James T. Woodward and the rescue of Belair
Between the last Ogle and the first Woodward racing dynasty, the estate that anchored Bowie’s colonial identity spent nearly three decades in decline. The man who reversed that trajectory was a Maryland-born banker who had made his fortune in New York — and who brought a piece of his home state back to life.
The Civil War that ended slavery at Belair also ended the Ogle family’s ability to hold it. George Cooke Ogle — the last of the Ogle line to own the estate — had freed his 41 enslaved people in 1867, and with them went the labor force that had made the plantation viable. By 1870 the house was in poor repair and George was carrying debts of around $10,000 to various creditors. When he defaulted on a debt to the estate of Maria Jackson — being executed by James Mullikin, of the same Mullikin family whose name is carried by the former school site at the boundary between the Pointer Ridge and Northview neighborhoods — the court ordered Belair sold to satisfy the obligation. On May 16, 1871, after 130 years of continuous family ownership, the estate passed out of Ogle hands at auction for $5,100.
One complication remained. The deed to Belair carried a long-standing provision that George’s youngest sister, Rosalie Ogle, could maintain a room in the mansion as long as she remained unmarried. She had chosen a room of 17 by 20 feet on the upper floor, and she declined to leave. When the new owners installed tenant farmers in the house alongside her, Rosalie took them to court, arguing that she could not be expected to share a home with people of a lower social station. The court agreed and awarded her a cash settlement. In 1877, the last Ogle of Belair retreated to a townhouse in Baltimore, and the great house stood without its founding family for the first time in over a century.
The gap years, 1877–1898
The new owners sold the estate in 1877 to Edward T. Rutter for $17,000 — nearly three and a half times the 1871 auction price, reflecting the underlying value of the property even in its diminished state. Over the following two decades, Belair passed through multiple hands, continued to fall into disrepair, and was progressively subdivided. By 1896 most of the remaining land had passed to Benjamin N. Hardisty. The estate that Governor Ogle had built in 1747 across thousands of acres had been reduced to 371.
The man who stopped the decline was James Thomas Woodward (1837–1910) — and his purchase in 1898 was, in a quiet way, a homecoming. Woodward had been born at Edgewood Plantation in Gambrills Station, Anne Arundel County, not far from Belair. He was the second child of a family already established in Maryland’s colonial gentry; his paternal grandparents included Eleanor Duckett of the same Duckett family whose name appears in the colonial history of Collington. He was, in other words, buying an estate in the landscape of his own origins.
The banker from Maryland
Woodward had built his fortune through New York banking. After completing his education in Baltimore, he moved north and in the early 1870s became a director of the Hanover National Bank. In 1877 he and his brother pooled resources to acquire a controlling interest from the firm of J. & J. Stewart, and James was elected president that year. Under his leadership the bank’s deposits grew from $6 million to $100 million. In October 1898 — the same year he purchased Belair — he was chosen as president of the New York Clearing House Association, reportedly because, the press noted, he had not sought the position but had earned it by years of conservative and successful banking. He served as its chairman through the Panic of 1907, one of the defining financial crises of the Gilded Age.
A lifelong bachelor, Woodward was a figure of easy wealth and broad social connection. He counted Grover Cleveland among his close personal friends and moved through the Union Club, the Metropolitan Club, the Knickerbocker Club of New York, and the Maryland Club of Baltimore. He invested significantly in St. John’s College in Annapolis, and in June 1909 the college awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws. The original Woodward Hall at St. John’s, now the Barr–Buchanan Center, was named in his honor. He was also an avid hunter and horseman — the qualities that drew him back to Belair.
Restoration and the stud
In 1898, Woodward purchased Hardisty’s 371-acre remnant for an undisclosed sum and immediately began investing in the property. He restored the mansion, added a wing, and invited descendants of the original Ogle family to see what had been done — a graceful acknowledgment of the estate’s history. Around 1907 he commissioned a new stable building to replace the outbuildings that had served Belair’s horses since the colonial period. That stable — built in brick, wood, and red sandstone in the manner of an English country estate — is the building now operating as the Belair Stable Museum.
