NOTHING COULD BE FINER THAN TO TRAIN IN CAROLINA
South Carolina training centers carry on long and proud tradition.
by Sean Clancy

“It would be a rash man who would say which of the South Carolina training centers—Aiken, Columbia or Camden—is the best for horses, because this would leave two South Carolina towns he couldn’t go into again, except furtively at night.”—Joe H. Palmer

It was many years ago when Palmer, a racing writer of extraordinary talent, traveled through South Carolina and strung essays about the Palmetto State’s horses and horsemen. The state was full of characters—Max Hirsch, Clarence Buxton, Del Carroll, Dallet Byers, Horatio Luro, Frank Whiteley and Jim Ryan, to name a few.

An array of horsemen spent winters in the South with young horses learning lessons and older horses refreshing for upcoming seasons. Buxton brought his horses to Columbia in 1928 and made a go of it. Horses like Discovery, Sun Beau, Cavalcade, High Quest, Bold Venture and Assault wintered there before going north to win big races by the bushel.

Eventually, Columbia’s horse population dwindled and neither Palmer nor any other writer would have to worry about calling it the best in South Carolina. It’s now the home of the Columbia Fair Grounds. There isn’t a horse in sight.

Aiken and Camden kept going strong and are the meccas of South Carolina horse train-ing. They hold the most horses and provide the two major public training centers in the state. But in addition to those two, the state is speckled with training centers from Webb Carroll’s operation in St. Matthews to Franklin Smith’s center at Elloree to smaller pro-grams like Doris Rabon’s Tim--mons--ville farm and Jane Dunn’s Holly Hill Training Center.

Lee Christian, president of the South Carolina Thor-ough-bred Owners and Breeders Associ-ation, sees the state as a farm system for Thoroughbred racing’s tracks around the country.
Remember, this is a state that helped develop champions such as Forego, Ruffian and War Emblem. Not to mention jockeys like Chris Antley and Ryan Fogelsonger and countless horsemen who got their start under the slightly slower pulse of a training center’s rhythm.
“It’s a great place to raise and train a horse because of the warm climate,” Christian said. “Most of the industry is in the breaking and training of young horses, and there’s a modest amount of breeding to race in the state. We hope to change that a little bit by putting a breeders’ program and other incentives in, but that will take time.”

An economic impact study is about to get underway, but Christian “guesstimates” that 1,500 Thoroughbred race horses reside (at one time or another) in the state during the course of a year. An agriculture study estimated that there were 90,000 horses (all breeds and disciplines) in the state.

“It’s growing gradually,” Christian said. “You’re seeing a changing of the guard. Take Aiken. You had the terrific, old, blue-blood kind of barns at the Aiken Training Center. Those folks are retiring and dying off, unfortunately, but you’re replacing them with some younger trainers that are more independent operators. They train for the public rather than individual stables. You’re seeing other areas spring up. Some have been around for a long time, like Holly Hill and Elloree, and others are of more recent vintage.

“The growth covers a wide area, not just in Aiken and Camden.” Now, let’s take a tour. . .
Aiken Training Center, Aiken Dirt roads, the Hitchcock Woods, the training track, Whiskey Road, Aiken Trials, Aiken Steeplechase. . . Aiken is the only South Carolina horse town that could make a feature in Town & Country magazine. It’s historic, prideful, bucolic and one heck of a place to train a horse.

Back before winter racing became such a requirement (a sea change that occurred in the late 1950s and early ’60s), the big outfits from the North would pack up and winter in Aiken. Rokeby, Greentree, Buckland, Claiborne, Firestone, Phipps, Paxson brought horses to Aiken. Around town, they claim 40 champions, including Kelso, Tom Fool, Gamely, Stage Door Johnny, *Hawaii, Shuvee, Candy Eclair, Pleasant Colony, Conquistador Cielo, Devil’s Bag, Swale, Forty Niner, Pleasant Stage and Pleasant Tap, and classic winners Summer Squall and Sea Hero.
Back then, older horses would get turned out for around 60 days while the babies were broken. Once spring arrived, the team would head back to the races.

