Next time you’re stuck at the light where Lee Road meets Orange Blossom Trail, look around and picture this: 644 horses, six blacksmith shops, and some of the greatest trainers who ever lived, all crammed onto the very corner you’re idling on. That’s no exaggeration.
The Ben White Raceway was the single busiest harness racing training ground in the entire country, a 120-acre kingdom of trotters and Hall of Famers tucked into Fairview Park. Long before Mickey Mouse showed up, this was the place out-of-towners drove to see.
Today it’s a city park where kids play soccer. Buckle up, because the road from one to the other is a great story.
Table of Contents
The Man Whose Name Stuck to the Track
First, the namesake. The place honored Benjamin Franklin White, a Canadian horseman from Whitevale, Ontario, who lived from 1873 to 1958 and racked up a résumé nobody has touched since.
White learned the trade under the legendary reinsman “Pop” Geers at Village Farm in East Aurora, New York, then went out and won four Hambletonian Stakes, harness racing’s biggest prize, inside a single decade. Four. In ten years. The sport nicknamed him “the Dean of Colt Trainers,” and plenty of folks just called him the patriarch of the whole game. His name would eventually end up on the Ben White Raceway, but the road there ran through a barn full of world-record colts first.
Here’s where Orlando enters the picture. Around 1920, White had a hunch nobody else had acted on: why freeze your horses up north all winter when Florida sits right there? So he became the first northern trainer to ship his stable south for the cold months, and he picked Orlando.
He started at the Orlando Fairgrounds, where by 1922 he was working more than 80 horses a season and turning out colts that broke world records. Trouble was, the city kept growing around him. Complaints about horse smells and animals wandering the streets eventually nudged him over to Longwood’s Seminole Park, until Orlando came calling with a much bigger idea.
How the Ben White Raceway Got Its Start (1946–1948)
Around 1946, the City of Orlando made White an offer: come anchor a brand-new training center on a 120-acre tract in Fairview Park, about three miles from downtown. The catch? The land had been built as a cattle exposition center, and that business had already gone belly-up.
White toured it, suggested a few tweaks, and gave it his blessing. In 1947, his own stable moved in as the very first tenants. All 120 original stalls filled up so fast that horsemen got turned away at the gate, because there was literally nowhere left to park a horse. The Ben White Raceway was a hit before it even had its name.
In the spring of 1948, a small ceremony made it official, and the grounds were dedicated as the Ben White Raceway in honor of the man who first dragged Orlando into the sport. One important footnote: the City of Orlando always owned and ran the place, not White himself, a detail that would come back to bite everyone decades later.
The marketing tagline, meanwhile, left zero doubt about the ambitions here: “The Training Capital of Harness Racing.” And for a good long while, that boast was the plain truth.
The Golden Years, When 644 Horses Called It Home
The 1950s and early 1960s were the glory days at the Ben White Raceway, and they were something to see. On a peak winter the property packed in 644 horses across a maze of tracks and barns, kept humming by six blacksmith shops and a handful of restaurants, the Holiday House and Pierce’s Dining Room chief among them.
The best part for locals? Admission was free. Thousands of Central Floridians rolled out on crisp winter mornings just to lean on a rail and watch the finest horses on the planet do their roadwork.
It cost a family nothing but a tank of gas, and in a town that hadn’t dreamed up a single theme park yet, that was gold. Kids raced along the fences, retirees claimed the same spots every week, and the whole place smelled like hay and liniment. For a couple of decades, the Ben White Raceway was both a genuine tourist attraction and a standing weekend ritual for the people who lived here.
And the cast of characters? The roster of horsemen who wintered here basically doubles as the sport’s wall of fame:
- Bill Haughton, so essential to the operation that they built a second half-mile track in the 1950s mostly to keep his stable happy.
- Clint Hodgins, the Canadian trainer behind the great pacer Bye Bye Byrd, who at one point ran more than 100 horses on the grounds at once.
- Frank Ervin, a big enough deal that a special barn was built just for him in 1961.
- John Simpson, Sr., one of the most politically wired men in the sport and a longtime Orlando resident (remember him, he’s about to cause some drama).
- Delvin Miller, plus a long parade of other Grand Circuit names who trained here before Pompano Park opened in 1964.
White got to watch his vision fill out, too. He died in Orlando in 1958 at age 85, and that same year was inducted as an “Immortal” into the Harness Racing Hall of Fame. Not a bad way to go out.
Wait, NASCAR Raced Here?
Here’s the curveball that makes most Orlando locals do a double take. That main oval, built for trotting horses, briefly moonlighted as a stock car track for early NASCAR. The folks who chase down old Florida speedway history clock it as a five-eighths-mile dirt oval that ran staged events somewhere around 1948 to 1951. That puts the Ben White Raceway on the very short list of places that hosted both harness racing and a NASCAR Grand National field, and leftover traces of that racing surface lingered for years. Trotters one weekend, throttles the next. Only in old Florida.