In 1904, Woodward and his nephew William Woodward Sr. — then recently returned from London, where he had been serving as secretary to the U.S. Ambassador and had developed a deep appreciation for English Thoroughbred racing — decided jointly to revive the estate’s breeding tradition. The uncle provided the property and the capital; the nephew brought the racing knowledge and the ambition. It was the beginning of what would become one of America’s most celebrated racing dynasties.
James T. Woodward died on April 10, 1910, at his residence at 9 East 56th Street in New York. After a funeral at St. Thomas’ Church on Fifth Avenue, he was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. He left everything — his controlling interest in Hanover National Bank, his properties in New York and Rhode Island, and the Belair estate — to his sole heir, his nephew William. The estate he bequeathed had been transformed from a 371-acre ruin into a functioning farm with a new stable and the beginnings of a serious breeding operation. What William would do with it is the subject of the sections that follow.
The Woodward family at Belair
William Woodward Sr. acquired Belair in the period 1917–1920, inheriting the estate from his uncle James T. Woodward, who had purchased the property in 1898 and built the large new stables in 1907. A New York banker and passionate horseman, Woodward Sr. saw the old Ogle estate as the perfect place to revive Maryland’s historic role in American Thoroughbred breeding. He registered the famous white silks with red polka dots in 1911 and officially named the operation Belair Stud in 1917.
Teaming with the legendary trainer James “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, Woodward built one of the most successful owner-breeder programs in the country. Under their care, Belair produced the only father-and-son Triple Crown winners in racing history: Gallant Fox (1930) and his son Omaha (1935). Other stars included Granville (1936 Horse of the Year), Johnstown (1939 Kentucky Derby and Belmont winner), and later Nashua (1955 Horse of the Year). From 1923 to 1953, Belair horses won 631 races and placed or showed in hundreds more. The detailed bloodlines, race records, and track achievements are covered in Chapter 3: Racing & Horses.
The Woodward chapter at Belair represents the culmination of a thread that runs from Governor Samuel Ogle’s 18th-century English imports through two centuries of careful breeding on the same Maryland ground. When William Woodward Jr. took over after his father’s death in 1953, the stable was still at its peak. The year that ended it all — 1955 — was also, almost perversely, the year it reached one final moment of glory with Nashua’s championship season.
That same year, however, personal tragedy struck the family when Ann Woodward fatally shot her husband, William Jr., at their Long Island home. The sensational case (later the subject of the book and film Deliberate Cruelty) brought the Woodward era at Belair to an abrupt close. The estate was sold in 1957 to Levitt & Sons, ending nearly 40 years of one of America’s most storied racing dynasties on the very ground where it had begun two centuries earlier.
William Woodward Sr. — banker, steward, and the most powerful figure in American racing
The racing record — Gallant Fox, Omaha, Nashua, 631 wins — is covered in Chapter 3. What that chapter doesn’t capture is the man himself: the dual career in finance and sport, the twenty-year campaign that changed international racing governance, and the character of someone who spent his working life at the intersection of American money and the English sporting world.
William Woodward Sr. was born in New York City on April 7, 1876, into a family whose Maryland roots ran deep but whose money came from the Civil War. His father — also named William Woodward — had made the family fortune supplying textiles to both sides of the conflict and had gone on to found the New York Cotton Exchange. The son was educated at Groton, then Harvard, graduating in 1898, then Harvard Law School, graduating and being admitted to the bar in 1901. He chose not to practice.
Instead, he went to London, where for two years he served as secretary to Joseph H. Choate, the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James. It was there that Thoroughbred racing took hold. Choate moved in the highest social circles of Edwardian England, and Woodward attended races alongside King Edward VII and the English elite for whom the horse was a defining passion. He returned to New York in 1903 with an understanding of racing sensibility that no American track could have provided — and with the social and professional connections in English racing that would prove decisive decades later.
