In late April 1960 a new chapter was added to the history of Icelandic’s export when horses were for the first time taken abroad with an airplane.
The transport, consisting on 38 mares and 3 stallions, was flown with a Lockheed Super Constellation plane of KLM from Keflavik to Montreal in Canada.
The purchaser of the horses was a company established by the Canadian Lees family in Arcola, Saskatchewan, who already had bought 34 Icelandic mares the previous summer and had them shipped to Halifax.
The Lees’ sold most of their horses to various buyers in United States, mostly located in Colorado but also further away like California and Florida.
The family still kept some 15 horses for their own use, among them a gray mare that still in the 1990’s was delightfully much used by the youngest family members.
The club in Greeley was formed in 1962 and named Icelandic Pony Club and Registry, Inc. Somewhere I heard the club's activities went out, when two of the founders died in a plane crash. At the same time there were some Icelandic people in Boulder that imported horses directly from Iceland. It was some struggle to get those stallions out of Iceland at this time and the request had to be approved by the general assembly of the Icelandic Agricultural Society in March 1960.
Thank you very much to Þorgeir Guðlaugsson for allowing me to post this new information on this blog.
