Margaret Howard Worrall, first woman to head the Maryland Hunt Cup, dies

Jan. 9—By Jacques Kelly — jkelly@baltsun.com

January 9, 2024 at 5:00 a.m.

Margaret Howard Worrall, who was born the day of the 1942 Maryland Hunt Cup and became the first woman to head the annual steeplechase event, died of heart failure Dec. 20 at her Monkton home. She was 81.

Born in Baltimore and raised in Butler, she was the daughter of Mary Katherine Sheppard Sappington, a Baltimore County government worker, and Henry Otto deFries, a World War II fighter pilot and manager at Harry T. Campbell & Sons' quarry company.

Her introduction to riding came as a 5-year-old, while living on Bellona Avenue in Woodbrook in Baltimore County. She took surreptitious rides on workhorses owned by the School Sisters of Notre Dame at their Villa Assumpta.

Related Articles

—

News Obituaries — Edgar Robert 'Bob' Kent Jr., investment banker and philanthropist, dies

—

News Obituaries — Eleanor M. 'Judy' Waters, Roland Park Country School educator for more than 50 years, dies

—

News Obituaries — Doug J.J. Peters, veteran and former Maryland state senator, dies at 60

—

News Obituaries — David Soul, the actor who portrayed the blond half of TV's 'Starsky and Hutch,' dies at 80

—

News Obituaries — Robert O. 'Bob' Grover, Baltimore Sun copy desk chief in the '70s and '80s who taught journalism, dies

Mrs. Worrall was a 1960 graduate and class valedictorian of Hereford High School, and earned an English degree at what is now Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

She met her future husband, Douglas Worrall, at Hereford High School.

"We never dated in high school and we went to the same parties," said her husband. "I went off to the Navy and she accompanied my mother to my boot camp at Bainbridge. We married while she was still in college."

Her husband's wedding gift to her was a steeplechase horse named Scandanus.

"He won nothing famous and he was a cheap wedding present. I already owned the horse," her husband said. "She rode him and took him to a couple shows."

She initially taught in the Baltimore County Schools system and then joined the faculty at Garrison Forest School, where she taught English.

Mrs. Worrall and her husband bought a Carroll County farm in Snydersburg and later settled on Black Rock Road.

She took a course at Goucher College on how to sell your written work. She initially wrote about her experience canoeing on the Monocacy and Potomac rivers.

Mrs. Worrall soon began covering steeplechase races for The Sun and The Chronicle of the Horse.

She was committed to preserving the Maryland countryside. In the 1970s, she and her husband placed their farm, Scanden, under the protection of the Maryland Environmental Trust.

Mrs. Worrall became the 1991 to 1995 executive director of the Valleys Planning Council, the environmental watchdog for much of rural Baltimore County.

In 1995, she became the first female member of the Maryland Hunt Cup Committee, later serving as executive secretary from 1998 to 2006.

"As a teenager, it was like being a Beatles' groupie," she said in a 2005 Sun story about her life and the race.

She spoke of her duties as race secretary: "I'm constantly thinking. I'm constantly wandering around. I can't sit around drinking bloody marys," she said. "Maybe I should."

Mrs. Worrall said she worried "about everything from people getting stung by bees to cars getting stuck in the mud to having an adequate number of portable toilets ... to the worst thing that can happen: riders and horses getting hurt."

She said a successful race is "mainly marked by no injuries, followed somewhere down the list by no rain and no drunken congregations on Cal Ripken's nearby estate."

"Margaret was the consummate good egg and horse industry enthusiast. She knew so much and was interested in everything and everybody if it had to do with horses," said Ross Peddicord, executive director of the Maryland Horse Industry Board.

He described her as "the state's number one equestrian historian," who worked with Ellen Moyer, former mayor of Annapolis, and Angela Reynolds, an Ocean City tourism official, to research and develop a website and brochure, which included the home of Man o' War, considered one of the greatest racehorses of all time, on the old Glen Riddle estate in Worcester County.

Ms. Worrall fox-hunted, showed horses and was a district commissioner of the Green Spring Hounds Pony Club.

In 1992 a horse she co-owned, Von Csadek, won the Maryland Hunt Cup. The race fell that year on her birthday, and her son, Patrick, rode Von Csadek to victory.

Mrs. Worrall accompanied Von Csadek the four times he raced on English courses. She had planned for Von Csadek to race in the British Grand National, but he came up lame and was brought back to Maryland. He recovered and raced in the Maryland Hunt Cup again.

Mrs. Worrall's work often appeared in the old Maryland Horse, now the Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred.

Among her books are "The History of the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club," "100 Runnings of the Maryland Hunt Cup," and "The My Lady's Manor Races, 1909-2009."

She was an administrative judge on the Baltimore County Board of Appeals and was the Dorchester County area representative for the Maryland Environmental Trust.

She was a volunteer at St. Mark's Church and St. John's Church nursery schools, and was on the vestry of St. John's Church in Butler.

Mrs. Worrall sat on the Women's Committee of Historic Hampton, Green Spring Valley Hounds & Hunt Club, and Maryland Horse Industry Board's Historic Horse Trails.

More than 30 years ago she and her husband moved outside Cambridge in Dorchester County where they sailed a pontoon boat, the Queen Margaret. They subsequently moved to Monkton.

Survivors include her husband of 59 years, Douglas Geoffrey Worrall, an attorney; a son, Patrick Worrall, of Austin, Texas; a daughter, Caroline Worrall, of Gainesville, Florida; two sisters, Zoe Sappington Verly, of Israel, and Hilly Bell, of Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania; four brothers, Courtney Sappington, of Maplewood, New Jersey, J. Russell DeFries, of Dallas, Chip DeFries and Patrick Kimo DeFries, both of Maryland; and four grandchildren.

Services were Saturday at St. James Episcopal Church in Baltimore, where she was a parish member.

Share this:

— Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

— Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

—