When Amanda Baker first spotted Southern Storm in the corral at the Chincoteague Pony Swim, the 4-month-old foal was the horse of her dreams.

A horse-crazy teenager from Massachusetts, Baker had grown up reading Marguerite Henry’s Misty of Chincoteague, and was on the hunt with her sister Allyson for a pony of their own with funds they’d raised together.

“Hershey” was calm and collected in the chaos that surrounds the annual swim and auction, so the sisters bid on him and won.

“It’s a lot of commotion, there’s a lot of stuff going on, and it can be really hectic,” said Baker. “A lot of the times the foals are really freaked out, the mares are on high alert, the stallions are fighting—and he just didn’t seem fazed by any of that. Every time we saw him he was just calmly hanging out in his group with his mother and father, just kind of munching on hay.”

Hershey as a foal at the auction, with his dam (right) and sire.

That aplomb has stood Hershey in good stead as he’s developed a career as an event horse. Baker never had huge expectations for Hershey, but he showed his natural ability for eventing, and most recently placed 13th on his dressage score in a big division at the Area II training championships in Lexington, Va., with Baker’s friend Anna White in the irons.

“Anything you point him to on cross-country, he goes over it,” said Baker. “He doesn’t care about anything. You can tell he loves it. He’s so happy when he’s out there running cross-country and doing what he loves. It’s not something I ever would have thought he would be so awesome and into, but he’s got a great work ethic for it.”

Even though she lived in Massachusetts, Baker was a fan of the annual pony swim made famous by Marguerite Henry’s book Misty Of Chincoteague. Each July, the 150 ponies who live wild on Assateague Island (the island’s lower half is in Virginia and the northern in Maryland) are herded up and swum to Chincoteague Island. Then selected foals are auctioned off in order to control the herd size. The auction benefits the Chincoeague Volunteer Fire Department.

Baker and her sister had raised the funds to buy a pony a few years earlier, but that foal turned out to be too small, topping out at 13.1 hands.

“It was probably a terrible idea for a 16-year-old and a 12-year-old to have a foal, but our first one, Tigger, was just so easy and so smart, that it was clear that they had a great personality,” she said. “They’re such smart, sensible ponies. Physically, they all look really different. Hershey’s freakishly tall for the breed. He’s 15.1, and that’s pretty much topping out height-wise.”

Baker believes Hershey (Ocean Star—Periwinkle) has some other breeds in his lineage. His sire and dam are both quite tall, and she was told that in the 1980s, Mustangs and Arabs were introduced to the herd to diversify.

“A lot of people think he’s a Morgan. They’re astonished when they hear he’s a Chincoteague from the island. He’s definitely bigger than most of the Chincoteagues, so I think that throws people off,” she said.

Hershey easily adapted to the domesticated life at Baker’s farm and she began training him for low-level dressage.

Baker met White while working at the SmartPak retail store in Massachusetts. A student at James Madison University in Virginia, White offered to teach Hershey how to jump while Baker was busy settling in to her new job in the IT department in 2011.

“It was terrifying at first!” White remembered. “He’s got really poor conformation, which I think is one of the neatest things about eventing. He’s not one that you eyeball and be like, ‘Oh my God, that horse would be a great jumper,’ but he does so well.”

Hershey, shown with White, doesn’t have the most conventional conformation, but he makes it work.

“At first, he would just run through fences as fast as he could. He didn’t have any respect for fences whatsoever. For a while, I didn’t know if it was going to work. I thought he would try to run through a cross-country fence one day and it wouldn’t turn out very well.”

White, who’d had experience to prelim with several off-the-track Thoroughbreds, persevered but gave the gelding the summer of 2012 off while she planned for her wedding.

“I came back to Hershey, and I don’t know what happened to him in his time off, but he all of a sudden, something just clicked in his brain,” she said. “Before I had a freight train of a horse that would just kind of plow through fences, then all of a sudden he learned to how to wait if he jumped, and it kind of went from there. As he went on, he just became more and more bold to the point where now he’s just point and shoot—he just locks on to the fences and goes.”

White and Hershey in action on cross-country.

The pair won their prelim/training debut at Hunt Club Farm (Va.) in August last year and hope to move up to prelim this year.

Baker and White think Hershey excels at eventing because of his hardiness, bravery and sensibility. “He definitely has the pony attitude in him,” said White. “I have three other Thoroughbreds at home who are all quite bigger than him, and he rules the roost. He’s a very sweet horse. He is very sensible. He has a good brain.”

Watch Hershey and White’s training level cross-country round at the Loch Moy Horse Trials (Md.)…

Baker is thrilled to see Hershey blossom under White’s guidance. “I trust Anna. I think she’s a wonderful rider. I think she’s probably one of the most patient and kind and intuitive riders I’ve ever met in my entire life. I trust her completely with him,” she said.

“It’s really been kind of an amazing thing. It’s kept our friendship really strong as well. When she moved down to Virginia, I didn’t get to see her as much,” Baker continued. “This has allowed us to stay really close, and watching the two of them makes me so happy because I can just tell that they’re both having the time of their life when they’re out there.” 

Love Hershey’s story? You can follow along with his upcoming adventures on his own Facebook page!