely people tried to start a registry. Several families were involved.
The Ashton MD herd is probably the first real breeding herd in the US: one stallion, Valur fra Valadal and 12 mares. The herd was owned by Sam Ashelman who bought them with the help of GunnarBjarnnason in 1960. The two men met while Ashelman was in Iceland as aconsulting economist. Ashelman was no horseman and didn't take care of his horses.

I found out about the horses when my mother read about them in the Washington Post the week they arrived. She nearly jumped out of her skin because she recognized Ashelman's name as her college friend's husband. We had to go visit them, of course. I was 15 yearsold and horse-nutty and the day we visited the Icelandics my life changed.

Oh, yes, on with the time-line. In 1966, Ashelman sold all his imported mares to a person named Veness in Washington Island, WI. He sold all their offspring (46) to me.

Then, Peter Strong in Greenwich,CT shipped the the next load in 1970.

I spent one summer in Vermont helping to get many of them ready for some endurance rides as Peterhad decided that the market for Icelandics lay in endurance riding.But he became disenchanted, I think, when the horses didn't do as well as expected.

The next shipment I know of was purchased by a very odd couple on Long Island (In 1977). They had heard that Icelandics made the best therapeutic riding horses and because they had a handicapped son, they bought a shipment of 20 horses, very few of which were suitable for handicapped riders. Their program was called "The New Riders of the Viking Horse", (cool name). They persuaded me to bring 4 horses up there, which I did. While I was there, the couple broke up and the wife managed to get all the horses plus my stallion, which I never saw again.
Annie Shields.

So if anyone out there happens to read this and might know where the horses ended up, Please let us know.
My first Icelandic..oh so many years ago, was one of the mares from this break-up. She was very old when I got her, 12.2 1/2 hand Buckskin pinto flying pace mare.