The Mystery of McKinney Livery Stable

In 2004, the McKinney Livery Stable was removed from the corner it had occupied for a century at First and D streets, to make way for a parking garage. Relocated to Steamer Landing Park, the false front building was painstakingly restored and reincarnated as the David Yearsley River Heritage Center, a memorial to a time in which the horse was Petaluma’s primary form of transportation.

Yet, a mystery remains. Why was it originally called the McKinney Livery Stable when it was built and operated by a man named Jack Grimes? Who exactly was McKinney?

Local historian Terry Park puts his money on a racehorse.

Horse transportation was already on the wane in 1904 when Grimes opened McKinney Livery. A new era of equine-free travel was dawning, beginning in the 1890s with the craze for the bicycle, a machine embraced by women as “the freedom machine,” as it meant they were no longer dependent upon a man hitching up a buggy to drive them around town.

A similar sense of liberation greeted the 1904 opening of the Petaluma & Santa Rosa Railway, an electric trolley providing service to Petaluma, Sebastopol and Santa Rosa, with numerous stops in between. The railway’s “windsplitter” cars offered farmers a convenient means of getting into town as well as an alternative to hauling their produce, milk, and eggs to market by horse and wagon.

The new P&SRR also purchased the Petaluma Street Railway, a horse-drawn trolley first installed in 1889 that traversed the city’s cobblestone streets on rails from Sunnyslope Avenue down F Street to Sixth, then across Sixth and Liberty streets to Western Avenue and Kentucky Street before heading along Washington Street to the fairgrounds. The P&SRR’s plan was to convert the line to modern electric cars, but after seeing a sudden decline in trolley ridership, they instead shut it down and ripped out its tracks.

Declining usage of the horse-trolley coincided with the opening in 1903 of Petaluma’s first local auto dealership at Steiger’s Sportsman Emporium on Main Street, across from today’s Putnam Plaza. Steiger’s initial model was a single cylinder Oldsmobile Runabout with seven horsepower—“horsepower” being a new measure for comparing gas engines with the power of draft horses—for $650, or $18,000 in today’s currency.

In 1904, the same year Grimes opened the McKinney Livery Stable, Steiger’s launched Petaluma’s first “livery auto,” marking the beginning of the end for local horse and buggy taxis, or “hacks” as they were called.

McKinney Livery Stable joined five long-standing local liveries. The oldest, Murphy Stables, established in the 1850s as the Petaluma Livery Stable, was located on Main Street across from today’s Penry Park in what is now known as the Mahoney Building. Buggies were parked upstairs and the horses taken down a ramp to the stables on Water Street. Like the other liveries, Murphy’s was located near a hotel, in this instance the Washington Hotel, whose site is currently occupied by a Bank of America parking lot.

The other four liveries were all established in the 1870s and 1880s. They consisted of Kamp & Son on the southeast corner of Kentucky and Washington streets; the American Livery at 122 Kentucky Street, which backed up to the American Hotel on Main Street, where Putnam Plaza currently sits; the City Livery, on the northeast corner of Western Avenue and Keller Street across from the City Hotel (renamed the Continental Hotel in 1905) on Western Avenue; and the Centennial Livery on Main Street wedged between the Masonic Lodge and the Cosmopolitan Hotel, in the building now occupied by the Lan Mart.

In addition to providing parking for hotel guests, liveries offered saddle horses and horse rigs for hire by the day or week. Rented rigs were especially popular on Sundays, when people liked to dress up and take drives about town, particularly young men courting young ladies.

The other function liveries served was boarding horses, particularly racehorses and stallions rented out for breeding, both of which were Grimes’s primary purposes in opening the McKinney Livery Stable.

Grimes had been in the horse business since immigrating in the early 1880s from Ireland’s County Tipperary, to Lakeville, where he joined his aunt Margaret Mallen and her children on their farm in Lakeville, shortly after Mallen’s husband passed away. At the time, Lakeville was a vibrant center of the local Irish community, Petaluma’s first large group of immigrants.