Things changed with year-round racing, and now most older horses keep running. Florida has gradually become the winter place to be. But Aiken still has a healthy horse population and training operation. The training track was opened in 1941. Barns were built by the major stables, and now eight surround the track. Stonerside Stable, Dogwood Stable, Legacy Stable, H. and D. Stable, Bruce Snipes, Dolly Bostwick, Gene Tucker, Steve Penrod, Tony Mitchell and town patriarch Mike Freeman use the facilities.

Other outfits fill in the gaps. If a person wants to rent stalls, the Aiken Training Track Association will find them.

Tim Jones moved to Aiken to train Janice and Robert McNair’s Stonerside horses after spending 17 years with Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott.

“It used to be a lot bigger when the old outfits were here, but those barns are still here,” Jones said. “Some people lease them, and over the years they’ve been sold to different outfits. I love it. We have the Hitchcock Woods—it’s 2,200 acres. I take my babies there to get them off the race track. We have all these dirt roads all throughout Aiken, that’s where the babies start out. Then we’ll go to the woods. It’s a wonderful place in the winter.”

About 300 horses called the training facility home last winter. Other operations, like Freeman’s Chime Bell Farm, outside of town, add health to Aiken’s horse population. Ron Stevens and Brad Stauffer run Legacy Stable, which breaks all of Edward Evans’s horses and counts Dogwood as a major client. Evans’s stakes winners Raging Fever, Gold Mover, Summer Colony and Colonial Minstrel were broken in Aiken, as well as Dogwood’s champion Storm Song.

“[Aiken] is down a little bit the last couple of years,” Stevens said. “We lost a few barns to the show people and polo people, but it’s still a great place to train. You push one button to cross a paved road and then you’re in 2,000 acres of woods. We have access to a grass gallop, five-eighth-mile training track and one-mile training track.” Camden Training Center, Camden
“Anything a horse can do, he can do at Springdale,” is how Palmer put it so many years ago. That goes for all of Camden, about 30 miles northeast of Columbia. The slow town houses an eclectic, albeit talented, crop of horses each winter. Steeplechasers and babies occupy Springdale while mostly babies call Camden Training Center home. The facilities are within hacking distance of each other. A lot of times, they’re called the jump side and the flat side, but in actuality they’re a little of both.

Kip Elser’s Kirkwood Stable prepped the world’s most expensive 2-year-old in training in Camden—a Fusaichi Pegasus colt who brought $4.5 million last February in Florida. Frank Wooten breaks a barn full of yearlings at Springdale each year. Jonathan Sheppard keeps flat horses and jumpers year-round in Camden.

Transient steeplechase trainers like Richard Valentine, Chip Miller, Janet Elliott and Kathy Neilson ship to Camden for winter training. On the flat side, Bob Witham breaks Shadwell’s horses. Mickey Preger Jr. will have a barn of about 20 there this winter. Donna Freyer runs a huge yearling operation. Neil Howard satellites part of the Lane’s End string there.
And it’s mostly due to Marion duPont Scott, who endowed Springdale to the state and was a driving force behind horses in Camden. Over the years, great horses like Forego, Ruffian, Hoist the Flag, Damascus and Tiller trained in Camden.

“You can go on and on with the horses that trained here,” Preger said. “The whole thing used to operate together. Mrs. Scott owned the entire place, and it all operated as one. When she died [in 1983], she endowed Springdale to the state and Will Farish bought the training center. Then Henrietta [Alexander] bought it (in 2001).”Preger has seen changes.

“When I was a kid, it was not a yearling center, it was a place where people came with horses for winter breaks. That was before winter racing. Now, it just doesn’t work that way,” he said. “I think it’s doing fine; it has its regulars. It’s hard on some of the trainers because not too many owners want to give horses off for the winter.” They should spend a weekend in Camden, just watching horses train; they might change their minds. Webb Carroll Training Center, St. Matthews
Call Webb Carroll and you might find him anywhere. “I’m picking up two horses in Saratoga, I’m picking up two yearlings in Pennsylvania, I got horses coming from everywhere,” Carroll said into his cell phone. It was September after all, time to get the babies going.

