Martha Gerry, who died Monday at 88, was one of the great horsewomen of her time, the owner and breeder of the magnificent gelding Forego, and chairman of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs.

An heir to the Humble Oil fortune, she turned her father’s Lazy F racing stables in Kentucky into a leading producer of stakes winners.

But it was Forego, a bad-tempered giant who had to be gelded in order to race, that was her greatest accomplishment, along with her happy marriage and four children, she once said.

Forego, who finished fourth as a 3-year-old in the 1973 Kentucky Derby behind Secretariat, went on to win 34 of 57 starts with 9 seconds and seven thirds. He had career earnings of $1,938,957, a nose behind the then-all-time money leader, Cigar. Perhaps the dominant racer of the 1970s — Secretariat had a brief career and was put out to stud — Forego was named Eclipse Horse of the Year in 1974, 1975, and 1976.

The 1976 season was highlighted by Forego’s win at the Marlboro Cup at Belmont, a race on a soupy track that Gerry said afterward was her most exciting moment in horseracing. “You had your heart in your throat the whole time, but he usually came through,” she told the Daily Racing Form in 2004.

The late Bill Shoemaker, one of Forego’s two regular jockeys, and who was aboard at the 1976 Marlboro, called him “probably as great a horse as I’ve ever ridden in my life.”

Martha Farish was born October 20, 1918, a year after her father, William Stamps Farish, co-founded the Humble Oil & Refining Co. in Houston. Humble later merged with Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey to form what would eventually become Exxon. William Farish also founded the Lazy F Ranch southwest of Houston, and later a small thoroughbred horse ranch in Kentucky that he named Lazy F, as well.

Martha Farish attended the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry and Vassar College, and was introduced to New York society in 1936 at a dance at the River Club. In 1939, she was married to Edward Harriman Gerry, an investor of impeccable pedigree.

In 1942, when her husband was overseas, her father died unexpectedly. Soon after, her brother, William Farish II, was killed while serving in the Army Air Corps. Martha Gerry and her devastated mother returned to the Lazy F, where Martha began to care for and train about seven yearlings her father had purchased before he died.

“I started breeding our mares and they were good producers, so I was hooked,” Gerry told Blood Horse magazine in August. “My mother enjoyed the horses and began to have a better attitude toward life.”

Her first stakes winners came from that first string of yearlings, and a steady stream of good runners came out of the Lazy F over the ensuing decades, but nothing to rival Forego. She bred 29 stakes winners and raced 33 stakes winners in all.

Gerry remained a fixture of Saratoga racing in recent summers, and pursued another passion, golf, nearly as fervently as horseracing. She was a three handicap (unlike Forego, who at 127 pounds was among the heaviest-handicapped horse).

Surviving Gerry are her children, William, Cornelia, Martha, and Libby. Also surviving is her nephew, William Farish III, former ambassador to Britain and squire of the Lane’s End Farm, one of Kentucky’s leading thoroughbred breeders.