Two careers, one man
Back in New York, his uncle James T. made him vice president of Hanover National Bank. He became president in 1910 upon his uncle’s death. When a 1929 merger created Central Hanover Bank & Trust, he became chairman of the board, serving until his retirement from banking in 1933. Along the way he was one of the original directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1914 — part of the founding architecture of the modern American financial system — and from 1927 to 1929 served as president of the New York Clearing House. His banking career placed him at the center of American finance during its most consequential decades: the founding of the Federal Reserve, the 1920s boom, and the 1929 collapse.
In 1933 he retired from banking entirely to devote himself to Belair. He had by then expanded the estate from the 371 acres his uncle had rescued to 2,280 acres, and had engaged the architects Delano & Aldrich to add two symmetrical Georgian wings and connecting hyphens to the original mansion, bringing it to 26 rooms. The collection of English sporting art he assembled at Belair — paintings of horses, riders, and country estates — is now housed at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
He had met his wife, Elsie Ogden Cryder, at Saratoga Springs in 1903 — one of the celebrated Cryder triplets, daughters of a prominent New York family, whose social prominence made them fixtures of the racing world. They married at Grace Church in New York on October 24, 1904, and had five children, including William Jr., born in 1920, who would inherit everything.
Chairman of The Jockey Club
In 1917, Woodward was elected to The Jockey Club, the private organization that governed American Thoroughbred racing. In 1930 — the same year Gallant Fox won the Triple Crown — he was elected chairman of its board of stewards, a position he held through annual re-elections until 1950. His twenty-year tenure as chairman reshaped the sport. The Britannica summary is precise: under Woodward’s stewardship, horse racing was transformed from a questionable gambling operation into a major spectator sport.
His single most consequential achievement in governance was the repeal of the Jersey Act. This 1913 British regulation had declared that any Thoroughbred not traceable entirely through the English General Stud Book could not be registered as a purebred in Britain — a provision that barred most American-bred horses from British recognition and undermined the international standing of the very program Woodward had built at Belair. He spent years lobbying British racing leaders, drawing on the personal relationships he had cultivated in England since his Edwardian days alongside Choate. The Jersey Act was repealed on July 11, 1949. The following year, he was elected an honorary member of the British Jockey Club — a recognition extended to very few Americans. In August 1939, TIME magazine had put him on its cover, a measure of how visible his dual identity as banker-turned-racing-statesman had become.
The final legacy, and the transition
Woodward died on September 25, 1953, at his Manhattan home, at 77. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, alongside his uncle James T. The horse he had bred but would not live to see fully campaign — Nashua, foaled in 1950 — became Horse of the Year in 1955 and was sold at auction for a world-record $1,251,200. The Woodward Stakes, now a Grade I event at Saratoga, bears his name. In 2016 he was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame as a Pillar of the Turf.
What he left his son William Jr. was not merely an estate and a stable but a set of expectations — the weight of a family identity built across two generations around a very particular idea of how an American gentleman of means should inhabit the intersection of money, land, and horses. It was, in the end, a weight the son could not carry.
Ann Woodward and Deliberate Cruelty
In October 1955 — weeks after Nashua’s nationally broadcast triumph over Swaps in Chicago — Ann Woodward shot William Woodward Jr. at their Long Island estate. She maintained it was an accident; she believed an intruder had entered the house. The case became one of the most sensational society scandals of the postwar era. Truman Capote reportedly based the character of Holly Golightly in part on Ann Woodward, and later published a thinly veiled portrait of her that she found devastating.
Roseanne Montillo’s Deliberate Cruelty: Truman Capote, the Millionaire’s Wife, and the Murder of the Century (2022) revisits the case in full, tracing both the shooting and Capote’s long campaign to destroy Ann Woodward’s reputation. The book is the most thorough recent account of the story. The reason it belongs in a history of Bowie is direct: the Woodwards were owners of the Belair estate and one of the most prominent racing stables in the country, and the collapse of that era — the scandal, the estate sale — helped clear the way for suburban Bowie as it exists today.