Carroll was born and raised in St. Matthews, about 25 miles off I-95, 30 miles from the Columbia airport, and has been breaking yearlings for 25 years.

“I sent out horses that were ready and right. The proof had to be in the pudding, that was the only way I could get started,” Carroll said. “I named it Webb Carroll Training Center; I felt like it was going to be the Big M. Either a Miracle or a Mistake. Either way, they would know who I was.”
They certainly do. Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner War Emblem and stakes winners Tale of the Cat, Offlee Wild and Water Cannon have learned their lessons in 10 or 12-horse sets over Carroll’s seven-eighth-mile training track, three-quarter-mile grass gallop and half-mile gallop in the woods.

The horse inventory comprises everything from babies to turn-outs, layups and older horses appreciating some time away from the race track. The crux of Carroll’s business is breaking and training, but he does some pinhooking for the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic 2-year-olds in training sales—Water Cannon, a starter in this year’s Preakness, went that route.

“I don’t race, I don’t do stallions, I don’t do broodmares. I just develop young horses,” Carroll said. “When the 2-year-old became a priority, because of my background, we could get it done. It just picked up from there.”

Carroll’s dad was a horseman, and his mother was a schoolteacher. His father trained Charlie Boy, who won 58 races in the late 1950s and throughout most of the ’60s. When racing was disbanded in South Carolina, Carroll’s father went on the road.

“I was born and raised right here in this town. It’s just an old quaint Southern town with two stoplights, and it’s been home to me. Home to a lot of horsemen,” Carroll said. “We bred our own, raised our own, and ran our own. I stayed home and was the farm man. About 25 years ago, I got involved with Odie Clelland—he was legendary—and I started breaking yearlings. Now this is all I do.”

Elloree Training Center, Elloree
Catching up with Franklin (known as Frank, or Goree) Smith is a job in itself, well, unless you’re the vet, the feed man or a man with a yearling to break. “I just got back from (Keene-land); we bought about 35 there,” Smith said. “This time of year, I’m all over the place trying to get a handle on all of them. We’ll have about 120, 130. We’ll be busy.”

Elloree was the home of Pal-metto race track back when South Carolina had parimutuel racing in the late 1930s and 1940s. One Saturday a month, the bookies would come down from the North and set up chalk-boards for a day’s racing. Racing was held at Myrtle Beach and Charleston, among several locations in South Caro-lina, before gambling was outlawed in 1947.
That’s when places like Pal-metto were abandoned, left as ghost towns. The track sat for more than a decade and then was refurbished for training, changing hands several times until Smith bought it in 1976.

“My family got involved in racing back in the ’40s. We farmed and did the horses,” Smith said. “I got involved in breaking yearlings in the late ’60s. We did well, the horses ran well, and then it took off. Before I knew it, I had more horses than I could put on the farm and my dad told me I needed to find another place. This place is about eight miles from the family farm that’s still there.”

Originally, Elloree was 135 acres. Now it’s about 400 acres with a three-quarter-mile training track, three-quarter-mile turf gallop and stabling for 250 horses. Elloree is about 10 miles off I-95, southeast of Columbia.

The Elloree Trials, 10 races for Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses, have been a tradition in March since 1962. Eclipse Award-winning apprentice Ryan Fogelsonger received his edu-cation under Smith, as did Chris Antley and Maryland jockeys Mark Rosenthal and Brandon Whitacre.
“We do a little breeding down here. I don’t know why I do it, but I do it. It’s just part of what you do. When you get this in your blood, it’s hard to find anything else,” Smith said. “We’ve had great luck with a lot of the horses. We have a few good ones every year. A lot of trainers refer horses to us. We get a lot of satisfaction out of that.”

Barclay Tagg, Dale Romans, Greg Foley, Richard Dutrow and Tony Dutrow are a few of the trainers who send horses to Smith. Good horses Demons Begone, Mr O’Brien (Ire), Tenpins, Royal Ski, Gin Talking, Champali, Island Fashion and At the Threshold were tutored by Smith.
“Every day you wake up wanting to go at it,” Smith said. “You just have so much fun talking horses and working with horses.”

