Chasing Horse Ghosts-telling Greyhound's story part 7 - Harness Racing Museum

The next stop on my research journey was the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame in Goshen, New York

The Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame is housed in the former Good Time Stables. The barn has been immaculately restored and converted. It is located right next to Historic Track.

August 6, 2023
I arrived at place called the "Serenity Cabin" yesterday. It is in New Jersey but not far from my target location of Goshen, NY. The area is very rural, the black dirt contrasting against the green of crops and grass is striking. The cabin sits on a small piece of land tucked in along a creek at the bottom of a hillside. It is a lovely location and the price was right. It will be my home away from home for the next ten days.
       Today is my first day at the Harness Racing museum and Hall of Fame--a truly amazing place!  I had no idea there was so much here. This morning I met with Rebecca Howard, the collections curator, and we stood out on the balcony overlooking Historic Half Mile Track. There were a few horses training, going the wrong way of the track on their slower, warm up laps and then turning the right way of the track (circling left, as they would when they race) and going for speed.
       Historic Track was established in 1838 and is the oldest active trotting track in the world. It has been in continuous operation since it's founding. The land itself had been used for informal racing since the 1750s.  In 1883 a one-third mile track was built around the circus grounds. In 1873, the track was re-positioned and built in its current half-mile configuration.     

Some views of Historic Track from the balcony of the Harness Racing Museum on a rainy August morning:

Rebecca and I chatted a long while about the past and the present, and about the differences between the Thoroughbred runners (the dark side she called it, with tongue in cheek, I think) and the harness horses. We talked about harness racing being the sport of the common man, not the aristocracy like the runners.
      After my talk with Rebecca, we went to see Greyhound’s stall. Amazing to stand in such a structure, knowing it’s history (more on this in a future post). They preserved it to look like it did when Greyhound lived in it, refinishing the wood to match what it looked like back then. But one area of wood was not refinished. The area of the door where the great gelding chewed and licked the wood is still bare, just as it was the last time the great horse touched it.
       After a quick tour of the museum, Rebecca took me upstairs to the library where I met the librarian, Paul. They set me up with a place to work and brought the first of many boxes filled with Greyhound information, pictures, articles and so much more. This would keep me busy for my first couple days.  But there was so much more!     

The sitting area outside Greyhound's picture window in his stall now housed at the Harness Racing Museum.

 August 9, 2023
Today I continued my digging into the boxes from the collection of Mary Lou Dondarski-- longtime office manager for the Hambletonian Society and huge Greyhound fan. What a tremendous amount of items she had! The history contained in these boxes centers around Greyhound but is also a look into the history of Harness Racing in Greyhound’s time.
       Mary Lou kept numerous scrapbooks filled with clippings from multiple newspapers. A real treasure trove of items to sift through. Some of the articles I'd seen but others were new to me. There were many pictures in these newspapers I had no hope of finding the rights for to use in the book. So much information is lost forever. Names and places, dates, etc. A lot of these old newspaper photos were tossed or sold in large lots, disappearing into black hole collections, never to be seen by the public again.  

Below: a few of the unique items and newspaper clippings from the Dondarski collection.

Also of interest were sales catalogs from Gainesway Farm, a farm not far from where I live in Kentucky. Now Thoroughbred powerhouse (home of the incomparable Tapit), it was amazing to see that Gainesway had once operated in the Standardbred on the same enormous scale. Particularly since people don’t generally seem to know this or that the part of Kentucky now thought of as Thoroughbred country was once a hotbed of Standardbred production. 
        As I leafed through these old catalogs, mostly from the 1940s, I wondered if Gainesway had their own copies, or if they were tossed ages ago when the Thoroughbred took over the emerald Kentucky pastures of the historic farm. Miss Greyhound, a full sister to Greyhound (foaled in 1938) was featured prominently in these catalogs, along with her foals. 
       Somewhere in the early 1950s I came across the final Gainesway catalog in the collection, a total dispersal of all of their Standardbred stock. They were getting out of the harness game and, like so many other of the bluegrass farms that once raised Standardbreds, they were going to Thoroughbreds. Was Miss Greyhound sold in the dispersal? Or had she earned the place of pensioner, living out her days on the farm she’d raised many foals. It seems each discovery uncovers more questions, more mysteries to solve. Editing this work into a final book will be a challenge, there is so much to share.

Next post: continuing my adventures at the Harness Racing Museum and Hall of Fame

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