The Monmouth County Horse Show will have a new home for 2016: Hamilton Farm in Gladstone, N.J. Cousins Tucker Ericson and Michael Dowling are taking over the 120-year-old show from George Richdale and Mike Maxwell and will move the competition from the Horse Park of New Jersey in Monmouth County to the U.S. Equestrian Team Foundation headquarters in Somerset County, about an hour away.

The show will be called Monmouth at the Team and is scheduled for Aug. 17-21, 2016.

Ericson and Dowling were inspired to run a major show at Gladstone after hosting an unrecognized benefit show there two years ago. Ericson said that the show raised $60,000, which went toward building a judge’s pavilion at the Sussex County Fairgrounds in memory of trainer Edd Lookingbill.  

“That went so well we kept thinking, how cool would it be to have a top-rated show at this facility?” said Ericson. “We spent the last two years banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to pull this off.”

Ericson approached Richdale over the winter and suggested that if he and Maxwell ever wanted to move on from producing the show, he had a plan to keep its tradition—as the longest continually-running show in the country—going while moving the competition to Gladstone. Manager Creigh Duncan will continue to manage the show, and for 2016 Skip Bailey will design the courses, and Mike Rosser has been contracted to judge. 

Ericson and Dowling have just applied for and not yet received approval from the U.S. Equestrian Federation to run Monmouth at the Team, and he said it’s not clear yet whether there will be mileage conflicts with the new location. While they’re hopeful to get approval for a national- or premier-rated show (i.e. an A or AA show), they’re also open to running the show as an unrecognized competition at first. 

“It will be a one-ring horse show,” said Ericson. “We know everyone wants to show in that ring, and we’d like to make that the focal point of the horse show.”