Holly Hill Training Center, Holly Hill
About 10 minutes east of where Interstates 26 and 95 cross, the town of Holly Hill is the home of one blinking light. The training center Holly Hill is home to about 80 of the best-bred horses in the country.

Holly Hill Training Center has been rolling out horses since the 1940s. Secretariat’s trainer, Lucien Laurin, owned it for a while, Evergreen Farm took it over, and for the last 11 years it’s been run by transplanted Californian Jane Dunn.

She breaks all of Claiborne’s and Pin Oak Farm’s babies during the winter. The number will peak at around 80 during the winter and then ebb to 35, 40 in the summer. Bluegrass and Fountain of Youth winner Pulpit got started here, as did Grade 1 winners Stroll and Madcap Escapade.
The farm, about 45 minutes from Charleston, encompasses 125 acres with a three-quarter-mile training track, 120 stalls and 26 grass paddocks.

“I went through a little bit of culture shock when I first moved here from California, but Charleston is a lovely town. I keep a sailboat, and there’s a lot to do,” Dunn said. “I don’t advertise, I just sit here quietly and do my job and things happen. I’m lucky because it’s private. I don’t have to share my race track with anybody. If I don’t like the surface, I can change it. If we want to gallop the wrong way, we can. There are a lot of pluses being the only guy calling the shots.”

James Layden Training Center, Ehrhardt
Drive up to James Layden’s training center, and you can be sure they’ll notice you. Layden owns and operates his 68-acre farm in Ehrhardt and, well, it’s small town.

“When someone passes on the road, you don’t have to look, you just throw your hand up and wave because you know the sound of their vehicle,” Layden said. “We might have 10, 12 people pass on a training day and most of them are on tractors. It’s a little town, about 1,200 people tops. A farming community. It’s a good out-of-the-way spot.”

And a good place to break and train horses. Layden’s father farmed the land, in Bamberg County (between Aiken and Charleston), and in his later years sold it. Layden purchased a section and went into the horse business in 1978. It now has a five-eighth-mile training track, swimming facilities, paddocks, three barns, 48 stalls and a free-style walker.

“I’ve never had another job. I built every single thing here,” Layden said. “It didn’t grow much the first 10 years. I started with Quarter Horses, but I got tired of that. There wasn’t any money, so I started galloping Thoroughbreds. I used to gallop in Aiken and come home and train seven, eight, whatever I had. The pinhooking has been a big step up for us.”

Layden pinhooks about 20 horses a year and has gradually built a healthy business. The farm handles everything from weanlings to turn-outs to breaking yearlings and training 2-year-olds. Graduates Grey Comet, Mother’s Sacrifice and Caribbean Cruiser have made their impact in the New York Stallion Series.

“In the winter, it will be a little overfilled. It keeps us pretty busy all the time, but that’s a good thing. I’ve seen it the other way and it’s not as much fun,” Layden said. “It’s totally a working farm. I’m just a plain worker. It’s on a hill, all road frontage, three-board fence. No fancy gates or anything like that, just a South Carolina working farm. And it’s been really good to us. It’s been a lot of work, but we’re having a good time.”

McCutchen Training Center, Kingstree
Bobby and Debby Mc---Cutchen met at Wingate Col--lege in North Carolina. They fell in love with horses in Kings-tree.

Their 500-acre operation sits outside the small town, between Camden and Myrtle Beach. The facilities include swimming, a free walker, three-quarter-mile dirt track and a grass gallop. The area is agriculture and more agriculture—cotton, corn and the McCutchen horses.

“We’ve been in the business for 20 years,” Debby McCutchen said. “It’s all my husband has ever done. We’re a small facility, by choice. We could have gone to Kentucky or Florida, but since we had a home base we stayed here. We raised two children, and they never gave us a minute’s trouble. I taught school for 11 years and retired from that. I’m kinda the bookkeeper/secretary, and I’ll put my two cents worth in once in a while. We love it. We just love it.”

