A Good Hand on a Horse…the Grooms of Meadow Stable (Part 1)

February 12, 2025

They grew up working with their hands in the rural Caroline County of the post-Depression years.  Local jobs were scarce and mostly limited to cutting pulpwood for the local sawmill, working on the railroad, in a mechanic shop or as a farm laborer. But the calloused black hands of the men who became the grooms of Meadow Stable would touch some of the greatest Thoroughbreds in racing …and leave their own indelible imprint on the history of The Meadow.

Their names did not appear in the headlines or record books, but Lewis Tillman, Sr. and Lewis Tillman, Jr., Bannie Mines, Alvin Mines, Charlie Ross, Wesley Tillman, Garfield Tillman, Raymond “Peter Blue” Goodall, Howard Gregory, and others from the close-knit web of local families most assuredly contributed to the success of Meadow Stable.

Personally selected for their jobs, these men would be entrusted with the daily care of the valuable broodmares and their foals, helping with the early training of skittish colts and fillies, the transportation of finely-tuned racehorses and the handling of powerful stallions in the breeding shed.

Wesley Tillman

You had to be real gentle with any horse and take your time with them. If you groomed them right, they would even get to like you so you could get them to cooperate with you. - Wesley Tillman

Wesley Tillman came to work at The Meadow as a youngster.  In 1946, at the age of twelve, he began helping in the hay fields with his grandfather Samuel Tillman. My grandfather said, ‘If you’re big enough to walk all the way down here to the farm, you’re big enough to work.’  So he gave me a pitchfork, and I started throwing hay on the wagon. That was my first job,” Tillman said. He made two dollars a day.

By age eighteen, he was helping his uncle Lewis Tillman, Sr., who was in charge of the broodmare barn. They would turn the horses out in the morning after feeding and get them back up in the evening. 

In the meantime, they would clean out the stalls and put in fresh bedding. When the mares and foals came back up from the Cove in the evening, they would feed them and put them in their stalls for the night. Wesley also pulled night watch duty when mares were getting ready to foal.

His next job was “up the hill” to the yearling barn. “That’s when I started breaking horses,” Tillman said.  “You had to be real gentle with any horse and take your time with them. If you groomed them right, they would even get to like you so you could get them to cooperate with you.”  

The next stop for young horses was the training center located across Route 30 where they would begin to learn the fundamentals of racing. The grooms would saddle the horses up for the exercise riders for the day’s work on the Meadow track.

Afterward, the grooms would wash the horses, brush them down, and put them on the hot walker (a mechanical walking machine) for a while. Lastly, they would lead them back to the barn and turn them out into the fields until feeding time.

In between their grooming duties, the men would cut grass, fix fences, paint barns, or do other chores around the farm.

Tillman, along with other grooms, sometimes traveled with the horses when they were shipped out as two-year-olds to the training stables in Hialeah, New York, or Delaware. As they would see, it was a different world outside the rolling green fields of The Meadow. 

“Everybody was treated equally at the farm,” Tillman said.  “I didn’t see any racism.  We were all like a big family.”   

But on the road, in those days of segregation, “coloreds” were not allowed in many restaurants or hotels.  “I had to stay back in the back with the horses from here to New York,” Tillman explained.  

When the van stopped for lunch, the white driver, Bill Street, would bring him his meal, which he ate in the van as the racehorses munched their hay and occasionally sneezed on his food.  If the grooms did take a break from the van, they had to go to the back door of the restaurant to get a sandwich or eat in the kitchen with the cooks. Mostly, they shrugged it off as part of their job.  

At the racetrack, the Meadow grooms would stay with the horses for maybe three or four weeks.  “We had our bunks right on the end of the barn, so if anything happened, like if the horses would get down in the stall or start kicking,  we’d be right there with them,” Tillman said.  

After new grooms were hired and the horses were settled in, the Meadow grooms would return to Virginia to start working with the next crop of young hopefuls.

Part 2 next week…

©Leeanne Meadows Ladin

Meadow groom, Lewis Tillman (Wesley Tillman’s uncle), holding a colt for his Jockey Club ID photo. Photo by Bob Hart.