Chester Eatmon

Chester Eatmon

Harness Racer

1904-1988, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Chester Adolphus Eatmon, became Canada’s oldest licensed harness racing driver in Canada at the age of 82. Eatmon grew up in Fredericton and began his primary schooling at the Charlotte Street School in 1912. A bricklayer by profession, in 1961, Eatmon obtained his racing license and began to train his first horse, Shadow Chief. Later that year, he traded Shadow Chief and picked up Joey’s Spirit, a four-year-old with “such a poor record it was given to him for nothing.” He rehabilitated the horse and raced it for another ten years. “He was always on the money,” Eatmon once told the Daily Gleaner. Other horses raced by Eatmon included C.S. Chief, Shermar Margie, Fashion Tempo, and Marco Poco. When nearing retirement in 1983, Eatmon stated that he had completed approximately eight hundred races by the time he was 79 years old. For Eatmon, harness racing was always a passion rather than strictly just a career: “I don’t race for the money… I race for the glory and the thrill.” Chester Eatmon passed away in 1988 at the age of 84 and is buried at Sunny Bank Cemetery next to his first wife Edna (née McCarty) and along with a number of his children.

UNB Art Centre

EST. 1765

UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK College of Extended Leaming

In conjunction with: Bi-campus Standing Committee on Equity,

Diversity, Inclusion & Human Rights