Remembering Aiken’s Horsemen Peter Green: Champion Trainer By Pam Gleason
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harles Peter Green was born in March 1883, one of five children in Mack and Sarah Green’s family. They were African Americans, and although Sarah (Scott) Green was born in 1867, after the Civil War, Mack, who was born in 1848, was most likely enslaved during the
Spring water to people in the city for 10 cents a barrel. As a young boy, Peter also made Coker Spring water into a business. As a child of 10 or 11, he used to polish up glasses, fill them with water and offer drinks to Winter Colony riders as they came in or out of the woods. This entrepreneurial spirit attracted the attention of Louise (known as Lulie) and Thomas Hitchcock, the main founders of Aiken’s Winter Colony. The Hitchcocks’ home, Mon Repos, was just up the street and it was not long before the young couple hired Peter to come work for them. He was just 11 and had only a second grade education, but he was smart and athletic and had an admirable work ethic. His first job was to ride a pony that the Hitchcocks had purchased for their first child, Celestine. The pony was cute but rambunctious, way too much for Celestine who was just a toddler at the time. Peter was instructed to ride the pony for two hours every morning to calm him down. “Yes, it seemed like a mighty easy job at first,” he told the Aiken Standard in a 1971 interview. “But it began to get tiresome after a while.” Next, when Celestine could ride a little, his duty was to accompany her on the hunts, stay with her and take care of her if the field started moving too fast. Peter was soon helping to break steeplechase horses for Thomas Hitchcock who maintained a stable of young prospects at Cedar Creek Farm, a sprawling plantation outside of town. Working as a groom, he accompanied the Hitchcocks north in the winter, living at their estate, Broad Hollow in Westbury, New York, on Long Island. Soon, one of his brothers, Jamesy, and his sister Malinda were also part of the Hitchcock household in New York. Jamesy worked in the stables while Malinda was listed as a domestic on U.S. Census records. The Green and Hitchcock families seem to have been quite close. When the Hitchcocks were in Aiken, Lulie is said to have visited Peter’s mother Sarah
Above: Peter Green with Louise Hitchcock, Celestine and her unruly pony. Right: with a young Thoroughbred.
first decades of his life. In 1888, the Green family moved from the surrounding countryside to a home on Fourth Avenue in Aiken, which put them in close contact with members of Aiken’s Winter Colony. There, Peter attracted the attention of the Hitchcock family and started working for them when he was just 11. Beginning as a groom, he eventually became Thomas Hitchcock’ right hand man and then the trainer of record for his champion steeplechase horses. During an era when Black trainers were a decided anomaly on the steeplechasing circuit, Green was honored many times as the top moneywinning trainer in the country. He trained horses for Hitchcock until Hitchcock’s death in 1941, and then went on to work for William Post & Son’s racing stable before he retired in his 80s. The neighborhood where the Green family lived, near Coker Spring on the edge of the Hitchcock Woods, was populated by other Black families. At that time Coker Spring was an important source of water for people in the city, many of whom used to travel there to fill up jugs that they would take home. Various members of the community turned the water source into a business. For instance, in a 1979 interview, Peter’s younger sister Malinda White remembered an old man who would deliver Coker
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The Aiken Horse
August-September 2020
