Bred within a closed circle of old Vermont blood, the Lippitt still stands close to the ground, still carries the crested neck set on top of the shoulder rather than in front of it, the short back, the round quarter, and the tireless, cheerful engine that made the Morgan famous from Montreal to Boston.
The Lippitt
was never re-imagined.
Most of the breed has since been re-imagined: taller, longer, higher-stepping, shaped to the show ring of each passing era.
Put a good Lippitt in front of a judge and the past tense disappears.
“The horse I have chosen best represents Justin Morgan in his day. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of Morgans so closely resembling one another and still have the traits we love in the Morgan horse.”
Art PerryJudging the Standard class · Lippitt Country Show, 2003
Four qualities, inherited together.The old Morgan was never bred for one job or one kind of rider.
Old horsemen called it nerve force: abundant, willing energy paired with a steady mind. Justin Morgan was said to show tremendous fire and presence at military review, yet carry a lady to a dance with perfect manners. The Lippitt carries that same balance forward—animated and impressive when asked, sensible and dependable when quiet manners matter most. It’s a combination Lippitt families still value on the trail, at home, and wherever their horses are asked to go.
Around 14.2 hands and a thousand pounds: a compact, close-coupled horse with a deep barrel, broad loin, and short, flat, dense cannon bone. It is the conformation of soundness: a horse built to carry weight all day, stay sane doing it, and very often go without shoes.
Lippitts today earn titles in reining and carriage driving, compete in dressage, hunt seat, and competitive trail, pack kids through 4-H, and do the week’s farm work in between. Not a specialist bred to a single class, but a general-purpose horse, the way the breed began.
The Lippitt's deep girth and well-sprung ribs give him the heart and lung room for hard work, along with the capacious body of an efficient keeper. On Vermont's working farms, horses had to thrive on practical rations, and generations of that economy remain part of the Lippitt today.
The threatThe Lippitt Morgan has been called a rare living antique. It is the polite way of saying the family teeters on the brink of extinction: a small gene pool, a shrinking band of breedable mares, and every year a few more “lost” Lippitts whose papers were mislaid and whose bloodlines drift out of the record.
The registry exists to stop the drift.
The workWe register, DNA-type, and track every Lippitt we can find; we help identify lost horses and return them to the book; we assist rescues; and we put the horse in front of the public at exhibitions and endangered-breed demonstrations. There are no members, no dues, and no salaries. The work runs on dedication and donations.
Whether you are meeting the old Morgan for the first time or protecting horses already in your care, there is a clear next step.
What a Lippitt is, how it differs from the modern show Morgan, what the original standard of type says, and what to look for when you go to buy: all of it plainly written, all of it sourced from the old records.
