This is the story of the "rams" that adorn the gate posts at the Horn Point Laboratory.
For centuries, Spain had closely guarded her renowned Merino Sheep, traditionally regarded as having the finest fleeces in the world. The wool was highly sought after by cloth manufacturers in England and Europe, but the sheep themselves were forbidden to leave the country. Cracks in this embargo had begun to open late in the 18th century, with Spanish gifts of choice Merinos to the rulers of Denmark, Germany, and France. Unless you were a head of state, smuggling was the only method of acquiring Merino Sheep. Andrew Craigie is remembered in the annals of agricultural history for having received the first Merinos smuggled into Boston in 1793. Unaware of their value, Craigie butchered and ate the animals; worth in the range of $1,000 dollars each.
Several enterprising Americans were able to pry a few Merinos out of Spain, Germany, and France. Robert Livingston in New York, David Humphreys in Connecticut, and Pierre Samuel Dupont in Delaware were all active in promoting the breed. In 1801, soon after he became President, Jefferson was to receive a lamb from one of the first shipments of pure Merino stock, imported by Dupont, a friend of the president when both were in Paris in the 1680s. That ram, however, died on the voyage, and the sole survivor of the transatlantic crossing, Don Pedro, spent ten years improving flocks in New Jersey, New York, and Delaware, where he was periodically put on exhibition at the Du Pont gunpowder works in the Brandywine Valley.
Interest in Merinos did not spread widely until prices of both wool and sheep began to rise. Sheep became associated—as never before—with dreams of profit, a situation which another embargo, Jefferson's own, did much to bring about. As he wrote the Marquis de Lafayette early in 1809, "Our embargo, which has been a very trying measure…We are all eager to get into the Merino race of sheep." The Embargo stimulated more than mere household production; large-scale textile mills sprang up all over New England and the mid-Atlantic states.
Jefferson at this time still believed he already had the Merino "race of sheep." Rising excitement about the Spanish Merino led him to mail more wool, this time from his Spanish flock out of Robert Morris's ram. Certain it was equal to wool then selling for five times the normal price, he sent it off to experts for their opinion. What came back by return mail was not just another chorus of negative judgments, but the universal opinion that Jefferson's sheep were not Merinos at all but Churros, the Spanish equivalent of the "common country sheep" of Virginia.
This disappointing news was accompanied by samples of wool from a dozen different "true" Merinos, Don Pedro among them. It was to aid this legendary ram's owners that Jefferson made his single public intervention in the Merino enterprise. He eventually gave permission to E. I. du Pont and Robert Livingston to import on the Mentor, the administration's dispatch vessel, "two parcels of Merino sheep from France, which they have procured there." He Duponts hoped that Jefferson would pose as the nominal owner of the sheep, in order to grease the wheels of French bureaucracy ("Mr. Jefferson's name would be very helpful in assuring their safety"). Two animals, the gift of the Marquis de Lafayette, did in fact take passage back on the Mentor and were soon herding sheep in Monticello's pastures.
In March 1809, when Jefferson handed over the reins of government he wished to be attired not just in American-made cloth, but in purebred Merino wool—from sheep no doubt sired by Don Pedro. "Homespun is become the spirit of the times," Jefferson wrote when ordering his cloth. "I think it a very useful one, and therefore that it is a duty to encourage it by example."
The political overtones of favoring local clothing echoed up and down the eastern seaboard. For example in Maryland, when Edward Lloyd of Maryland became Governor (1809-1811) and took his oath of office; he wore green homespun made from the wool of his own sheep which were of Don Pedro's lineage at Wye House in Talbot County. Curiously, Governor Lloyd’s daughter, Mary Ellen, would eventually marry the wealthy William Tilghman Goldsborough (1808-1876), and become the mistress of Horn Point until the Civil War ended the plantation era in the 1860s.
When Don Pedro died in 1811, one of the artistic relations of Sophie Dalmas Dupont (wife of E.I. Dupont) memorialized the beloved ram in a painting which still hangs in Pierre Samuel Dupont’s bedroom at Hagley, on the banks of the Brandywine. He also carved a wooden sculpture of Don Pedro which is now at the Hagley Museum (but not on display). In addition, concrete casts of Don Pedro were made and widely distributed among the family by the 1920s. Our Don Pedro appears to have been brought to Horn Point by Frank (Francis V.) Dupont, who inherited the estate at the death of his father, T. Coleman Dupont, in 1930. The casts of Don Pedro apparently had adorned the gateposts at “Eden Park”, one of the family houses on New Castle Avenue in Wilmington, until the road was widened about 1935. This may have been especially convenient, since Frank Dupont was then serving as State Highway Commissioner.
[This was compiled from information sent to J.C. Stevenson from the Hagley Museum (http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/), as well as from http://www.monticello.org/]