Patsy Topping, 77, Was A Force Of Nature

Jagger Topping has been training and showing horses for more than 40 years, riding into some of the most prestigious rings in the country, on countless different horses, with varying degrees of confidence and trepidation, depending on who his partner is on any given day.

Despite that wealth of experience, Topping, from time to time, still finds himself drawing strength from something his mother, Patsy Topping, told him when he was just 12 years old.

It was late summer, and he was competing at the Hampton Classic on a pony from his parents’ riding stable, Swan Creek Farm, in Bridgehampton. It was a windy day, and the pony was spooky, refusing to behave in the schooling ring.

“He wasn’t being too good, and I said, ‘Mom, I don’t know about this,’” Jagger recalled. “And she said, ‘Listen. I want you to go in and jump the first jump. If you jump that jump, try to jump the second jump.’ And I thought, okay, I can do that.”

Jagger recalled that his mother finished off her pep talk with an emphasis on effort, telling him, “If the horse doesn’t jump, and you tried as hard as you can, you can be just as proud as if you jumped all the jumps. I just want you to try. If you really try, most of the time you come through.”

It wasn’t an easy or smooth trip, but they ultimately finished the course. They didn’t come away with a ribbon. Instead, Jagger gained something far more valuable and memorable from the experience.

“I still walk into the ring saying that to myself, 40 years later,” he said last week, referencing his mother’s words of wisdom from decades earlier. “I was showing a green horse in Florida last week and was standing at the in-gate, and this horse doesn’t stop at the jumps but he often jumps way too big, and I said to myself, okay, I’m just going to go jump the first jump and see how this goes.”

The philosophy that Patsy Topping used to help her son all those years ago was one she used with dozens of children she taught to ride at the sprawling and bucolic farm south of the highway in Bridgehampton that she operated with her husband, Alvin Topping, starting in 1969 before handing it over to her son Jagger and his wife, Mandy Topping.

The matriarch of one of the oldest and most successful riding stables on the East End died on March 14, after a year-long battle with cancer. She was 77.

Putting in maximum effort was simply a way of life for Patsy Topping. Whether she was training a young horse or rider, competing in the ring herself, rescuing hundreds of dogs from South Carolina for ARF over the years, or even battling proposed zoning laws that stood to impact the value of the family farm, she was described by loved ones as fierce, fearless and relentless in her pursuits, a tenacious competitor who was always up for a fight or challenge, but who also had a deeply compassionate side, which found its truest expression in the way she cared for animals.

Patricia Topping was born on April 22, 1945, in Rumson, New Jersey, to parents Lawrence Clarke and Janice Smith. During her childhood, the family split its time between Rumson and a home in Amagansett. The Smith family owned the Smith Meal Fish Factory, processing menhaden, in an area of Napeague sometimes referred to as Promised Land. Patsy was the middle child in a family of five, but never struggled to stand out or make her mark. Her younger sister, Lolly Clarke, recalled when Patsy got her first horse, an off-the-track thoroughbred named Travis County, in 1957.

“He was very powerful; I never could have handled him,” said Clarke, who also became an accomplished rider, having a successful showing career later on with renowned trainer Harry deLeyer. “I think Patsy was maybe 12 years old when she got him. He was way too much horse for a 12-year-old kid.”

Maybe for most 12-year-olds. But not for Patsy. “She rode him great,” Clarke said. “She did some unbelievable things with him.”

On New Year’s Day in 1958, Topping rode Travis County on a fox hunt with the Monmouth County Hunt in Red Bank, New Jersey. Not only did she have the wherewithal to ride a hot horse at a very young age on a high-stakes chase over unpredictable terrain; she and Travis County were first to the kill on what was a live hunt — most hunts these days have transitioned to using a drag scent — and she was awarded the head of the fox, known as the mask.

“I’ll never forget that,” Clarke said. “That was a very big deal.”

Topping was an animal lover from the start. Jagger — the oldest of her and Alvin’s three children, including Gretchen Topping and Christian Topping — said that having her dogs, cats and horses by her side “made it feel like home wherever she was,” especially as a child when they traveled frequently back and forth between New Jersey and Amagansett.

Topping and her siblings inherited their love of horses and riding from their mother, who was an avid fox hunter. Having horses and being around them constantly made her the subject of ridicule at times when she was a child attending Rumson Country Day School in New Jersey.

“She would tell me that in grade school and high school she’d get teased because she was always mucking out stalls and showing up to school in muddy boots,” Jagger said.

She went on to the Madeira School in Maryland for high school, and eventually graduated from Connecticut College with a bachelor’s degree in science after majoring in zoology.

Being subjected to teasing from her classmates at a young age didn’t slow Topping down. If anything, it only solidified her natural determination to succeed and rise to the top. At the same time, she was leading the fox hunt on a horse that would have tossed off most riders her age within the first few minutes, she was also breaking track and field records at her school, showing off a competitive spirit and athletic prowess uncommon for most girls at the time.

