Every year Saratoga features the Grade 1 Alabama Stakes for three-year-old fillies at 1 1/4 miles. Were it not for the modesty of a former Confederate Captain named William Cottrill, this race, first run 128 years ago, would be known today as the Grade 1 Cottrill Stakes.

Many of the most wonderful distaffers in Thoroughbred racing history have annexed the Alabama, including Miss Woodford (1883), Beldame (1904), Top Flight (1932), Vagrancy (1942), Busanda (dam of Buckpasser) in 1950, Gamely (1967) and Shuvee (1969).

William Cottrill, a native of Mobile, Alabama, was one of the owners credited with reviving racing in the North in the years following the Civil War. A Southerner by birth and a Confederate officer, he did not allow sectionalism to interfere with racing. When officials from the Saratoga Racing Assn. approached him in 1872 about naming a race in his honor, he modestly declined, and requested instead that the race be called the "Alabama Stakes."

Cottrill was born in England in 1817 and died on Valentine's Day, 1887, at age 70. Like the famous Dwyer Bros. of Brooklyn, Cottrill began as a butcher in his native Mobile. He gradually spent all his time with his love, breeding and racing Thoroughbreds. His Magnolia Stud was located in Mobile, but he also had a breeding farm in Danville, KY (20 miles south of Lexington). Probably his most famous horse was Buchanan, winner of the 10th Kentucky Derby in 1884. Cottrill finished second with Kimball, seven lengths behind winner Fonso, in the 1880 Kentucky Derby.

Upon his death in 1887, The Kentucky Live Stock Record (predecessor of the Thoroughbred Record) wrote, "Capt. Cottrill was universally esteemed for his many good qualities of head and heart; indeed we do not know of a more universal favorite...he was an ornament of the turf."

© 2001, Ron Hale