Sports wall of fame to honor harness racing past

People past a certain age tell a story about Hazen Ashley, who ran a barber shop in St. Stephen. He had a customer in the chair, cutting his hair about noon, when someone came in the door and said they had to leave soon if they intended to get to the track somewhere out of town before the horse races started at 2 p.m. "And Hazen said to whoever was in the chair, 'I'm going to have to do this on Tuesday because I'm closing the shop,'" according to local historian Darren McCabe.

There has not been a harness horse race in St. Stephen since 1959, but years ago people on both sides of the St. Croix River, indeed, across the Maritime provinces and Maine, took the sport seriously. The eighth annual inductions to the Greater St. Stephen Sports Wall of Fame on Saturday, May 23, will recall this era by inducting St. Stephen Harness Racing Past in the special achievement category. The induction ceremony and dinner will be held at the Garcelon Civic Center.

Co‑nominators McCabe and Jeff Macleod chose the late William Todd (1854‑1935) and William (Billy) Keys (1876‑1967) to represent the entire harness racing era in St. Stephen from 1886 to 1959. Macleod remembers attending ball games as a youngster in the 1960s at the old race track at the fairgrounds on King Street. "The ball field was inside the track, and it wouldn't be unusual to see somebody out training a horse the same time the ball game was going on," he recalls. The old grandstand finally came down to make way for the new St. Stephen Elementary School, which opened in 1969, 10 years after the last horse race. The Rod Wilson Field now lies in the centre of the former race track, McCabe says. St. Stephen built the Border Area Community Arena on the old fairgrounds property, next to the school, in 1974.

Why pick William Todd and Billy Keys to represent dozens if not hundreds of people involved in standardbred harness racing over 73 years? "The inspiration and the real start of horse racing in St. Stephen was William Todd," Macleod says. In 1885, he bought land at Todds Point, where Oak Bay and the St. Croix River meet above St. Croix Island, across from Devils Head, Maine. Todd and business partner John Frost started the St. Croix Stock Farm, bringing in as many as 130 of the finest race horses on the planet from Kentucky and elsewhere. Todd, son of lumberman and businessman Freman Todd, had the money to back this venture. "Todd had his own track. He actually imported the clay for his track from Scotland. This was a man of wealth, and he really started breeding, interest in racing horse and harness racing," Macleod says, adding, "He was really the one that set the foundation with horses and racing and really getting into it in a big money way, but he had means. The Todd family was immensely wealthy."

McCabe agrees, stating, "Really, the catalyst to it all was when Todd built the stock farm."

Billy Keys, who lived on King Street not far from where Tim Hortons stands today, owned, bred, drove and trained horses for harness racing. He was a well‑known character in St. Stephen and beyond by the time he died at 90 in 1967 -- when Macleod was a Grade 10 student at St. Stephen High School. Keys was inducted posthumously into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame in 2002. According his citation, he "was regarded as one of the greatest and complete horsemen to ever come from New Brunswick," driving and training more than 200 trotters and pacers on the old Maine‑New Brunswick circuit. He first gained recognition with the horse Ray Wilkes by setting the Maritime pacing record in St. Stephen at 2:21. Keys set 36 trotting and pacing records in Atlantic Canada and Maine. His early stars included the trotting mare Saskia, who set over a dozen track records, and Maritime record holder Jenny H. His most famous horse was Ruby P, who set a world record of 2:04 3/4 when she upset the legendary Bessie McKylo at Fredericton in 1927.

At one time there were 128 harness racing tracks in the Maritime provinces. Today, only Woodstock is left in New Brunswick, Charlottetown and Summerside on Prince Edward Island and Truro, Inverness and North Sydney in Nova Scotia. According to information available online, Maine once had at least 110 harness racing tracks. The number has dropped to two commercial tracks in the state, in Bangor and Cumberland. The annual Washington County Fair in Pembroke does feature harness races.

"Back in 1886 in St. Stephen, and Woodstock just for comparison purposes, pretty well everybody owned a horse," Macleod says, adding, "You went to church with the horse. You went to the field with the horse, so it was kind of only natural that when harness racing, racing of any sort came up and it was horse driven, that there'd be an interest in horses and an ability house, feed and exercise a horse."

"When everybody owned a horse, it [harness racing] was booming. When the automobile came in, everybody owned a horse but rich people owned cars," says Macleod, who remembers Billy Keys keeping a horse in a small barn behind his house. "By the post‑World War II era, everybody owned car and only rich people owned horses." Mixed farms relying on horsepower declined as tractors took over, and people lost interest in horses.

"The country folk all had horses. They weren't race horses. They were utility horses. They were work horses," McCabe says. Well-off people could afford horses built for speed, he says, adding, "People back in those days, they were in awe of these horses," which McCabe called "the drag racers of the day."

Before the automobile and television, communities created their own entertainment. People flocked to fall fairs, which always featured race cards, in Calais as well as St. Stephen. "These communities are tied at the hip and always have been. These same industrialists, these lumber barons, they had businesses on both sides of the border, so it just made sense that they would be kind duplicating the same thing over there [in Calais]," McCabe says.

According to an online search, Karl Benz is often credited with building the first automobile in Germany in 1886, the same year that harness racing started in St. Stephen. At one time, the country people all went to town on Saturday night where there might be a race card on or, at least, they could get a haircut at Hazen Ashley's shop where they could talk horse racing and hockey. Families such as the Mehans, Russells, Lindsays, Barneses, Mathesons, Keyes and others kept standardbred trotters and pacers.

When everybody got a car after the war, people could head to Saint John or Bangor instead of St. Stephen and Calais. Television and, today, computers offer entertainment alternatives. Society changed, and keeping a race horse got expensive. "Most of the people you'd want to get this information from, they're gone, they're deceased," Macleod says. "There is a season for everything," McCabe says, citing the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Todd's business venture came to grief when many horses died in a fire at the St. Croix Stock Farm late in the 19th century. Todd, who won terms in the provincial Legislative Assembly and federal Parliament, served as New Brunswick's 16th lieutenant‑governor from 1923 to 1928. The Ganong Nature Park occupies the former St. Croix Stock Farm property.

Today, the elementary school and playing field occupy the space where the race track and bandstand once stood. St. Stephen closed the Border Area Community Arena, built as recently as 1974, when the new Garcelon Civic Center opened in 2014. The old arena came down this year to make way for an apartment building under construction now. McCabe remembers the community fundraising to build the old arena. "And it was just weird to see it [the arena] all come down," he says. No doubt, many felt the same when the old grandstand came down some 60 years earlier.