Birth of the Hambletonian Society

Posted by BarbaraAnne Helberg Oct 23, 2007

There have to be rules. Rules to live by. Rules to work by. Rules to play by. Rules to...race by.

The New York Trotting Club made rules to harness race by in 1825. But other tracks and clubs elsewhere across the nation had their own entities...to rule by.

Thus came the National Association for the Promotion of the Interests of the American Trotting Turf. Say what? Okay: it was definite, but, like Charles Dickens' sentences (which I love), too long to swallow. It was pared down to the single governing body, National Trotting Assocation.

Where and why did the Hambletonian Society pop up?

Trotting associations were standing pat, with no new ideas for competition, no new stakes events, and, most significantly, no new event to encourage and attract breeders and owners to continue to produce new trotting stars.

Three Chicago horsemen got their heads together. William Monroe Wright, the breeder of Peter Manning and founder of the powerful Calumet Farm, had a brother-in-law named Harry O. Reno, who had brought about the American Pacing Derby with its $25,000 purse. Reno, along with John C. Bauer, owner publisher of Horse Review Magazine, and Joseph I. Markey, the magazine's Grand Circuit writer-reporter, did a think tank session.

Since the pacing Derby had been a readily adopted public success, Bauer suggested a similar race for three-year-old trotters. The three horsemen agreed that the new race should be called the Hambletonian Stake.

There had to be organization and...rules to go by. Aha! Witness the birth of the Hambletonian Society, a group of sponsors for the race, who, of course, were bound with creating rules...to race by. Today, the race is the premier event of trotting.