Far Hills, New Jersey, Turned a Farmers' Thank-You Race Into America's Biggest Day of Steeplechase Society

Far Hills sits in Somerset County, New Jersey, about an hour west of Manhattan, at the centre of a stretch of rolling countryside that has stayed in horses and hedgerows rather than housing developments largely because its wealthiest landowners wanted it that way. The area's social calendar still runs on fox-hunting rhythms set down more than a century ago.

From the Essex Hunt to a farmers' thank-you race

The roots trace to the Essex Hunt, a fox-hunting club established in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1870, reorganised in 1913 as the Essex Fox Hounds. That same year the hunt created what it called the Farmers' Day Race Meeting, a steeplechase run specifically to thank the local farmers and landowners who allowed riders to cross their property. In 1915 the meeting moved to the Grant B. Schley estate, known today as Moorland Farm, where it has run almost every year since, pausing only for the Second World War and the Covid-19 pandemic.

View on Google Maps →

The Far Hills Race Meeting today

Now known simply as the Far Hills Race Meeting, the event has grown into one of the National Steeplechase Association's marquee fixtures, with six races on the card and purses that can run into seven figures combined, among the highest on the circuit. Tens of thousands attend each October, many arriving for the tailgate scene in the infield as much as the racing itself, a tradition that has made the meeting as much a social fixture as a sporting one.

A private world built around horses

Much of the land the Essex Fox Hounds still hunts over belongs to the same kind of large private estates that have defined the area since the early 20th century, their owners largely uninterested in subdividing prime hunting country for development. It's an arrangement that depends on a small number of landowning families choosing, generation after generation, to keep the land as it is.

Traveller tips

• The Far Hills Race Meeting runs on a Saturday in mid-to-late October each year at Moorland Farm; tickets and parking passes sell out well in advance.
• Far Hills has its own stop on NJ Transit's Gladstone Branch, roughly 75 minutes from New York Penn Station.
• Much of the surrounding hunt country is private land; the race meeting and public roads are the practical ways to see it.
• Confirm race day, ticketing and any dress code directly with the Far Hills Race Meeting before planning a visit.