Truman Capote and the story that killed Ann Woodward
The 1955 shooting is the event the preceding section describes. What followed over the next twenty years — and what happened in October 1975 — is a separate story: one of the most deliberate acts of social destruction in postwar American literary history, and one whose consequences reached directly back to Belair.
Ann Woodward was not convicted of any crime. The Nassau County grand jury that heard the evidence of the 1955 shooting ruled it accidental. But the verdict of the courtroom and the verdict of New York society were two entirely different things, and the society verdict was swift and permanent. Ann — born Angeline Lucille Crowell on a farm in Kansas in 1915, a former showgirl and radio actress voted the most beautiful girl in radio in 1940 — had always been regarded with suspicion by the Woodward family’s social world. She was an outsider who had married into American aristocracy, and after the shooting she was expelled from it. Life magazine called the case “The Shooting of the Century.” The New York social world that had tolerated her while William was alive now closed its doors entirely.
She spent the years after 1955 largely in Paris and Europe, living on the Woodward family money, an exile from the society her marriage had briefly admitted her to. She was, in the words of Deliberate Cruelty author Roseanne Montillo, a woman who had lost agency over her own story. That story belonged now to anyone who chose to write it. The person who chose to was Truman Capote.
The swans and the novelist
Capote had spent the late 1950s and 1960s cultivating a position unique in American literary life: he was the intimate confidant of a circle of extraordinarily wealthy and socially prominent women — Babe Paley, wife of CBS chairman William S. Paley; Slim Keith; Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s sister; and Gloria Guinness, among others. He called them his “swans.” They told him things they told almost no one else. He stored it all. For years he had been promising his most ambitious work: Answered Prayers, a novel he described as his Proustian masterpiece of American society. Under pressure from his publisher, he agreed in 1975 to publish excerpts in Esquire. A first chapter appeared in June and drew little attention. Then came the November issue.
“La Côte Basque, 1965”
The piece took its title from an achingly fashionable French restaurant in Manhattan where Capote had lunched with his swans countless times. Its narrator dines with a character transparently based on Slim Keith, and the conversation proceeds through a series of devastating social vignettes in which Babe Paley, William Paley, and Mary Rockefeller appear in barely disguised form. And then Ann Hopkins walks into the restaurant — a character so transparent in her identifying details that no one in New York social life could have failed to recognize her. Ann Hopkins is a gold digger who, Capote’s narrator implies without ambiguity, had shot her husband not by accident but by design.
Capote had met Ann Woodward precisely once, briefly, at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. By most accounts he despised her, and she had reportedly referred to him in public as a “fag” and a “little toad.” The story he wrote was not a portrait drawn from intimacy. It was a weapon assembled from twenty years of accumulated gossip and social resentment, aimed at a woman who was already exiled and could not defend herself without confirming that the character was her. When his editor warned him, before publication, that the subjects would recognize themselves, Capote dismissed the concern: “Nah, they’re too dumb. They won’t know who they are.”
Ann Woodward received an advance copy of the story. She died on October 10, 1975, taking cyanide in her Fifth Avenue apartment. She was 59. Her body was discovered a few days before the November Esquire reached newsstands. The reaction from Elsie Woodward Sr. — William’s widow, who had lived at The Waldorf Towers since 1956 — was reported in terse, unforgettable terms: “She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her, and so now I suppose we don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
The fallout
The swans cut Capote off one by one. Babe Paley, who had terminal lung cancer when the story appeared, never spoke to him again and died in 1978 without reconciliation. The others followed. Capote, who had been relying increasingly on alcohol and drugs throughout the early 1970s, now had no social world left. He died on August 25, 1984, leaving Answered Prayers unfinished. The complete manuscript has never been found.
