Best There Ever Was by Sharon B. Smith

Author:Sharon B. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sugar tycoon C. J. Hamlin didn’t like pacers but finally realized that the rest of America did. (Photo: Munsey’s Magazine December 1904)

Sadly, the visit never took place. Just before traveling to Cleveland in September, McKinley made a quick side trip to Buffalo for a Hanna-approved appearance at the popular Pan-American Exposition. While greeting well-wishers on September 6, 1901, he was shot by anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz, the Detroit-born son of a Polish immigrant farmer. Mark Hanna rushed to McKinley’s bedside but his aid and support was not enough this time and the president died a week later.

In a bit of irony that wouldn’t be appreciated until later, the Circuit itself moved to Buffalo after a stop in Columbus. There Dan Messner heard a great deal about—and possibly met—another of the harness racing barons, a man even richer than the Hannas.

He was Cicero Jabez Hamlin, builder of the Buffalo Driving Park and owner of Village Farm, home to eight hundred of the finest Standardbreds in the world. Hamlin was the Sugar King, the man who had all but cornered the market on glucose through his Buffalo Grape Sugar Company.

C. J. Hamlin was reputed to be the richest man in New York outside Manhattan and he had used a good part of his money on fast trotters. He didn’t much care for pacers, even though he had relented when he paid $10,000 for a pacing stallion named Direct Hal. He had been talked into buying a couple of other good pacers too. Hamlin was enough of a businessman to know that people loved seeing fast pacers and that buyers of young horses had begun looking for them. He himself believed that only handsome trotters were worthwhile.

Hamlin’s prejudice existed in spite of his own history of self-creation, having arrived in western New York as a seventeen-year clerk in his brother’s grocery store. A few months later he bought the business, expanded to dry goods, then to sugar. He was a millionaire in 1868 when he turned his attention to racehorses.

His goal at his Village Farm was to breed the best trotters in the world, and he would do that by following two principles. One was that the handsomest horses would produce the fastest offspring. Foolish on its face, this principle proved to have some merit. A determined individual horse might overcome badly shaped legs or a back of the wrong length, but a son or daughter who inherited the problem might not be able to do so.

His second guiding principle was that extreme speed was all that mattered in breeding stock. Stamina was admirable, good nature was pleasant, determination was useful. But all paled in comparison to speed. He had no interest in breeding a lot of horses who were pretty good, even though he and others might make a living from them.

“I would rather produce one 2:10 trotter than a hundred that could go in 2:30,” he would say to anybody who would listen. A lot of people listened to a man who was worth $15 million and willing to spend a good chunk of it on racehorses.

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