It was also home to William Bihler, a German immigrant who bred cattle and horses on his 8,000-acre ranch. Bihler was the owner of Young England’s Glory, said to be the finest English Draft stallion in America. Along with Harrison Meacham, who bred Clydesdale draft horses on his 7,000-acre ranch northwest of Petaluma, and Theodore Skillman, California’s main importer and breeder of French Norman draft horses at his Magnolia Ranch north of town, Bihler helped to establish Petaluma’s reputation as the “Big Horse Market” of the Pacific Coast. Draft horses, in addition to working the farms, were also in high demand for pulling carriages and delivery wagons around the growing metropolis of San Francisco.

Petaluma was also becoming known in the 1880s for harness racing. In 1882, the Sonoma and Marin Agricultural Society, which had staged an annual fair in Petaluma since 1867, purchased 60 acres of the Payran ranch on the east side of town for a new Agricultural Park, having outgrown its 10-acre site at Fair Street, site of today’s Petaluma High School.

One of the problems with the old fairgrounds was the racetrack, which, in addition to being only a half-mile long, had a rock stratum beneath its surface that many horsemen considered unsafe, deterring racing entries, which served as the fair’s largest source of revenue. The society’s new fairgrounds provided a mile-long track on adobe soil, which, while not ideal for winter racing, made for one of the fastest summer tracks in the state, reviving local harness racing, which since the Civil War had evolved from impromptu heats on country roads, into professional events at county fairs.

The races, in which a horse pulls a driver in a two-wheeled cart, were based on two different gaits, trotting and pacing. Trotters moved their legs forward in diagonal pairs, with right front and left hind legs striking the ground simultaneously, followed by left front and right hind legs. Pacers moved their legs laterally, with the right front and right hind legs moving together, then the left front and left hind legs. By the 1880s, harness races, which had run up to four miles, had been reduced to between half a mile, or four furlongs, and a mile and a half.

The shorter distances favored sprinters and younger horses, leading to changes in breeding practices that resulted in the Standardbred, a horse trained to either trot or pace at the 30 miles per hour required to meet the “standard” 2:30 minute mark around a one-mile track.

As farmers’ demand for draft horses begin dropping in the 1880s with the adoption of steam-powered tractors and threshing machines, many local horsemen shifted to breeding racehorses.

That was the market Grimes targeted when he opened his first livery in 1887, leasing with a partner a stable on East Washington Street across from the train depot. By the 1890s, his horses were winning races and awards, including first prize for his pacing stallion, Location, Jr., at the 1899 state fair.

Harness racing, however, was curtail in the mid-1890s, after California’s governor cut the state’s subsidies for county fairs as part of a tax-reduction initiative. The Sonoma and Marin County Agricultural Society managed to secure private funding for one last fair in 1895, followed by a five-day harness racing meet the following year, after which the Petaluma Savings Bank foreclosed on their fairgrounds. Horse racing in California subsequently shifted entirely to privately owned tracks, where wagering became paramount.

In November of 1902, Harry Stover, a well-known California racehorse owner, purchased Petaluma’s dormant 60-acre Agricultural Park, along with 50 adjacent acres, renaming it Kenilworth Park in honor of his prized thoroughbred racehorse.

Born in Kansas and raised in Humboldt County, Stover began buying and racing horses while still a teenager working in a Eureka sawmill. In his youth he also excelled at cross-country racing, instilling in him a drive to win at any cost. It was a trait not always admired by his fellow horsemen at the race track. Accusations of bookmaking and under-the-table dealings led to periodic suspensions for Stover from the racing circuit, earning him a reputation “not of the sweetest order, and especially unsavory in California.”

Based in the Bay Area, Stover raced his thoroughbreds under the colors of one of Kentucky’s prominent breeders, Ketcheman Stables, while traveling the annual racing circuit that started in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the spring, then onto St. Louis, Chicago, and the Midwest in the summer, and finally New York and the East Coast in the fall.

