The child, sitting down with the old man close behind…had been thinking how strange it was that horses who were such fine honest creatures should seem to make vagabonds of all the men they drew about them…

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

Dickens couldn’t possibly have been thinking of Correction when he wrote those words—the novel was published in 1841, and she was born four decades later—but the filly did seem to have an uncanny ability to attract to herself something of an unsavory sort.

Foaled in 1888, Correction (Himyar – Mannie Gray) was an older full sister to Domino, who won the Withers, the Sheepshead Bay, the Matron, and the Futurity, among others, and who was a member of the inaugural class of inductees into the U.S Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame.

His sister’s career wasn’t quite so illustrious, nor as well-recorded. She was owned by John A. Morris, the owner of the Morris Park racetrack in what is now the Bronx, and his son Alfred, and while her racing career is well documented in the daily pages of The New York Times, not only is her name absent from most histories of the turf, but she doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, perhaps the most damning contemporary indicator of cultural and historical irrelevance.

Correction does have a couple of stakes wins to her credit—at two in the Clover Stakes and at six in the Toboggan Slide—and, according to Pedigree Query, she made 122 starts, winning 38 of them. But she seems to have gotten the most ink for being the subject of no little bit of racing controversy, and on more than one occasion.

Continue reading at Brisnet.com…

1886 Sheepshead Bay program. Property of Brooklyn Historical Society.