Draft Proposal

Try to forget for a moment what a stud Diligence was.

Yes, the legendary stallion sired more than 400 foals, but his amorous prowess is just part of why a group of Moorestown residents hopes to install a bronze statue in his honor.

Diligence's truer claim to fame is as the founding father of the Percheron horse in America: a breed so hardworking and gentle that it became the nation's most popular draft horse.

And it was to Moorestown that Percherons, including Diligence, were first imported to this country in the early 19th century.

"They were brought in three shipments," Julie Maravich, publicity chair for Friends of Percheron Park, said this week as she strolled in a small patch of town-owned land at Main and High Streets.

Once the site of a gas station, it is where Maravich and her colleagues hope to honor the acclaimed breed, along with Moorestown's place in its history.

"Haddonfield has the Hadrosaurus," she joked, referring to the first dinosaur skeleton discovered in America. "We have Percherons."

Memorializing them will not come cheaply, however.

Friends of Percheron Park, a tax-exempt nonprofit formed in the fall, figures it will need $200,000 to landscape the 75-by-60-foot pocket park with benches and a sitting wall and commission a full-size Diligence in bronze. It has raised about $37,000.

On May 14, Burris Construction Co. will host a fund-raiser for the project at its Main Street office, just yards from the park. In addition to pledging to match what the group raises at the event, owner Bill Burris has donated a new Fiat 500 for the group to raffle.

Plans call for landscaping the site this summer and commissioning the statue of Diligence next year.

"We don't have a design yet," Maravich said. "One idea is to have him look like a real horse standing in a field."

Imported in 1839 from France, Diligence and his principal broodmare, Joan, lived long, productive lives on the farm of Edward Harris II, a gentleman farmer who made his home in the Smith-Cadbury Mansion, diagonally east on High Street.

A naturalist and philanthropist who accompanied the great ornithologist John James Audubon on two of his birding expeditions, Harris first encountered Percherons on a visit to the province of Le Perche, north of Paris, from which the breed takes its name.

By 1930, there were almost three times as many registered Percherons in the United States as all the other draft-horse breeds combined, according to the park's website.

Mostly speckled gray or black, they typically weigh about 1,900 pounds and stand slightly under six feet at the withers, or shoulder.

The design for the park calls for a course of horseshoes embedded in the ground and running through park and up High to the mansion, Harris' home from his birth in 1799 until his death in 1863.

Built in 1738 and expanded several times by its successive owners, the white-painted, wood-frame structure is the home of the Moorestown Historical Society.

Tradition has it that Harris, a businessman and heir, was so smitten by the strength and gentle nature of the Percherons he encountered in France that he decided immediately to import several to his 500-acre farm in the heart of what was then Chester Township.

"He was such an interesting man, they should have called it Harrisonville," says resident Margo M. Foster, who got the idea for a Percheron statue seven years ago.

"There was a committee formed to think of ways to rejuvenate Main Street, which is something that comes up every few years," she recalled last week.

"I had read about how the Percherons were imported here in 1839, and thought, 'Why not build a statue for them? They were very important to American agriculture, especially in the Midwest."

Finding a place to put a statue proved elusive, however. Foster, who rode for years but never owned a horse, asked many business owners on Main Street about donating space. All declined.

About two years ago, the township acquired the site of the former gas station, razed because of ground pollution and now in remediation. When the Moorestown Garden Club got permission from the town council to create a park, Foster approached its members about including her horse statue, and they agreed.

"This was once a farming community," she said last week. "I think it will get people interested in Moorestown's history."