The McCutchens keep about 35 horses for clients and about five for themselves. Bobby McCutchen’s been known to drop in to Keeneland in April with a fast-running 2-year-old that he doesn’t come home with. He also picks out and purchases yearlings for clients.

“If you drove in the drive-way? You’d say, ‘I’m in a Southern small town where people have horses and the horses come first,’” McCutchen said. “It’s quaint, woodsy, the trees are full of moss, it’s just a training center out in the country. It’s a quiet, peaceful place for young horses.”
The Kingstree Trials will make their ninth running on Novem-ber 13.

“People tailgate, we get a few thousand people,” McCutchen said. “When you live in a state with no parimutuel racing, that’s the only way people get to see a horse race in South Carolina. For a small town, we get a good turn-out.”

Glenview Farm, Timmonsville
Doris Rabon went looking for a show horse. She came home with a 189-acre training center off Exit 153 on I-95.

Rabon was in college and found a $2,000 horse in Georgia. She bought Prime Legacy, and her friend Linda Klein talked her into making him a steeplechase horse. He won stakes from Delaware to Kentucky, and Rabon was so hooked, she bought a cow pasture outside Florence, in Timmonsville, and hung a shingle for incoming horses.

Rabon’s Glenview Farm now has 60 stalls, a mile track (with the rail from old Garden State Park), two shedrow barns, one center-aisle barn, steeplechase jumps and grass gallops. Rabon and her husband, Eric, break, train and look after 80 to 100 horses in the winter. The number will drop to about 40 in the summer.

Clients come from all over: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. “When I got out of college, I bought this farm and my husband and I have built it up. There wasn’t a thing here. It’s come a long way,” Rabon said. “It’s a mixture of a working farm and a fancy Kentucky farm. I live it every day. I love it. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Sometimes I wish I lived in a neighborhood and was normal. This weekend, I had a horse colic, you know, but most of the time, I love it.”

Rabon still dabbles in jump racing, and owns race horses who are usually stabled at Phila-delphia Park. She has a good 2-year-old named Schiloh who won at Belmont this year. He’s on the farm resting for his 3-year-old campaign.

“I try to not keep too many of my own, but I somehow end up with them,” Rabon said. “This is my life. My kids are growing up right here on the farm, it’s good and healthy for them. It’s a lot of work but it’s a lot of fun. You have your ups and downs, but the farm does real well.”

Randy Rentz, Ehrhardt
Randy Rentz, like James Layden, was born and raised in Ehrhardt. They worked with Quarter Horses together. Rentz rode races from Louisiana to Florida, California to Texas. When he retired in 1982, he gradually moved into breaking and training young horses.

“I started with mostly Quarter Horses, then started getting Thoroughbreds,” Rentz said. “They started going north and doing good, and then I started getting more clients.”
Rentz’s big break came when prominent New York owner Seymour Cohn sent horses to him about 10 years ago. Major stakes winners Kashatreya and Chasin’ Wimmin (who’s retired on the farm) came through Rentz.

“They sent me five horses, and I told them three aren’t worth fooling with,” Rentz said. “They didn’t know me, I didn’t know them. They said, ‘Nobody ever told us that.’ It wasn’t two weeks later they sent me 10 more.”

Randy and his wife, Janet, who handles the layup side of the business, manage the 200-acre farm. Horses train on a three-quarter-mile track, and the farm also offers swimming facilities. They keep about 75 horses year-round and can get up to 125 in the winter. Rentz breaks and freshens horses for Penn National-based Bruce Kravets and has a long list of clients.
“We’ve got a nice place, nothing real fancy, just a working farm,” Rentz said. “We keep everything neat and clean. We’re a family-operated deal. My oldest son, Andy, works here. My youngest son, Justin, mucks stalls in the afternoon and helps keep an eye on things.”
Rentz summed up the entire South Carolina horse industry:

“None of us try to put on a big fancy show or nothing. Just try to take care of our horses and get good results. We’ve been lucky, all of us, we do pretty doggone good.”