Isaac Murphy: Greatest Jockey of All Time (and a Clark County native?)

From 1875 through the end of the cen­tu­ry, black jock­eys dom­i­nat­ed the sport of Thoroughbred rac­ing. In 1875 Oliver Lewis won the first run­ning of the Kentucky Derby aboard Aristides.  In 1892 Lonnie Clayton became the youngest jock­ey to win the Derby at age 15.  In his first six races, at age 13, James Perkins earned five wins and one place at the Kentucky Association Race Track in Lexington.  In 1898 Willie Simms became the only black jock­ey to win all three races of the Triple Crown.  And then there was Isaac Murphy. 

Isaac Burns Murphy (1861−1896) won the Kentucky Derby three times, the Latonia Derby five times, and four of the first five run­nings of the American Derby, the pre­mier race of his day.  Murphy still holds the high­est offi­cial win­ning per­cent­age among all jock­eys at bet­ter than 34 percent—539 win­ners in his 1,538 mounts.  He also became the high­est paid jock­ey of his era—the $12,000 he earned in 1887 is the equiv­a­lent of near­ly $400,000 today.  Murphy was the first jock­ey to be induct­ed into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame at its cre­ation in 1955.  These accom­plish­ments are all the more remark­able for some­one who was born into slav­ery.  Had Murphy not died at the young age of 35, he might have achieved much more.

Local inter­est in Murphy stems in part from claims that he was born in Clark County.  The lat­est word comes from a March 26 Winchester Sun arti­cle, “Newly estab­lished Racing Hall of Fame of Fame com­ing to Winchester.”  One of the Hall of Fame’s goals is “mak­ing the Isaac Murphy home­place in Clark County a Kentucky tourist attrac­tion.”  Proving Isaac Murphy’s home­place might be a challenge.

According to a Lexington news­pa­per obit­u­ary, Murphy was born on Upper Street in Lexington.  The Kentucky Center for African American Heritage puts his birth in Bourbon County, and the Kentucky Derby Museum has it in Clark County.  Interestingly, the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame lists his birth­place as Frankfort.

No evi­dence was pro­vid­ed for any of the above claims.  Taking a look at first-hand accounts, we face sim­i­lar prob­lems.  But first a lit­tle back­ground infor­ma­tion is needed.

Isaac’s moth­er was America Murphy, a daugh­ter of Green and Anne Murphy.  America mar­ried Jerry Burns alias Skillman in Bourbon County on December 28, 1859.  Jerry enlist­ed in the Union Army in 1864 and died at Camp Nelson bare­ly a month lat­er.  America’s appli­ca­tion for a widow’s pen­sion stat­ed that Jerry Burns was the father of her only child, Isaac Burns, born January 2, 1861.  After Isaac won his first race in 1876, he added Murphy to the end of his name.

Among the peo­ple who should know where Isaac was born, we find con­flict­ing accounts. 

In 1869 two women sub­mit­ted state­ments in sup­port of America’s pen­sion appli­ca­tion, one of whom was her sister—Anna Murphy and Anna Tucker.  According to the state­ment, “They were present at the birth of said child Jerry, that he was born on the 2^d day of January 1861 at the house of Col. John Brown in the coun­ty of Bourbon.”  (It appears that America named her son Jerry at first, then in 1870 changed it to Isaac.)

In an 1889 inter­view with a St. Louis reporter, Isaac him­self stat­ed, “I was born in the city of Lexington and raised there and Cincinnati.” 

These two accounts are in con­flict, and nei­ther one points to Clark County as the birth­place of Isaac Murphy.  Clark County gets into the pic­ture in a round­about way.

Following Isaac’s death, his friend, turf­man Llewellyn P. Tarlton, penned a memo­r­i­al in the Thoroughbred Record, which opened with the fol­low­ing state­ment:  “Isaac Burns, or as he is known to fame, Isaac Murphy, who was born in 1861, before the eman­ci­pa­tion of his peo­ple, on the farm of Mr. David Tanner in Fayette County, Ky.”

The rea­son­ing has gone like this:  There was no David Tanner liv­ing in Fayette County, but there was a David Tanner in Clark County.  According to the 1860 cen­sus, David Tanner was a wealthy farmer liv­ing a few miles east of Winchester on the south side of Ironworks Road.  A sec­ond record was found that lists the birth of an unnamed male slave on David Tanner’s farm on January 6, 1861. 

If we accept that Tarlton real­ly meant David Tanner of Clark County rather than Fayette, and that Isaac’s report­ed birth dates (January 2 and 6) are rea­son­ably close, then we have a cir­cum­stan­tial case for Isaac’s birthplace. 

There is some evi­dence weigh­ing against the claim, besides the state­ments of America’s sis­ter and Isaac him­self.  There is no record that Tanner had a slave named America.  In 1860 he owned sev­en enslaved peo­ple.  Tanner died in 1862 and his estate inven­to­ry lists six—Hester, 65; Jack, 35; Una, 23, with chil­dren 5 and 2; and Hester, 5, an orphan.  One oth­er, Mary, died in 1861.  No America was listed. 

Sadly, we may nev­er have a defin­i­tive answer to the ques­tion of Isaac Murphy’s birth­place.  Federal, state and coun­ty record­keep­ing for African Americans dur­ing the entire 19^th cen­tu­ry was abom­inable.  In the ante­bel­lum peri­od the US cen­sus only list­ed slaves by sex and age; names were omit­ted.  Owners treat­ed slaves as property—they didn’t list their cat­tle by name either—and list­ing names in the cen­sus might imply that slaves were actu­al­ly peo­ple rather than prop­er­ty.  After Emancipation record­keep­ing for blacks in Kentucky was, at best, lackadaisical.

In con­clu­sion, there is good but not incon­tro­vert­ible evi­dence that Isaac Murphy was born in Clark County.  However, no addi­tion­al con­fir­ma­tion is need­ed to estab­lish his stand­ing near the top of Thoroughbred rac­ing in America.

Two recent biogra­phies of Isaac Murphy address the ques­tion of his birth­place:  Pellom McDaniels, The Prince of Jockeys (University Press of Kentucky, 2013) and Katherine C. Mooney, Isaac Murphy (Yale University Press, 2023).