In 1900, he purchased a thoroughbred named Kenilworth who quickly made him one of the top horsemen in the country. Tall and leggy with a swimming stride, the two-year-old colt was said to take to a muddy track like a duck to water, an advantage for rainy meets in the Midwest and East. In Kenilworth’s first year on the turf, he set a California record of nine straight wins, earning Stover more than $25,000 in purses, or $775,000 in today’s currency.

California horse racing faced a new challenge by that time from Progressives and evangelists like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who were engaged in a moral campaign to stamp out vice. Bowing to their influence, in 1899 the city of San Francisco banned gambling, resulting in the closure of its popular Ingleside Race Track. A new track named Tanforan was quickly constructed in nearby San Bruno to circumvent the ban.

Stover saw a similar opportunity in establishing his race track at Kenilworth Park as an alternative to the late spring meets held in Los Angeles, which some horsemen complained were becoming light in the winning purses.

For financial backing he turned to Rudolph Spreckels, a scion of the Spreckels sugar family, who had recently purchased the Sobre Vista Ranch in Glen Ellen as a summer residence. Like many wealthy men of the day, Spreckels maintained a racing stable of thoroughbreds and standardbreds. He boarded them at Petaluma’s former Agriculture Park, which, after shutting down, had been leased to a group of local horsemen, including Grimes, for boarding and training purposes.

Stover quickly set about reworking the racetrack for thoroughbred as well as harness racing, and remodeling the stables to accommodate hundreds of horses for boarding and training. He also created an arena for game chickens, cockfighting being one of his favorite side hobbies.

It wasn’t until 1906 that the state’s governing racing authority, the California Jockey Club, approved Stover’s application for a spring meet. In the meantime, he staged his own harness and thoroughbred races at the track, often featuring his prized stallion Kenilworth, now referred to in racing circles as the “Petaluma Flyer.”

The renewal of local horse racing inspired Grimes to build his own livery as a training and breeding stable. Local historian Terry Park believes the name, McKinney Livery, was a means of branding the stable for horse breeding, in that McKinney was the name of a legendary California stallion owned by Los Angeles Irishman Charles A. Durfee.

After entering race circuit in 1889 as a two-year-old colt, McKinney won 17 out of his 24 starts, setting a record of 2:11 in a historic mile-long harness race during his final campaign at the age of four.

After his retirement from the track, the breeding demand for McKinney was so great that over his lifetime he sired more than 1,400 progeny, creating a bloodline in the making of the American Standardbred. By the early 1900s, McKinney had earned in race purses and stud fees more than $150,000, or $4.5 million in today’s currency.

In setting up his new stable, Grimes acquired two horses sired by McKinney, the more distinguished of which was McMyrtle, a prize-winning standardbred Grimes advertised as “the best bred horse in the county.” Of the horses entered in the harness race meet held at Kenilworth Park in 1907, McMyrtle was among two dozen pacers and trotters who were sired by McKinney.

The moral crusade to shut down racetracks however was taking its toll on horse racing. In 1904, Petaluma’s mayor, William H. Veale, bowing to the demands of the Good Government League, issued an order to close all gambling within the city limits. As the race track at Kenilworth sat on the eastern boundary line, the boxes for the bookies were simply moved to the east side of the track just over the city limits.

Race tracks in other parts of the country were not so fortunate. Of the 314 tracks operating across the United States in 1897, only 25 remained by 1908, after New York became the first state to officially ban gambling. The California legislature followed suit in February of 1909 with the Walker Otis Anti-Racetrack Gambling Bill, making it impossible for bookmakers to ply their trade, and resulting in the closing of race tracks around the state.

As other states adopted bans on gambling, the Aqua Caliente track in Tijuana, Mexico, just across the California border, became the new betting mecca for horse racing.