“She was unbelievably fearless,” her sister, Clarke, said. “And she really pushed me. She always wanted me to be much braver than I was. I was a wimpy kid. But Patsy was my rock.”

That competitive streak showed itself in a variety of ways. Clarke recalled a year when she was away at college and her sister took her horse to a show.

“It was fall, and it was really cold at the show and there were some riders there who were real Locust Valley snobs, so Patsy took my mother’s long mink coat, that was practically touching the ground, to wear at the horse show to show off among the snobs,” Clarke said with a laugh. “But it got really cold, and damp and rainy, so she put my mother’s mink coat on my horse as a blanket, and all those Locust Valley snobs were like, oh my god, I can’t believe she did that.

“Nobody was ever going to out-do Patsy,” Clarke added.

After graduating from college, Topping ultimately settled down full-time on the East End, and embarked on what would be a lifelong career as a horsewoman. She married Alvin Topping in 1968, and they bought the roughly 40 acres on Halsey Lane from a total of 300 acres of farmland owned by Topping’s great-uncle and grandfather, which they had initially purchased during the Great Depression, Clarke said. Alvin, who came from a family of Bridgehampton potato farmers, suggested starting off by leasing some of that land and turning it into a horse farm, a plan which led to the eventual purchase. The rest of the land was sold off by the extended family in the 1970s.

The name for the farm came from looking at old maps of the area that show a creek running through the farm. Some of the maps have it listed as “Sam’s Creek,” while others label it “Swan Creek.” The prettier name stuck.

Topping had gotten her start teaching riding lessons as a teenager, working for Liz Hotchkiss at Stony Hill Stables in Amagansett. She also taught for a period of time at the Topping Riding Club in Sagaponack, owned by Alvin’s brother, Bud Topping, and his wife, Tinka Topping. When they opened Swan Creek in 1969, Patsy and Alvin set out to run a family-oriented riding academy, teaching everyone from beginners and pleasure riders to those with serious showing goals. And while times have changed, and horseback riding and showing has become a serious, big money pursuit for many people, Swan Creek has remained one of the top show barns in the area by largely staying true to that original aim. Topping had horses and students showing all over the East Coast, from New York to Florida, and Jagger and Mandy have continued that success after taking over.

As a trainer, Topping was disciplined and “a little bit on the demanding side,” according to Jagger. “She was serious about her craft. She considered teaching riding and teaching people about our sport and everything that horses teach you about the world and about yourself as being really important. She felt her job was life-impacting on people and she treated it as such.”

Jagger said he now has a greater appreciation for what his parents, and his mother in particular, did during those early years, especially after he and his wife Mandy raised their own daughter, Phoebe Topping, now 18 years old.

“She was running a small business and raised three kids on the farm, dealing with multiple employees and clients,” he said. “Mandy and I raised Phoebe on a farm that was built. It was still a lot of work, but my mom and dad created it and built the structure and maintained clients and raised kids. I think they were incredible.”

If juggling all those competing interests wasn’t enough, Topping still found the time to excel in the show ring herself, and in arguably one of the most challenging divisions that existed at the time. For several years, in the 1980s and 1990s, she became one of the most accomplished sidesaddle riders on the East Coast, winning champion at nearly every show she entered, including at the Hampton Classic, which had a sidesaddle division until the early 1990s.

Jagger said that his father Alvin encouraged Topping to give it a try, and that it started off more as a “fluke.” Because of the degree of difficulty involved in guiding a horse over 3-foot-plus fences with both legs situated on the same side of the saddle — which requires an extraordinary degree of balance and concentration, not to mention bravery — not many horses are appropriate for it, but Topping had a gelding aptly named Nimblelight who she partnered with for most of her tri-color ribbons in the division, even competing at Madison Square Garden.

“It’s supposed to be considered, at least back in the day, the ultimate feminine thing to do, but it is so difficult,” Clarke said of sidesaddle riding. “There is nothing feminine about it. It takes blood and guts to do it.”

Whether it was competing herself in the sidesaddle divisions or sending countless child and adult riders into show rings at any number of prestigious shows, Topping became a fixture on the East Coast show circuit and in particular at the Hampton Classic, where Swan Creek students have excelled for decades. Hampton Classic Executive Director Shanette Barth Cohen described Topping’s outsized influence on the show and the local equestrian community.

“Patsy called it like she saw it and didn’t sugarcoat anything, but she was there for you too and was kind and caring,” she said. She recalled one year during her junior career, competing in an adult jumper class in the Grand Prix ring on a horse named Pierson owned by her uncle, Dennis Suskind. Topping was not Cohen’s regular trainer, but was helping her out for that show, and Cohen recalled the experience and Topping’s signature style.

“We were walking the course and made our way around to obstacle 12, and my uncle’s horse really had a stop in him at that time, so she looked at me and said, ‘If you get this far, just come around here …’ and she kept going. It was so Patsy. She had a huge personality and a huge presence.”