The consequences ran further. Both of Ann and William Jr.’s sons — James and William III — died by suicide, in 1978 and 1999 respectively, ending the direct Woodward line entirely. Dominick Dunne’s 1985 novel The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, which fictionalized the shooting and its aftermath, became a television miniseries in 1987. Roseanne Montillo’s Deliberate Cruelty (2022) remains the most thorough recent account of the full story. And the 2024 FX/Hulu series Feud: Capote vs. The Swans dramatized the entire arc, with Ann Woodward portrayed by Demi Moore — introducing the story to an audience for whom 1955 and 1975 are both remote history.
† The Belair connection to all of this is direct. The 1955 shooting ended the Woodward era at Belair. The 1975 Capote story sealed the silence around it. Ann Woodward’s death closed what the shooting had opened — the brief, troubled life of a Kansas farm girl who had spent a decade as the wife of one of Maryland’s most storied estates, and whose name, twenty years after her exile, was still powerful enough to destroy a novelist’s career and end her own life.
The White House sheep and the Woodward farm at Belair
The purchase — 1918
During World War I, President Wilson had a flock of sheep installed on the White House grounds to graze the lawn, saving groundskeeping labor for the war effort and generating wool that was auctioned for the Red Cross.
Contemporary newspaper reports state that President Wilson, while riding through the country with Dr. Cary T. Grayson, the White House physician, remarked that he would like to see sheep on the White House grounds, and that Mrs. Wilson would too. Dr. Grayson told the President he knew where there were sheep “of excellent breed on a farm at Bowie, Md., owned by William Woodward.” Wilson authorized Grayson to negotiate the purchase, and the deal was completed. The flock consisted of twelve sheep and four lambs. Both papers noted that, so far as White House attendants could recall, no animals other than dogs, cats, and squirrels had ever been kept on the grounds before. [Washington Post, April 30, 1918] [Alexandria Gazette, April 30, 1918]
The return — 1920
The sheep stayed at the White House for the duration of Wilson’s wartime presidency. In September 1920, the Baltimore Sun reported that the last of the flock had been rounded up for return: “the bulk of the flock, by President Wilson’s orders, was returned to William Woodward, at Belair, Md., who sent the sheep to the White House during war days, when the lawns needed trimming and wool was in demand.” Some animals had already been disposed of; the remainder went home to Belair. [Baltimore Sun, September 30, 1920]
An author’s note. I first heard this story not from a history book but from a staff member at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia, during a visit as part of a Virginia historical tour. When I mentioned I was from Bowie, the staff member noted that when they tell visitors about the sheep, they say the animals came from Bowie — from the Woodwards. When I made the connection to Belair Mansion and mentioned that William Woodward had been killed by his wife, the staff stopped to look it up on the spot. I suggested they might want to reach out to the City of Bowie Museums, since two small museums with an unexpected shared story seemed like a natural fit for a collaboration. The Wilson Library leans into the sheep story with some enthusiasm — the gift shop sells woolly sheep figurines and other sheep-themed items, particularly aimed at children, making the animals one of the more memorable touchpoints of a presidential library visit. It is, in its small way, exactly the kind of history that sticks.
The Levitt sale — horse country becomes a suburb
Two years after the shooting, Levitt & Sons purchased the Belair estate and announced plans to build a large planned residential community on the former farm and racing grounds. The same year that produced Belair Stud’s greatest champion — 1955 — had already ended the stable, the family, and the estate’s identity as horse country. The Levitt purchase in 1957 closed the chapter entirely.
The estate that Governor Samuel Ogle built in 1745 sheltered two governors and witnessed an artillery train bound for Yorktown. It produced the foundation mare of American thoroughbred racing and the only father-son Triple Crown dynasty in history. That same ground later became the site of what would eventually be called Belair at Bowie — one of the largest planned suburbs in the mid-Atlantic. The mansion itself survived; it is now a City of Bowie museum. The story of what Levitt built there, and at what cost, continues in Chapter 5: Modern Bowie.