2017 Chincoteague pony auction sales set record
With the sale of the 55th pony on the block Thursday, auctioneer Tim Jennings announced this year’s Pony Penning set a new sales record.
The 92nd annual event garnered $210,000 for the 62 Chincoteague Pony foals auctioned Thursday morning, according to an unofficial Daily Times tally.
That smashed the previous record of $178,300.
The proceeds will benefit to the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company, which owns and manages the herd and will put the funds toward building a new firehouse.
“We have a lot of people with good hearts,” Jennings said to the early-morning auction crowd. “This is the best place in the world, the best auction in the world.”
Each year, a fraternity of men on horseback known as the Saltwater Cowboys round up the northern and southern Chincoteague Pony herds the weekend before Pony Penning.
After a short swim across the Assateague Channel, the ponies parade through the Town of Chincoteague to the carnival grounds, where they await the auction the next day.
The event was designed to bring the ponies to the public and has been a draw for tens of thousands since Marguerite Henry’s novel “Misty of Chincoteague” put the ponies in the spotlight in 1947.
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Some, like the Bradley family from Comer, Georgia, still pay tribute to the author today.
“We didn’t want any fighting over the name, so if it was a girl, it was Marguerite. If it was a boy, it was Henry,” said Gwen Bradley as she waited in line to pick up vet papers for her new pony.
She bought Henry, a dark brown bay, for her six grandchildren to share on her 300-acre farm.
At $1,100, it was the lowest bid to nab a pony this year.
The 62 foals auctioned Thursday morning outnumbered the 57 sold during Pony Penning 2016, helping sales soar above all other years.
But the average price per foal was also up almost 30 percent, from $2,659 in 2016 to $3,387 this year.
It’s a far cry from just a few years back, when the recession drove prices below the $1,000 mark on many Chincoteague foals.
Before the recession hit, the 2007 Pony Penning auction grossed the previous record-high of $178,300 for its 73 foals, according to the Chincoteague Chamber of Commerce website.
In addition to the colts and fillies that will travel home with their new families, the fire company auctioned 10 “buy-back” ponies this year.
Winners of the buy-backs earn naming rights for their foals that swim back to Assateague Island to rejoin and replenish the herd.
This year’s highest bid of $15,000 went to a buy-back palomino filly, though the bid from the Chincoteague Legacy Group did not outdo the group’s own record-high bid of $25,000 at the 2015 auction.
Proceeds from one buy-back pony benefit a different charity each year, and this year the Kiwanis Club of Chincoteague took home $7,100 from the sale of a six-week-old filly.
The Feather Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young people purchase their own Chincoteague Ponies, also helped two girls realize that dream this year.
Eleven-year-old Alyssa Jastram from Ridgely, Maryland, won a pinto filly thanks to the Feather Fund.
“Everyone who reads those books dreams of owning a pony, and you bring your kids here to pursue that dream,” Bradley said.
In all, the fire company auctioned 27 colts and 35 fillies this year.
Of them, two buy-back colts and eight buy-back fillies will rejoin the herd for the swim back to Assateague on Friday, including a chestnut pinto Chincoteague Mayor Arthur Leonard purchased.