edward willis
As a trainer, driver and farm superintendent and manager, Edward D. Willis made a mark with historical ramifications reverberating to this day. Willis was said by famed harness racing historian John Hervey to be “one of the greatest of all early speed makers,” and at W.E.D. Stokes’ Patchen Wilkes Farm, “no other trainer fills so many places as does Willis, and what is most important, [he is] efficient in every phase of his duties.”
Willis joined the farm in 1896 and was at its helm with all the duties of management of the farm from 1909 through 1913, some of its most productive years. Among the outstanding accomplishments of Willis’s career was the lowering of the world’s record for yearling trotters not once but twice. He achieved this both by training and driving first Miss Stokes in 1909 and Peter Volo in 1912. Willis trained and drove six horses under 2:10 during his career and is credited with breeding, breaking and training the majority of Peter the Great’s offspring at Patchen Wilkes Farm.
There is subtext to Willis’s story that makes it all the more remarkable. Edward Willis was an African-American living in a period of history rife with racial shifts and tensions. Based on available research, his birth in 1869 made him part of the first generation of his family not born into slavery. Nearly every accolade Willis earned or article mentioning his work highlighted his race. He was “one of the most unique men of the harness track,” wrote one paper, “the only colored driver of any prominence on the Grand Circuit.” There were other African-American trainers and drivers but as Henry Ten Eyck White acknowledged in 1908, “negro trainers are none too popular in Kentucky.” Despite this, Willis saw potential in the industry for other African-Americans. In 1910 he presented a session at the National Negro Business League convention on managing a stock farm and the educational Standardbred breeding program he later helped establish was at the Tuskegee Institute, where none other than Booker T. Washington conferred Willis’s honorary degree.
Edward Willis was an advocate for the rights of African-Americans as the editor and publisher of the Lexington Weekly News and as an activist, leading protests against the 1916 movie Birth of a Nation. He was also on the committee that created Douglass Park in Lexington.
Edward Willis died in 1930.