One of Topping’s most treasured students was Phoebe, her only grandchild. Phoebe went on to have a very successful junior showing career in the hunter and jumper divisions, and is now competing as a professional. She recalled being fascinated, as a young child, watching her grandmother teach riding lessons, and became even more enamored with her over time.

“As I got older, I developed a greater admiration for her, not only for her skill in teaching riding, but also her strong work ethic and ability to stand for what she thought was right, no matter the cost,” Phoebe said. “In 2016, she came to watch me at my first Junior Hunter Finals, and I was so nervous to be at such a big competition. She recognized this, and reminded me that ‘No matter how big the competition, you just need to ride your horse, and always remember the basics.’”

Topping remained a fixture at Swan Creek even after officially handing the business over to her son and daughter-in-law. She could still be found in recent years, before her illness, sitting along the top rail of the indoor riding ring, shouting instructions to a young child trying to coax a lazy pony into a canter. But she had begun to spend more time down South in the latter part of her life, at the farm she and Alvin bought in 1998 — named Dixie Hall — as a retirement haven. They renovated the old plantation house at the rural South Carolina farm, which had survived the Civil War, and turned the property into a winter haven for the Swan Creek school horses and old family horses that had earned their retirement after competing for years with Jagger, Gretchen, Christian and others. Topping found what ended up being a second act once she started splitting her time between Swan Creek and Dixie Hall, getting into dog rescue.

She initially adopted a few dogs from a local shelter, and began to realize the staggering numbers of dogs that needed homes, and the subsequent upsetting realization that, in that area of the country, dogs who weren’t adopted right away were often put down. Unable to bear the thought of an animal being killed simply because no one had stepped up to take it home, or made an effort to find it a loving home, was not something she could ignore, so she began taking in dozens of dogs at a time to her farm. She would care for them and then transport them in her horse trailer to the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons, which would take them in and find them homes. From 2007 to 2016, Topping was involved in the rescue of more than 2,000 dogs. The ones who were particularly hard to find homes for often ended up at hers, and she lovingly referred to them as her “misfit club.”

Last summer, she was given a lifetime achievement award from ARF for her efforts. ARF Executive Director and CEO Scott Howe said Topping’s contributions were enormous for the rescue organization, describing her as “a legend.”

“Patsy’s work in South Carolina helped ARF expand its work beyond eastern Long Island to regions of the country facing the same problems we had here in the Hamptons 50 years ago; abandoned cats and dogs, roaming free, unspayed and unneutered. Her conscience couldn’t allow her to see animals treated as if they were disposable, to be euthanized out of sight and out of mind. She saved well over 2,000 animals, and her impact on ARF resulted in our saving tens of thousands more animals as a result.

“Her legacy reached far beyond ARF to all the families who adopted her rescues,” he added. “We should all be as principled and brave as Patsy. The world would be a much better place.”

Topping did not discriminate when it came to caring for animals. There is an infamous family photo of her smiling contentedly while holding her daughter Gretchen, an infant at the time, and also bottle feeding two baby raccoons they’d found abandoned on the side of the road. During that time period, the refrigerator at their home was filled with bottles, labeled either “Gretchen” or “raccoons.”

Gretchen spoke about how, within the last year, her mother had worked hard to find a special equine surgeon to save her horse, Lefty, which had been born with a club foot, a condition that over time became painful to the point where the only choice was an expensive surgery or euthanasia. The surgery was extremely costly, and there was no guarantee it would work. But Topping spent her time tracking down the best surgeon for the job, refusing to give up on the horse, which had been bred and born at Swan Creek, and held a special place in Gretchen’s heart. The horse is now sound and rideable, given a new lease on life, and Gretchen expressed her gratitude that her mother had been so committed to saving the horse, even as she was in the throes of battling cancer.

There is doubtless more that Topping would have done and accomplished if she were still alive, but Jagger said the legacy she leaves behind is still enormous. He admired his mother’s lifelong dedication to not only tirelessly caring for so many dogs and horses, but also for the fierce dedication both she and his father had to Swan Creek. In the early 2000s, Topping devoted a lot of energy to pushing back against Southampton Town’s new zoning regulations that many farmers and landowners at that time felt would decrease their property value, out of a desire to make sure the farm would provide financial stability for the family for generations.

“Mom and dad were so relentlessly connected to that piece of property, and also looked at the property as an investment and financial security, so that if God forbid something bad happened, they could sell it,” he said.

Her deep commitment to her family, to what she built with her husband so many years ago, to the animals she loved, and, most of all, to passing all those values on to her children and the many other people whose lives she touched is what Jagger says he will remember about his mother.

“She was an incredible lady,” he said. “Truthfully, she was a teacher and she loved teaching, and that’s how I’m going to remember her, just always trying to teach me and the people around her.

It was a guiding principle that seemed to inform almost everything she did.

“She wasn’t arrogant about it,” he continued. “Sometimes, she was learning even while she was teaching, and she wasn’t bashful about that.”

It was a willingness to engage in the effort that always mattered the most.

“She’d say, ‘I don’t know if this will work, but I think it might, so let’s try.”