Stover, who had participated earlier in an ill-fated scheme to establish winter racing meets in Mexico City, wasn’t able take advantage of the new Mexican racing boom however. Four months after California passed its gambling bill, he died while attending a race at a track he owned in Salt Lake City. Stover was 45. The cause of death was tuberculosis, which he’d suffered from for some time. He placed his last bet on one of his thoroughbreds, Native Son, who won the first race of the day.

Stover left Kenilworth Park, which he had expanded to 250 acres with more than 100 mares and stallions, making it one of the largest breeding farms in California, to his widow Hattie. In 1911, she sold 65 acres of the property to the city of Petaluma, who converted it into a municipal park for baseball games, gambling-free horse racing, rodeos, and a public campground.

In 1914, Hattie Stover parted with her husband’s favorite horse, Kenilworth, selling him to the John and Louie Bugeia, who continued to show him in expositions and breed him on their horse ranch at Black Point in Marin County.

The Centennial and American Livery stables closed in 1911, victims of the automobile’s increasing popularity. Two years later, Grimes, a lifelong bachelor, decided to take an extended trip back to Ireland. He retained the livery but auctioned off his stock, including his prized standardbred McMyrtle and a draft horse named Duke, which he claimed to be the only remaining Norman stud in Sonoma County.

When Grimes returned to town in 1914, he rebuilt his breeding stock and added a second barn to his livery at First and D streets. A few years later, shortly after America entered World War I, the three remaining liveries in town closed down, leaving Grime’s McKinney Livery the last stable standing.

In 1920, Grimes was thrown from a hay wagon and seriously injured. Unable to maintain the livery, he auctioned off his stock of more than 100 horses and sold his two barns to grain merchant George P. McNear, who leased them to the Sonoma Express Company. Two years later, Grimes died at the age of 64.

The legendary Kenilworth lived until 1933, just short of his 35^th birthday, having won 94 races during his seven-year career on the racing turf. That same year, with the economy crippled by the Great Depression, California voters passed a referendum legalizing pari-mutuel betting at race tracks, which allotted a fixed percentage of the money wagered to racing purses, track operating costs, and state and local taxes, before being divided up among winning betters.

Horse races returned to county fairs, although not at Kenilworth Park, where the Sonoma-Marin District Fair, which began restaging annual fairs at the park in 1936, converted the track to auto racing.

After Grimes’ death, the McKinney Livery Stable was utilized for many purposes over the next century—including as a warehouse, a hide tanning factory, a poultry dealer, a pinochle parlor, an auto and tractor repair shop—until 2004, when thanks to the initiative of Katherine J. Rinehart and other local building preservationists, it was moved to its new home in Steamer Landing Park and rechristened.

*****

Special thanks to historians Terry Park and Katherine Rinehart for their help.

SOURCES:

Newspapers

Buffalo Review: “Sporting Events of the Day,” October 2, 1900; “Kenilworth Demonstrates His High Class,” October 9, 1900.

Los Angeles Evening Express: “Petaluma Flyer Comes,” September 30, 1903.

Nashville Tennessean, “Live Sporting Notes,” January 17, 1894.

Oakland Tribune: “The Premiums,” September 3, 1890.

Petaluma Argus: “The County Fair,” September 19, 1867; “Norman Stallion Duke de Chartes,” May 25, 1877; “Draft Horses,” August 26, 1881; “Draft Horses,” November 25, 1881; “Agricultural Park,” December 23, 1881; “What Others Think,” January 6, 1882; “Selections,” September 21, 1899; “Agricultural Park is Sold,” November 25, 1902; “Two New Automobiles for Petaluma People,” October 31, 1903; “Bought the Old Street Railway,” November 11, 1903; “Is Building a Big Barn,” November 2, 1904; “Steiger’s New Building a Big Improvement,” July 27, 1905; “Finished Work of Removing the Rails,” July 2, 1906; “Opening of the Races,” August 23, 1907; “Master of Kenilworth is Dead,” June 3, 1909; “Mrs. Stover Presents Cup,” August 13, 1909; “More About the Fine Races,” July 21, 1914; “Mrs. H. Stover Will Dispose of Kenilworth,” August 30, 1914; “Grimes Auction was Underway,” December 6, 1919; “Firemen Stop Serious Fire in City’s Largest Stable Sunday,” December 8, 1919; “Purchased the Grimes Property,” July 12, 1920; “Death Calls Jack Grimes,” October 9, 1922; “W.H. Dado Buys the Jos. Steiger Sporting Goods Store on Tuesday,” December 10, 1924.

