Artist: Jack K. Hodgkin (born 1936)
James Ben Ali Haggin
HAGGIN, JAMES BEN ALI (1822–1914), inducted 1915
Kentuckian James Ben Ali Haggin was one of the wealthiest men of his lifetime, owning 400,000 acres of land in California, 10,000 acres in the Bluegrass State of Kentucky, some of the richest metals mines, and some of the fastest racehorses in the world. Born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, grandson of one of the state’s earliest settlers, Haggin was educated at Centre College and began practicing law. In 1850, he moved to California to open a law office with Lloyd Tevis, who later became his partner in several mines during the Gold Rush days. He and Tevis purchased the Rancho Del Paso near Sacramento in 1862 and established one of the largest horse breeding operations in world history. In 1904, 1,500 of the 7,000 broodmares registered in the official Stud Book belonged to Haggin.
Haggin’s horse, Ben Ali (his Turkish mother’s maiden name), won the 1886 Kentucky Derby. Salvator and Firenze were Hall of Fame Thoroughbreds. In 1897, James Haggin acquired Elmendorf Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, and by 1905 had shifted all equine operations there. He also established a model dairy on the land. Just prior to his death at age eighty-seven, Haggin founded the James B. Haggin Memorial Hospital in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. The Ben Ali Stakes race at Keeneland, in Lexington, is named for him. Interestingly, his grandson, James Ben Ali Haggin III (who went by “Ben Ali Haggin”) was a successful portrait painter and a theatrical set designer for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and Ziegfield Follies. Although Haggin’s original portrait was lost in the 1934 fire, a Kentucky artist was commissioned to return his likeness to the collection, after it was moved from Chicago to Louisville in the 1970s.
Source: Saddle & Sirloin Guidebook 2026, p. 101