“Let’s shorten our reins and pick our hands up. Lift your hands. That’s plenty of canter. Slow it down. Good… Shorten your reins. Inside leg to outside rein. Good. Closing that leg. Don’t let it swing. Good, Mallory. Can you lift your left shoulder? That was great. It was great.”

On a hot and humid Mississippi afternoon, Ellen Goodman leans against a corral and watches as three young riders lead their horses through a series of exercises. Her corrections and instructions come easily as she guides them through jump after jump. Ellen, owner and operator of New Prospect Farm in New Hope, specializes in English horseback riding – unusual in an area where Western riding and the rodeo reign supreme.

After the busy drive down Highway 69 and a turn onto the gravel drive (5 miles per hour at most, the signs request), the farm is tucked away in the woods, surrounded by mature green trees. With well-maintained pastures and turnouts, stables, corrals, a tack shed, a wash stall and more, New Prospect is a rider’s (and a horse’s) dream farm.

Ellen is a first-generation horse farmer, and she grew up on New Prospect Farm – though at that time there wasn’t a “farm,” much less a horse.

“My family are not animal people. I’m an anomaly,” Ellen said with a laugh. “My dad bought this land over 50 years ago, and he built the log home by hand. There’s a lot of sentimental value to this farm… 18 years ago I had my first pony after I begged and begged my parents. My dad built me this little two-stall barn, and I got to bring my pony home, and then I got a second pony.”

Ellen remembers printing out ads about horses for sale as soon as she was old enough to use the internet. Her unrelenting requests for a pony led her dad to ask a horse farmer friend what he thought about the idea. That friend, Ellen said, encouraged her dad to give her lessons first to see if the passion and hobby would stick. And stick it did.

“I vividly remember my dad very distinctly saying, ‘Oh, I’m just building her two stalls because Ellen only has her two ponies,’” she continued. “Well, it kind of grew from there, and ever since then we’ve added on to it. We started out with 12 acres. We now have over 40 acres, and this summer we had 22 horses.”

Ellen declared her LLC as soon as she turned 18, and New Prospect has been running ever since.

From pony to program

Though English horseback riding remains relatively uncommon in the Southeast, Ellen has spent more than 10 years introducing riders to hunter and jumper competitions, taking students to shows in Birmingham, Jackson, Memphis and more. And, she said, most are bringing home ribbons.
But even those without a quest for ribbons are welcome to join Ellen’s world.

“We run a lesson program. I have some really, really lovely lesson horses, and we do our lessons in a monthly package,” she said. “You don’t have to have your own horse. You don’t have to have any previous experience. We teach complete beginners. Some have never even touched a horse. We have a whole age range too, from children to older adults. It’s a really good kind of eclectic group.”

“We have a lot of riders who are competitive, committed, have their horses and want to go horse shows, but we also have a lot of riders who don’t ever want to do that, and so they come out and they walk and they trot during their lesson,” she continued.

When asked what makes English riding different from the more common Western style, Ellen starts simply by saying, “It’s a completely different world.”

But then, with the experience of someone who has been asked this question dozens of times, she begins to break it down.

“English and Western have completely different styles, and then they’re broken down into what’s called a discipline. So in English, you have things like hunters, jumpers, dressage … similar to what you’ll see in the Olympics,” she explained. “And then Western has its own sports. You see those at the rodeo… And then there are totally different qualities in the horses themselves.”

In addition to English riding lessons, Ellen runs a sales program. The qualities she looks for in an English riding horse are numerous and precise, including the way the horse moves, the way it jumps and the way it’s put together – something called conformation. Then, she said, they look for more specific things like stride length and temperament.

“We want a horse that takes really big steps – big, slow steps,” she said. “And then we look for personality things too, right? We want a pretty even-tempered horse. They can be opinionated, but we’d rather one not be super spooky or nervous.”

More than ribbons

It’s clear the horses in the corral are well suited for English riding. Their strides are long as dust swirls and the rhythmic clop of hooves echoes while the girls canter and make “serpentine” riding patterns of connected half-circles.

As the sun continues to sink lower, Ellen comments to Kirksey that her horse, Obie, looks like he’s getting pretty hot. Major, a 17-year-old gelding, has been pouring sweat for a while, while the third horse, Remus, appears stoic despite panting heavily in the heat.

The lesson is just as demanding for the horses as it is for the riders, something Ellen is quick to remind her students of.

“Let him catch his breath and then do it. He’s really hot,” she instructs Major’s rider, Aidan, before sending her through another series of jumps.

From an outsider’s perspective, it’s clear that proper riding form, safety and, above all, the horses’ well-being stay at the forefront of Ellen’s mind.

As the lesson comes to a close, she has the riders lead their horses to the wash stall for a cooling rinse. She encourages Aidan to spray Major’s entire body with cool water before holding the hose to his chest to help him cool down after working in the summer heat.

“They’re hot. They all work hard. This is like a cleaning and cooling thing,” she said as she watched the riders rinse their horses. “Just like us, if we leave them sweaty and dirty, it feels gross, and then it can create its own host of issues, and they can get fungal infections and lose their hair. We have to work to maintain them and take care of them.”

The horses are at the heart of everything Ellen does, but running New Prospect means balancing that passion with the realities of life beyond the barn. And this summer, that means preparing for another cross-country move.

Ellen and her husband, an Air Force pilot, are headed to California soon for his new work assignment. She said she’ll continue to manage the farm from afar, something she has done before when her husband’s job took them to Maryland for three years.

“I handle all the scheduling and payment and staffing, and I have four instructors employed and two grooms,” she said. “But I absolutely miss it. Being in Maryland was tough.”

But Ellen said she finds a way back to horses wherever she goes. In Maryland, she coached a college equestrian team, and she already has a job lined up in California at a barn she said she’s excited to work with. Still, no matter where she lives, New Prospect remains home.

“I take my job very seriously from the horse aspect and the human aspect,” she said. “It’s my job to keep everyone safe and happy. That’s a big task, but there’s a lot of joy and pride in that as well. I love every single horse here. I think they’re all so special, and it is such an honor to be able to take care of these horses and to be able to know them and understand when one’s not feeling well or we need to make a tack change or a program change. So it’s stressful and it’s overwhelming, but it’s also really fulfilling.”