HALLOWELL — Where most people see swing sets, slides and monkey bars, Stephen Thompson looks at a school yard and sees men gliding along in sulkies behind world champion trotting horses.

Where most of us see headstones and somber remembrances of the dead, Thompson looks at a cemetery and sees thousands of people unwinding from a week of back-breaking work by cheering on their family, friends and neighbors in hotly-contested horse-and-carriage races.

Thompson, a retired education coordinator for the state, has made it his life’s work to preserve the history of horse racing in Maine. He has a blog, losttrottingparks.blogspot.com, chronicling Maine’s trotting horse history and last month started a newsletter, The Maine Spirit of the Turf, promoting Maine’s agricultural history, fairs and standardbred horse breeders.

As horse racing has faded from prominence as one of the most popular sports in America, the country’s racing heritage has faded from written and oral history.

“It’s a great part of not only Maine history, but Americana,” said Michael Andrew, a horse breeder from Gorham and past president of the Maine Standardbred Breeders and Owners Association. “It’s being kept alive at fairs to some extent, but a lot of it is being lost over time.”

Ironically, modern technology is helping historians such as Thompson find evidence of the ancient sport’s prevalence in Maine.

“Google Earth or Google Maps is a lot of fun because you can see the halos of the old tracks,” Thompson said. “You see them in schoolyards, in housing developments, on the edge of graveyards…”

Thompson visits those sites, many of which closed by the 1920s, and wonders what it would have been like to live in a time when the lives of Mainers were inextricably linked with the horse.

“It’s been dubbed ‘The age when the horse was king,'” Thompson said. “It was when the horse was our worker in the field, our transportation from home to the market. The horse was part of the energy that moved the economy. You had the horse as warrior, in the battlefield, and then you had the horse as entertainment on the trotting tracks.”

Dozens of trotting tracks, usually 1/4- to 1/2 mile long, were built across the state, and one didn’t have to travel far to find a track in central in western Maine, from Litchfield to Bethel, New Gloucester to Kingfield.

Stephens estimates that at least 110 Maine towns had at least one trotting park. Some towns had more than one. Portland had five.

Today, Mainers associate horse racing with the harness racing held at fairs or Scarborough Downs. Little more than 100 years ago, it was a regular way of life.

Agricultural societies built fairgrounds for education and entertainment purposes, with the trotting tracks providing much of the entertainment. Everybody loved a fast horse and especially loved showing off one of their own. Whether it was on weekends during the spring and summer, during the late summer and autumn fair season, or even on frozen lakes and rivers during the winter, horse racing was the national pastime.

Legends were made on the tracks, and Maine produced no more legendary horse than the trotting stallion Nelson.

The Northern King

Nelson was born in 1882 to Charles Horace “Hod” Nelson, a Civil War veteran and owner of Sunnyside Farm in Waterville. At old Lewiston Raceway, he became the fastest three-year-old in the United States.

From there, the horse and his owner’s reputation grew around the country, and with no competition left in Maine, “The Northern King” traveled south and west to race.

In September, 1889, countless Mainers traveled via train to watch him race his great rival, Alcryon, at Boston’s Beacon Park. Before more than 30,000 spectators, Nelson won the race in three heats, but as horse and owner returned to Maine more celebrated than ever, that National Trotting Association was investigating a possible fix.

While the investigation languished in litigation, Nelson’s legend grew. In 1890, he set a world record of 2:15 1/4 on a half-mile track at Maplewood Park in Bangor. On a time trial tour of regulation mile tracks in the Midwest, he ultimately reached a low of 2:10 1/4 in Indiana.

“The exploits of Nelson were in all of the horse periodicals across the nation. Thompson said. “The horse was a phenomenon.”

The phenomenon met disgrace, however, in December of 1890, when horse and owner Nelson were suspended by the NTA after Hod Nelson admitted buying the race at Beacon Park.

For the next two years, Nelson continued trotting at non-NTA tracks. In 1892 in Trenton, N.J., he lowered his half-mile track world record to 2:11 3/4 using a new, smaller “bike” sulky, developed by James Sanborn, the co-founder of Chase and Sanborn Coffee (and owner of the Elmwood Stud Farm of Poland, one of the most popular breeders in the state at the time).

Nelson was reinstated by the NTA in November, 1892 and continued to break track records in Maine and Canada, but the damage to his legacy had been done.

“I really think a lot of the writers of the time wrote him out of history,” Thompson said. “You’ll see books written on the trotting stallions and there are horses that ran in the same period that get mentioned whose times were slower than Nelson’s, but Nelson isn’t mentioned. So there had to be some conscious exclusion.”

Nelson is even forgotten in Maine horse racing circles, even though he held the distinction of being the only Maine-bred world record holder for over a century.

“Nobody really remembers him,” Andrew said. “He’s almost lost from history.”

Trotting Horse Heritage

Much of Maine’s racing history is being lost, Thompson said, which is why he established his blog in 2009 and published the first issue of The Maine Spirit of the Turf in February.

“It’s preserving a slice of Maine life that wasn’t being preserved,” he said.

Helping with that preservation is Thompson’s cousin, Clark, a horseman from Bangor who published “Maine’s Trotting Horse Heritage Trail,” a guide to Maine’s early trotting history from 1819-1893.

In conjunction with the book, Clark Thompson placed inscribed granite monuments at 21 locations around the state from Old Orchard Beach to Dover-Foxcroft. The trail commemorates pivotal people, horses and places in the state’s trotting history, and includes stops in Auburn for Benjamin Briggs, owner of Maple Grove Stock Farm, one of the New England’s most prominent stock farms, and Livermore Falls, the birthplace of one of the earliest trotting stars from Maine, Mac.

Stephen Thompson hopes to build upon his cousin’s work in his blog by visiting historical societies, libraries, town offices, museums and Maine horsemen. With his newsletter, he hopes to chronicle the history being made today. Barring construction of a long-discussed Maine harness racing museum, he knows those will be vital resources for that history. 

“I want to remember the horseman who may not be the most successful horseman, but it’s part of their blood, part of their spirit. They matter. The fact that they’re doing this matters,” he said. “It brings them meaning and value and they need to be part of the history. It shouldn’t just be the winning horse.”