"Helping horses become sound or remain sound is the most rewarding part of my work. I don’t have any special technique. I just do what I do and the horse owners love it, and I think the horses do too. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told by an owner that ‘my horse always seems to feel better.’“

Farriery is a business “where you can never say you know it all. Every day, I learn something.”

Isaiah Garn, a 24-year-old farrier who works south of St. Louis, Missouri, in the small northeast Jefferson County town named High Ridge, reflects the historic independence of his town.

High Ridge is a unique municipality that is run by elected trustees. It has not ever become a city, rather being an unincorporated self-governing town. The early German and Irish settlers, the story goes, wanted to keep a rural non-urban governmental structure.

“I was homeschooled most of my youth. In some of the years, I used different Christian school programs. I had to do all the same tests and work that the kids did in the public school. The plus side was I could go at my own pace and do two days’ work in one day and graduate early. I was graduated at 16 years old and went to horseshoeing school at 17.”

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When she took over heading up the Saddle Seat discipline of Stephens College’s equestrian program in July 2014, Kelly Hulse was already an Adjunct Professor there since the Fall of 2013.

“I was so excited and happy to be able to continue working with the girls I had come to know well.”

After Stephens College advertised in a national search for the full-time position, Adjunct Professor Kelly applied. Following the review of all the applicants, the school’s selection committee offered the job to Kelly.

In her Stephens job, Kelly teaches “three riding/driving classes, currently using 16 American Saddlebreds, Hackneys, and Morgans,” she said in our December interview.

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How old were you when you acquired your first American Saddlebred and what was its name?

When I was about nine years old I began showing Elle Dee in equitation and then show pleasure. Lady Sonja, she was a three-gaited mare for the Blacklaws out in Oregon. They retired her to be a broodmare and then gave her to us. She had several nice colts for us.

What or who inspired you to become involved with American Saddlebreds?

I showed ponies out in the Northwest as a kid, and had always admired the Saddlebreds. There were some really good trainers to watch and learn from out there. Trainers like Dal Hope, Joe Biles, Don Deardorff, John Jones and Virgil Helm all had great strings of horses back then.

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It was somewhere around midnight at the World’s Championship Horse Show when I found myself seated in a director’s chair at the Larry Ella Stables and Bent Tree Farm Ltd. stabling area, listening to Karen Waldron speak. I was exhausted; the evening session had dragged on as sessions at Louisville will do, and a wood chip mulch cross-country trek in heels was the price I’d paid for the interview. But as she began to speak I quickly forgot all of that. Who was this woman? And why weren’t there more of her? 

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