Forty-five years ago Plainfield was home to what was arguably the largest standardbred breeding, training, boarding and racing farm in New Hampshire and Vermont. Mac’s Happy Acres maintained three or four studs and cycled 90 to 100 mares through its facilities in a year while breaking and training its own and others’ animals for competition at what was then a plethora of venues offering harness racing and pari-mutuel gambling around New England and New York State.
It was a bustling place and commanded attention and respect throughout the region’s community of standardbred fans.
But in a matter of about two decades the whole sport would be crushed by the huge expansion of state-sanctioned gambling to the point where the racetracks disappeared and farms like Mac’s Happy Acres were forced to abandon the entire enterprise. The destruction of the standardbred industry began in 1963 when New Hampshire Gov. John King signed legislation creating the nation’s first public-run lottery in the 20th century.
King’s action was like a logjam being broken and the ensuing years would bring more and more lotteries in state after state, along with gimmicks like off-track and simulcast betting. Once restricted to Nevada, big casinos would come to Atlantic City and tribal lands in Connecticut followed by more in Massachusetts. Gambling would become ever more accessible, with local sites offering scratch tickets, high-stakes bingo and keno games. Terms like Megabucks and Powerball would evolve into common parts of the public vocabulary. And today it’s possible to place bets from a wristwatch.
Just four miles from Mac’s Happy Acres in 2025 sits a glitzy casino, the Revo in Lebanon, a perfect testament to how state-sanctioned gambling has embedded itself into just about every nook and cranny of the Upper Valley and New England.
So what is a standardbred? It’s a breed of horses that was developed in the United States in the 19th century. In competition, it is harnessed up to pull a two-wheeled sulky carrying a driver; it may have either of two gaits—trot or pace, determined by how the feet land as it runs along.
The standardbred has often been called “the farmer’s horse” for long ago it often would race in a county fair and then return home to be hooked up to a cultivator or cart. It is very different from the thoroughbred, which carries its driver in a saddle on its back and has been bred purely for speed.
West Lebanon native Bill McNamara served with the Navy Seabees in the Pacific Theater during World War II. He saw heavy combat at Guadalcanal and in other battles but came home unscathed. One day a horse he was riding stepped into a woodchuck hole and threw him to the ground, resulting in spinal injuries that left him partially paralyzed for the rest of his life. That setback never deterred him from his determination to have a farm; he shared that ambition with his wife Hazel, a registered nurse from the Howe family of Tunbridge, famed breeders of Holstein dairy cattle.
In 1950, Bill and Hazel bought the riverside Ward-Skinner farm in Plainfield; it came with one cow and no electricity. They built a dairy operation and began raising a family. They named the farm Mac’s Happy Acres and it was one of the first in the region to have a milking parlor and employ the new fangled “loose housing” system for the cows.
They always had a few horses around but slowly they had more and more. In the mid-1960s they began racing with one or two horses, driven by a friend, a famed harness horseman named Bucky Day. There were plenty of places to run in those days — Hinsdale, Rockingham, Foxboro, Suffolk, Scarborough, Saratoga were reliable destinations at a time when all tracks were looking for more entries to keep racing strong.
Difficulty getting dependable hands to staff the dairy operation led to the sale of the milking herd in fall of 1968 and the McNamara focus shifted to the harness racing business. A half-mile track was constructed on a meadow behind the farmstead and the farm started boarding, breaking and training horses for other owners. Cattle facilities were remodeled into box stalls.
Bill and Hazel had five children, four of whom were deeply involved in the development of the Mac’s Happy Acres harness racing enterprise. Brothers Tom and Patrick are still engaged in the farm as it’s organized today; Barbara is a recently retired local large and small animal veterinarian; and Joyce is current president of the Community College of Vermont. Their sister Anne lives nearby and is a principal in a large vegetable and horticultural farm just up the road.
One recent Saturday they sat down and reminisced about those years in the standardbred racing business.
“We trained horses here, hauled them to the track, raced and then hauled them home,” recalled Tom, who became a licensed driver for county fair races in 1973 and a full USDA licensed driver in 1975. “We started going further and further; places like Yonkers and Batavia” in New York.
Barbara likewise became a driver licensed to compete at raceways where there was pari-mutuel gambling.
It was common for the McNamaras to work late into the afternoon putting up baled hay, then load a horse in a trailer behind a pickup (usually driven by Bill) and sprint to a track in time to make the sixth or seventh race, then get home in the early hours of the next day, and maybe do it again that afternoon.
These McNamaras can talk for hours about those days in the 1970s and early 1980s. They can reel off stories about memorable races, the names of the horses that ran, who was driving, their times over the mile course.
They speak of the period when a new program called the New Hampshire Sire Stakes was established to improve the quality of races and boost purses, which generally amounted to about $800 per race but could jump to $6,000 for a Stakes race featuring progeny of a top stud standing at a New Hampshire farm.
William Rosenberg, founder of Dunkin Donuts, had a standardbred farm in Kingston, N.H., and he almost singlehandedly convinced the New Hampshire Legislature to create the Sire Stakes program. The argument was that better, faster horses drew in more money from betters, which was good for the horsemen, the tracks and the state treasury.
“It was having a big impact and attracted a lot of out-of-state interest,” Tom recalls. “But when Rockingham Park burned in 1980, it was a turning point.”
Rockingham in Salem, N.H., was a venerable horseracing institution that conducted both thoroughbred and harness racing schedules, thriving on its proximity to Greater Boston. It had the best facilities and offered the best purses, old horsemen will say. But after fire destroyed its massive grandstand, it never was rebuilt; today a sprawling mixed-use development is being constructed on the site.
Other tracks around New England were more Spartan, and when they began turning to Greyhound racing the decline of standardbred competition accelerated. Many New England agricultural fairs offered harness racing even as tracks like Hinsdale and Foxboro were fading away. The sport has survived the longest in Maine where fair directors consider it an essential element of the fairgoer’s experience, though usually minus the wagering. Large wooden grandstands at the fairgrounds of Hopkinton, Lancaster and Rochester, N.H., and Tunbridge and Rutland in Vermont, among others, testify to the time when harness races were a big deal.
The McNamaras resumed their dairy operation about the time Rockingham burned, but continued their standardbred venture, though on a slowly declining scale. When Hinsdale announced in March 1986 that it was ending harness racing, it was a sad day for Bill McNamara and his family.
The track said it had experienced substantial losses on harness racing, but was making money on greyhounds. Attendance and the betting handle weren’t keeping up with the expenses of running a harness racing meeting. Today the site of the Hinsdale track is occupied by a Walmart supercenter.
The half-mile track at Mac’s Happy Acres still exists, but the farm has undergone vast change in the years since harness racing went away. There’s a 270-cow dairy herd; the milk is processed and bottled on site. The farm sells corn silage and hay to a legion of customers. There’s an egg-producing branch, and the farm has begun testing the market for homegrown wheat, barley and oats. Nearby is a maple operation, processing the sap of more than 35,000 taps. An on-site bakery and its ample “creamees” draw crowds to serving windows on the sugarhouse and a mobile maple-themed concession trailer.
This involves the next generation of McNamaras with yet another generation on the ground and raring to take over the show.
The years of harness racing still hold vivid memories for Barb, Joyce, Tom and Pat, yet they show little bitterness over how the sport got wiped away by the explosive growth of state-sanctioned gambling.
Occasional Valley News contributor Steve Taylor speaks and writes frequently on New England agricultural history and rural life. He lives in Meriden.