Horse Crazy

Alice Cardon Crockett, who sent us a story about the time she rode U-Dandy (one of the stud horses kept at USU in the horse barn days), shared with us some more of her childhood memories of the barn and Logan. She described herself as "horse crazy," and she and her friends would often visit the horses in the barn.

Ms. Crockett remembers that there was an alfalfa field where the LDS Institute of Religion now stands, and she would pick alfalfa for the horses on her way to the barn. "And if it didn't seem like quite enough, and if U-Dandy looked especially hungry, I'd just go up into the haystack and get some more for him. . . . We played a lot in that hayloft. It was really fun, but after you'd bounced around a lot it gets kind of dusty, and that's when we'd kind of give it up and do something else." She said this "just drove the groundskeeper wild."

In addition to U-Dandy, she remembers that the name of another horse in the barn was Seabiscuit (not the famous racehorse Seabiscuit). "[The names] were written right above, so that you knew all their names, and those are the only two I can remember. And they were the two who had the bigger paddocks, because they were at the end [the south end of the barn]. And when I think about it, I'm not even sure the other horses had their names over their stalls."

Ms. Crockett said that she learned to ride horses at Dunbar Stables in Logan's "Island," and they would ride to Providence through the orchard of Edgewood Hall, an old abandoned estate that was said to be haunted, perhaps because a child supposedly drowned in the pool there. She said her frequent contact with horses was what gave her the confidence to try to ride U-Dandy. She compared the experience of riding U-Dandy to the excitement she felt the time she thought she saw the Bear Lake Monster on a family trip to Bear Lake.

She said the picture she took of U-Dandy and her father, featured in an earlier blog post, was taken with a Brownie camera given to her by her school friend Peter Brunson. She would frequently bring her parents up to the barn "Just so they could see this wonderful horse I loved. And in my heart, I thought, if they get to know him enough, I’ll be able to bring him home. And there is still, as you turn into University Hill Way, there is still a small orchard there. It has maybe four ancient trees. Well, in my mind, U-Dandy could live there, and I would, there is a little gray garage that’s there that we have, and I just, I just knew that if things were right and everybody got along, he could come. And it never happened." She also at one point tried to convince her parents to buy a horse from the circus that came and performed in the old stadium, which once stood across from the barn.

Ms. Crockett has many other fond memories of growing up around USU, including playing house in the student union building, buying hamburgers with her friends at the Bluebird on campus, and meeting jazz musician Duke Ellington when he performed at USU. She came to USU as a student after the horse barn had been transformed into the Art Barn. ". . . I went back to take a pottery class there, and I remember thinking . . . right there is where U-Dandy was. And it was, it was pretty nice. I kind of thought, well, I bet he's still here sort of. It was neat."