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Hotel Will Be Called the Continental,” June 9, 1905; “Petaluma Once Had a Street Railway,” May 9, 1941; “Kenilworth, Famous Stallion Dies at Novato,” February 8, 1933; John Anderson, “Early Petaluma Had Horse Drawn Street Cars, Many Livery Stables,” August 5, 1955; “Memories of Petaluma in the early 1900s,” April 24, 1982; “Petaluma’s Hidden Gems,” May 10, 2012.

Petaluma Courier: “East Petaluma,” August 17, 1887; “Petaluma Street Railway,” October 3, 1889; “No Appropriations,” March 28, 1895; “For Our Fair,” April 23, 1895; “A Slight Mistake,” July 29, 1896; “Donahue Dots,” July 22, 1896; “Agricultural Park,” March 9, 1897; “Sobre Vista Purchased,” April 2, 1897; “Street Cars No More,” October 3, 1898; “Local Brevities,” March 29, 1899; Ad for Grimes’ stallion breeding, May 20, 1899; Notice, March 14, 1900; “Spreckels’ Horses Arrive,” April 19, 1902; “Working out at the Track,” November 25, 1902; “Local Brevities,” December 2, 1902; “Jack Grimes’ New Menagerie in East Petaluma Grows,” April 7, 1903; “Transfers of Sonoma County Real Estate,” October 24, 1904; “Mrs. Stover Presents Cup,” August 13, 1909; Ad for Myrtle, April 30, 1910; “Blooded Stock is Sold at Auction,” August 3, 1913; “Mrs. H. Stover Will Dispose of Kenilworth,” August 30, 1914; “Springtime Won Race,” October 27, 1914; “Will Erect a Large Barn,” April 7, 1915; “Jack Grimes Was Severely Injured,” December 2, 1919; “Mrs. M. Mallen Succumbs in San Francisco,” March 6, 1920.

San Francisco Call: “Kenilworth Makes a Great Record,” April 14, 1901; “Last Day of the Running Races,” May 4, 1890; “Kenilworth Park Meeting,” January 24, 1906; “Kinney Lou and Driver Are the Features,” October 11, 1908; “Noted Turfman Passes Under Final Wire,” June 4, 1909.

San Francisco Chronicle: “Gossip of the Turf,” April 6, 1901; “Harry Stover and his Stable Suspended,” May 1, 1902; “Trotters Bring $3,155 at the Petaluma Sale,” August 5, 1913.

Santa Rosa Republican: “Order Made to Stop Gaming,” May 24, 1904; “One Stake is Filled,” February 17, 1908; “News Items from Republican of Twenty Years Ago,” August 3, 1933.

Books, Journals, Magazines, Websites

“The Horse In Sport,” The International Museum of The Horse. http://www.imh.org/imh/his/harness

Paul Roberts, Isabelle Taylor, Laurence Weatherly, “Looking Back: The Lost Tracks of the San Francisco Bay Area,” Thoroughbred Racing Commentary, thoroughbredracing.com.

W. Robertson, The History of Thoroughbred Racing in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964).

Charlene Wear Simmons, “Gambling in the Golden State 1998 Forward,” California Research Bureau, California State Library, 1998, p. 99. https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/gambling/GS98.pdf

Peter Willet, The Thoroughbred (NY: G.P. Putnam Sons, 1970).