Roland Mallar climbs into a two-wheeled jog cart a little after seven, gloves on, legs out straight in front of him, and eases a young Standardbred onto the half-mile sand track behind the barns on Beulah Hill Road. Billy Cole is a few lengths back doing the same thing with a different colt. Neither man is performing for anyone. This is Tuesday.
That scene has almost nothing to do with the version of the Pinehurst Harness Track most residents have seen advertised this year. Since spring, the calendar out there has been dressage shows, a polocrosse tournament, and a car show banquet in the Fair Barn. All real, all worth attending, and all of it sitting on top of the track's actual reason for existing, which restarts this month whether anyone shows up to watch or not.
What's Been Happening There All Summer
If you've followed the Harness Track's public calendar this year, you've seen the Swat 'n Sweat dressage series run its full six-show slate from May through early September, closing out with the CoolDown show on September 5 and 6. The American Polocrosse Eastern Zone competition also used the track's one-mile course. And if you follow the classic car crowd, you might know the Sandhills Motoring Expo held its awards dinner inside the historic Fair Barn during its Memorial Day weekend run in May.
All of that is real programming, and all of it uses the same 111 acres. None of it is what the track was built to do.
What Actually Reopens on October 15
According to the Village of Pinehurst, winter training at the track runs from October 15 to May 1 each year. That's the season the Harness Track exists for: Standardbred trotters and pacers, mostly yearlings still learning to carry a driver in a straight line, working through their paces on one of three surfaces, a half-mile sand and clay track, a five-eighths-mile sand jog track, or the full one-mile clay oval.
Local event listings describe the viewing window a little more loosely, from October through April, Monday through Saturday, roughly 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and free to walk up and watch. Whichever exact week it clicks over, the pattern is the same one that's held since 1915: horses on the track before most of the village has had coffee, trainers rotating through barns that still hold close to 300 stalls, and no ticket booth anywhere in sight.
The Restaurant That Comes With It
Walk the fence line long enough on a training morning and you'll end up at the Pinehurst Track Restaurant, the plain white-block building that looks out over the oval. According to PineStraw Magazine, it's run by Tracy Cormier, whose late husband, Real "CoCo" Cormier, drove Standardbreds professionally in Quebec before the couple settled in Pinehurst permanently in the 1990s and took over the kitchen. The menu is diner food, breakfast through lunch, and the blueberry pancakes have a reputation that outlasts most restaurants twice its size.
That's not incidental color. It's the same social structure the track has run on for decades: horsemen who came from somewhere else, stayed for the mild winters, and built a small, specific economy around training season. Mallar himself grew up around harness racing in Maine, under his grandfather, and was already running horses in summer fairs before he finished high school. Cole grew up in Wagram and didn't know anything about horses until a friend who worked at the track offered to teach him in 1985, hoping to fill an opening.
"You got to teach them to go straight before you can teach them to go fast."
Mallar, as quoted in PineStraw Magazine, was describing what training a yearling actually looks like in October and November, before anyone is thinking about speed.
Training Season Versus Matinee Day
The two versions of the track that most people encounter, the quiet winter mornings and the one loud Saturday every spring, don't resemble each other at all.
| Training Season (Oct 15–May 1) | Spring Matinee Race Day | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | $5 per person, 12 and under free |
| Hours | Roughly 7 a.m.–1 p.m., Mon–Sat | Gates at 11 a.m., races at 1:30 p.m. |
| Crowd | A handful of regulars along the fence | Nearly 4,000 attendees in recent years |
| What you see | Yearlings and young Standardbreds learning to drive straight | Full competitive heats, trotters and pacers racing |
| Where | Fence line along any of the three tracks | Bleacher seating, parking off Monticello Drive |
The Matinee is the version that makes the newspaper. It's also one day. The training season is six and a half months, and it's the one that's actually free to everyone, every week, with no reservation and no program to buy.
Why This Particular Piece of Land Kept Its Purpose
The track opened in 1915 as an amenity for resort guests. Leonard Tufts, son of Pinehurst founder James Tufts, helped form the Pinehurst Jockey Club the following year and became its first president. Harness racing specifically took hold in the late 1920s, and the track's early stars became genuinely famous within the sport. A trainer known as Doc Parshall won 130 races there in a single 1937 campaign, enough to get Pinehurst mentioned in a national harness racing magazine that Christmas as a place where champions were made.
The land almost didn't stay a training ground. By the 1980s it had been sold to real estate investors, and there was a real possibility the barns and paddocks would be cleared for golf course or housing development. A group of local residents organized as the Friends of the Pinehurst Harness Tracks, pushed back, and convinced the Village Council to buy the property outright in 1992. That same year, the track earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Three years later, the Village turned daily operation over to its Parks and Recreation Department, which still runs it.
The Fair Barn sitting inside the same grounds has its own version of that story. Built in 1917 as an exhibition hall for the Sandhills Fair, one of the larger country fairs in the Southeast through the mid-1920s, it fell out of regular use before being restored in 2002. It now hosts the weddings, dinners, and community events that show up on the summer calendar, including this year's Sandhills Motoring Expo banquet.
None of that history changes what happens on the track itself starting this month. It just explains why the Village kept the land instead of letting it become something else.
Before You Go
- Training runs roughly 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., Monday through Saturday, October through April. Early morning is when you'll see the most activity.
- There's no admission and no reservation for spectators. Park along the fence areas near the barns off Beulah Hill Road South.
- The Track Restaurant keeps breakfast and lunch hours during the season. Cash and patience for a small dining room help.
- Spring Matinee tickets and race-day parking details are handled separately through the Pinehurst Driving and Training Club closer to April.
- The Village of Pinehurst's harness track page posts any schedule changes before the season opener.
By the second week of October, the fence line on Beulah Hill Road will look nothing like it did during polocrosse weekend. Fewer people, fewer signs, no admission table. Just a handful of trainers in jog carts, teaching young horses to go straight before anyone asks them to go fast.
If watching that unfold from a front porch or a morning walk sounds like the kind of daily life you'd want in Pinehurst, Rhonda Edwards knows this village down to which barns still smell like the 1920s. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what living near it actually looks like.
