Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press

Girls take riding lessons on a recent Friday afternoon at Legacy Stables. The Stewartsville, Mo., farm, owned by Tammy and Jamie Noll, was named for their daughter Courtney's love for the Nichole Nordeman song "Legacy" and also is home to "God first, horses second" summer camps.

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Three years ago today, Courtney Noll had the best day.

She witnessed the birth of a colt to her family’s black mare in the wee hours of the morning, then set out for her job at a T-shirt shop in Gower, Mo. There, she made shirts for the children enrolled in the horse camps her mom had started at their farm in Stewartsville, Mo., two summers earlier.

After work, she mowed an elderly neighbor’s lawn and went horseback riding with a friend. And that evening, she played in a church softball game and brought a friend home with her to spend the night.

Before she and her friend went downstairs to go to bed and watch a movie, she said good night to everyone closest to her, including her mom; her 6-year-old brothers, Colton and Clayton; and her 5-year-old sister, Grayson, who were all in Florida visiting family.

On the phone, she told her mom all about her great day — not knowing it had been her last in this life.

Three years ago today, on May 24, 2005, Courtney died in her sleep. It was something no one saw coming, something that isn’t supposed to happen to perfectly healthy 16-year-olds.

The doctors who did her autopsy attributed her death to myocarditis, a virus of the heart. No one knows what caused this sickness that stole Courtney away in the night, but what her parents do know is that she went to sleep with a friend and woke up with Jesus — and that, even now, her legacy is still alive.

“I’d give anything in the world to have her back,” says Courtney’s mom, Tammy. “But I think God really knew what he was doing.”

A fog of grief and disbelief shrouded Courtney’s family for the next few days. Something that stood out sharply, though, was the fact that just four days before her death, Courtney had heard Nichole Nordeman’s song “Legacy” on the car radio and declared that, someday, she wanted it played at her funeral.

And it was. But the song’s influence didn’t end there.

The day after the funeral, Tammy went for the first time to see the colt that had been born the day Courtney died. They had to name the horse Legacy, Courtney’s dad, Jamie, insisted — and Tammy agreed. She also knew they finally had a name for their farm, after being there 10 years and never coming up with anything.

Legacy Stables became a place for the people Courtney left behind. Her friends from church and from East Buchanan High School in Gower came to ride horses, to look through Courtney’s things and just to remember who she was.

At 16, she was someone always smiling who loved God and life and dreamed of being a fighter pilot in the Navy.

Her room was full of Christian CDs and notes to God and absolutely nothing that disappointed her parents when they looked through her belongings after her death.

She drove a 1986 Mitsubishi pick-up truck with a bad paint job that everyone knew as “Mitch.” After she died, her dad found coloring books in the truck that she’d bought for her little brothers and sister, which led him to say that even from heaven, she was still giving gifts.

But this wasn’t who Courtney had always been. Although she called Tammy “Mom,” she was actually her father’s daughter from his first marriage and spent the first eight years of her life with her biological mother. Drugs, alcohol and instability were what she always knew until her mom went to prison and she began living with Jamie and Tammy.

In the beginning, this new arrangement was rough. Tammy “lived and breathed her,” but Courtney resisted receiving affection. She didn’t want to be touched, and she didn’t like boundaries. She fought her parents.

But little by little, she changed. And on her last Mother’s Day, just weeks before she died, she wrote Tammy a note of thanks for not giving up on her.

“This child saw more by the time she was 8 than anyone should ever see,” Tammy says. “But eight years later, anyone could see she was a child of God.”

The summer following Courtney’s death, Tammy continued her horse camps as usual. But somehow, although the format of the camps remained largely the same, something was very different.

The camps were still called “God first, horses second” — due to Tammy’s conviction that “God has to be first in everything, or you won’t have anything” — and incorporated daily devotions and prayer into the typical horse-camp fare of riding, doing farm chores and watching horse movies in the bunk house at night. But suddenly, many of the children who came to camp and to riding lessons were different than the group of church kids who had spurred Tammy to start the camps and lessons two years earlier.

Time after time, the children who came to her after Courtney died were from broken homes. They were children touched by suicide, by unexpected loss, by divorce. They were in many ways Courtney all over again — and they’d come to a place where they could experience the same life-changing love and lessons that she had.

Tammy hopes to soon be able to offer this kind of positive environment year-round by adding an indoor riding arena to Legacy Stables. She doesn’t know where the money for this will come from, as both she and Jamie work outside the farm already — her cleaning houses and him at Sprint — just to be able to continue to offer camps and lessons at a much lower cost than people can find elsewhere.

But she has faith that somehow, the plot of land designated for the arena won’t stand empty forever. And when the arena is a reality, it will be yet another depiction of the legacy Courtney left behind — and that her mom carries on today.

“Anybody can wake up and not be here anymore,” Tammy says. “I hope that when I’m gone, I’m remembered as a woman who loved God and wanted kids and horses to be together.”

Want to horse around?

Spots are still available in some of Legacy Stables’ “God first, horses second” summer camps. Camps are offered for boys and girls ages 5 to 8, 9 to 12 and 13 to 15. The cost for each camp is $150 for children ages 8 and under, who attend for three days, and $295 for children 9 and older, who attend for five days.

Tammy Noll also offers 45-minute riding lessons and one-hour trail rides for $15 each. For more information, call her at (816) 424-6309 or (816) 294-3651, or visit www.myhorse camp.net.

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.