Sep Palin trained Greyhound, ``the Babe Ruth of harness horses,'' at Aiken tracks in the 1930s. SPECIAL

Harness racing began as a 'church activity'

Web posted March 17, 2000

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By Stephen Delaney Hale
Correspondent

AIKEN -- The Aiken Mile Track -- now named McGhees' Mile -- has a place in harness racing unsurpassed by any other training center in the country.

Dunbar Bostwick, scion to one of America's pre-eminent horse-racing families, built the track, then just east of town, in 1936.

Brother of steeplechasing great Pete Bostwick, and son of racing patriarch Arthur C. Bostwick, Dunbar Bostwick is widely credited with reviving national interest in harness racing. He was personally responsible for introducing Aiken as a training center to many of the greatest names -- both human and equine -- in the past 75 years of the sport.

The Standardbred horse, used exclusively in harness racing, is the first purely American breed, created from a mixture of thoroughbreds and farm horses in Colonial days.

The Standardbred is considered one of the most even-tempered, intelligent and willing breeds of horse. Those traits were vital to its origin in early America, when the breed was developed as a horse that could serve as a family's main source of transportation and still have the stamina, speed and willingness to race on Saturday afternoon -- or home from church on Sunday.

The Standardbred was the common man's racehorse, the same horse that drove his wife and children to town. Vicious or unmanageable horses could not be tolerated.

D. Bostwick SPECIAL

According to accepted legend, the distinctive gaits of trotting and pacing grew out of the strict religious beliefs of early American society. Horse racing was considered immoral in the days of Puritans and other fundamentalist sects that dominated rural Colonial America.

But these same farmers were very proud of their animals and the training they gave them. It became a matter of intense pride to leave church, in front of all the assembled neighbors, with the family riding behind the most beautiful and well-trained horse in the congregation.

Running full out would have been sinful, but as long as your horse remained in a prescribed gait, there was no harm done -- so says the legend. Often church attendance increased if everyone in the community knew that two prized horses would test each other, either going to or from the services.

Those first harness horses were pacing horses, a gait in which the legs on either side move together. Trotting horses were developed later. They use opposing legs in the stride -- the right front and the left rear working together followed by the left front and the right rear in the next stride. As in those first years, it is forbidden for the horse to break out of that gait into a full run.

Triple Crown Section  Race for the crown  Steeplechase event grows  Horses help economy  Trials test young horses  Facilities draw trainers  Gelderlanders to compete  Harness racing fever  Harness racing began as a 'church activity'   MAPS  Aiken Trials  Steeplechase  Harness Race

The sport remains fabulously popular in the U.S. Midwest, Canada and, curiously, in Scandinavia, as well as New Zealand and Australia. (Brett Pelling of New Zealand, who wintered in Aiken in the early 1990s, was the leading trainer in North America in 1999.)

Several winners of the Hambletonian (``the Trotters' Kentucky Derby'') and the Little Brown Jug (the top race for 3-year-old pacers), learned their gait at the Aiken track.

Dunbar Bostwick was considered one of the pillars of American harness racing for decades. He and his trainer, Harry Whitney (no relation to the Joye Cottage Whitneys of Aiken), produced some of the sport's great champions, including Nibble Hanover and Chris Spencer.

Sep Palin, who trained the incomparable Greyhound in Aiken, was another giant of the harness-racing world. Greyhound, called ``the Babe Ruth of harness horses'' by the sporting press in the 1930s, lost only one race in a career that spanned more than half a decade and included a win in the 1935 Hambletonian.

The track has probably seen half-a-dozen Hambletonian winners, the most recent being American Winner in 1993. The big, gentle champion was owned by Bob Key's Key Stable and trained in Aiken by veteran Jimmy Arthur.

Horse book

This story is excerpted with permission from the new book, Aiken and Its Horses -- A Celebration of Equestrian Sports.

The coffee-table style book is published by The Augusta Chronicle and was edited by members of the newspaper's news and marketing staffs.

The book was written by free-lance writer Stephen Delaney Hale. Mr. Hale, an Aiken native, grew up in the Aiken ``Horse District'' and has been an avid fan of the sport since childhood. He has written about Aiken owners, trainers, riders and horses in many publications for the past two decades, including 10 years at the Aiken bureau of The Augusta Chronicle.

The book will be available for sale at the Aiken Steeplechase on March 25.

Reach Stephen D. Hale at (803) 279-6895 or scbureau@augustachronicle.com.