Our story starts with Frank Gilmore’s dream to provide for his family. He started with a small 86-acre tree farm that he worked on the weekends and evenings outside his full-time job teaching at Ole Miss. Over the years, he and wife Ann add two additional parcels of land to bring their total holdings to 365 acres.
As a young girl, Kristin and her brother Paul worked with their dad to build a firewood business and to help with cutting pulp wood. Kristin and Frank also started building a barn that someday would hopefully be home to the horses Kristin asked Santa for every year.
That barn was never finished and Kristin was 14 before she finally got a retired barrel racer as her first horse. But, her dream of owning horses and helping people through interactions with them never died.
Fast forward a few decades and Jackson joined this world and discovered an incredible love for his Pataw’s farm and started to learn that horses can be great friends for humans.
As Jackson (and Kristin) got older, we started wondering why Oxford didn’t have more options for riding, boarding, and teaching about horses. We also didn’t want the legacy Kristin and Paul’s parents built to be lost.