How It All Came Apart
No single knockout punch took down the Ben White Raceway. The place came undone slowly, thanks to four things piling up at once.
Pompano Park stole the spotlight
When Pompano Park opened down in Broward County in 1964, it lured away marquee stables, Haughton and Delvin Miller among them, and shattered the critical mass of talent that had made Orlando the place to be.
The Simpson tantrum heard ’round the track
The nastiest blow was personal. After one of John Simpson, Sr.’s prized Albatross colts was killed going over a hub rail, Simpson demanded the rail come out. The horsemen put it to a vote, and the proposal lost. Simpson, never one to take a loss quietly, reportedly fired off “to hell with those fools,” then stormed off and built his own facility, Southern Oaks Training Center, northwest of town. He took roughly a third of the horse population with him.
The cherry on top? Plenty of horsemen who had voted to keep the rail defected to Southern Oaks anyway. And because Simpson had been the loudest voice for the place over at Orlando City Hall, his exit yanked away its political muscle, too.
The bills and the vibe both shifted
Then came the slow squeeze. Shipping horses between the northern circuits and Florida kept getting pricier, and the winter-training math stopped working. On top of that, harness racing itself drifted out of fashion in American sports through the 1970s and 1980s, thinning out the owners willing to bankroll a Florida operation.
The crowds that once lined the rails got sparse, the barns emptied, and the restaurants that fed a small army of horsemen quietly went dark. By the early 1990s the Ben White Raceway was technically still open, one former employee’s mother worked for Ben White Jr. from 1988 to 1992, but it was a ghost of the empire it used to be, coasting on memory more than momentum.
From Racetrack to Trotters Park (2001–2003)
The ending came in chapters. In July 2001, White’s family asked the city to take his name off a facility that no longer had much to do with harness racing, so the Ben White Raceway became Trotters Park. By January 10, 2002, Orlando made it official and voted to close the struggling operation and turn the land into a public park. A full redesign rolled out across 2002, and the made-over Trotters Park was rededicated in January 2003. The famous ovals were ripped out, and more than 100 acres went back to the public.
What’s Out There Today
The site at 2701 Lee Road is now Trotters Park, one of Orlando’s four designated “cornerstone parks.” Spread across its 100.2 acres you’ll find four lighted soccer fields, four lighted baseball fields, biking and blading trails, restrooms, concessions, and around 20 acres of equestrian facilities for therapeutic riding at the Ledesma Equestrian Centre. So horses never fully left the old Ben White Raceway grounds, which feels exactly right.
And if you know where to look, the past is still standing. Some of the original cement-block horse stalls built for the trotters never came down. For years they housed Freedom Ride, a therapeutic horseback-riding nonprofit that worked out of part of the old Lee Road property. Staff there loved to brag that the stalls were built so tough they were considered hurricane-safe, a stubborn little monument to the days when the Ben White Raceway ran this town.
Why Orlando Should Remember It
Cruise the Lee Road and 441 corridor today and you would never, ever guess what once stood here. But for a few golden decades, this quiet neighborhood was the thumping heart of American harness racing, a spot where Hall of Famers conditioned world champions, where tens of thousands of fans showed up every winter, and where, on at least one bizarre afternoon, NASCAR stock cars roared around a horse track.
The barns are mostly gone and the ovals have been plowed under, yet the bones of the place hang on in those stalls, the wide-open acreage, and the horses still ridden on the grounds.
The Ben White Raceway may be history, but next time you roll past Trotters Park, you’ll know the soccer parents and Little Leaguers out there are sharing the field with one of the wildest stories Orlando ever produced, and that it’s sitting a whole lot closer than most locals will ever realize.
🔥 Love Orlando history like this? Well, there's plenty more where this came from, right here.
Sources:
https://www.thehistorycenter.org/ben-white-raceway/
https://harnessmuseum.com/content/benjamin-white
https://standardbredcanada.ca/news/1-30-10/sc-rewind-remembering-ben-white.html
https://orlandomemory.org/places/ben-white-raceway/
https://horseracingtime.ca/articles/ben-white-a-harness-racing-legend/
https://forum.realracinusa.com/t/topic/19502
https://harnessracingupdate.com/2020/02/16/the-story-of-how-southern-oaks-became-the-finest-training-center-in-florida/
https://www.orlando.gov/Parks-the-Environment/Directory/Trotters-Park
https://fun4orlandokids.com/Fun-Around-Town/Sport-Courts-Fields-and-Complexes/Trotters-Park/View-details
https://www.clickorlando.com/getting-results/2021/03/25/freedom-ride-nonprofit-that-offers-therapeutic-horseback-rides-now-on-the-move/
