This post is the second in a series of four written by guest author, Dan Sullivan, owner of The Book Oasis in Stoneham.
Decades after it closed, A.G. McVey, a journalist who played on the track as a child, remembered the opening of the track this way: “Hiram Woodruff and his brother William, who ran the Old Elm House in North Cambridge, were appointed to take charge. The soil was of clay composition and the footing was good … races took place nearly every fine day.” The Trotting Park was laid out by the local engineer and surveyor Charles A. Mason. It was said to be as flat as a “billiard-table.”
McVey went on to say: “There was no grandstand, rude seats being made inside the pole by planks nailed on the tops of posts. There was a low fence built around the track and youngbloods drove out in all kinds of equipages from the whalebone buggy to the one-horse shay.” He also stated that the track was never profitable. This is a situation that was made worse by an 1846 article in the Chronicle that mentioned the track was brought in front of the local Police Court twice for charging admission to a sporting event in violation of an existing statute. The facility went through some improvements because another description of the track does mention that it later had a grandstand in front of and slightly to one side of the entrance to the Track House. There was also a judges’ stand.
Some of the events could be described as gimmicks. I assume they were created to increase the uncertainty of the betting. A blindfolded man ran the track pushing a wheelbarrow running against time and running into both fences, John Stetson ran a mile pulling a sulky; a horse trotted sixteen miles with an added weight of 41 pounds. One race was a trotting horse against a horse pulling a wagon loaded with 263 pounds. One race was held against two untrained street horses.
In 1855 the property was divided into 275 housing lots and auctioned off. It is somewhat ironic that this enterprise, that was never profitable, would have what was probably it’s most successful day just before it closed. On May 15, 1855, John Grindell of New York and John Stetson from Boston ran a ten-mile race that drew 15,000 spectators.
So how exactly did the locals view the track? When the property was auctioned off, the New York Herald stated that, according to locals, it “was voted by all good people a wicked concern.” Looking back, in 1893, the Chronicle referred to the track as “anything but a moral centre.”
Check back next week for Part 3…
