William P. Kinzer

William P. Kinzer
Born	1841 Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Died	Nov. 17, 1917 Toledo, Ohio
Cause of death	Crushed skull
Resting place	Wooster Cemetery
Known for	Trainer-Driver-Owner of the high-wheeled era trotting horse, Deception, racing from 1871-1880.
Spouse(s)	Francena "Frank" J. Stitt
Children	William S. Kinzer, Charles E. Kinzer, Clara C. Kinzer

Biographical Sketches

William P. Kinzer lived in the Wooster, Ohio between 1870 and 1894 and played in instrumental role in shaping horse racing in Wayne County. He is the earliest person of record who started to train harness horses for the purpose of racing, and the first to setup a racehorse stable in Wooster and campaign racehorses outside the local area. Little is known of Kinzer's life before he blew into Wooster, Ohio at about the age of 25 from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1870. He stepped into town a single, white male, and took a room in a local boarding house. He reported his occupation to a Federal Census worker in 1870 as a grocery dealer.

It is unclear if he came to Wooster because of his job, or if he had family or friends living in the area, or was attracted by the opportunities of this small but growing community. What became clear was that he had a proclivity for fast horses and over the course of his lifetime William P. Kinzer revealed he was a person that could not be trusted and was likely a compulsive gambler. He took advantage of every person he met and exploited every situation to his own advantage.

Winning a horse race at the 1870 Wayne County Fair marked the first "win" of record for William P. Kinzer as a harness horse driver and the beginning of his storied horse racing career. It was during the year of 1871 that Kinzer came into possession of a horse that would change his life forever: a grey gelding named, Deception, with an untraceable pedigree and an age that could only ever be approximated as being born sometime in the 1860s. Where this horse was bred or from whom Kinzer purchased Deception is unknown. According to a list published in Scientific American in 1883 of horses who have won purse monies from racing totaling more than $10,000 and upward to the close of 1882, Deception was listed as winning 34 races between 1875-1879 and earned $12,225 from racing.

William P. Kinzer married Francena "Frank" J. Stitt on Feb. 29, 1872. They would have three children together all of whom were born eight years apart: William S. Kinzer was born in 1873, Charles E. Kinzer was born in 1881, and a daughter Clara C. Kinzer born in 1889. During the height of horse training career William P. Kinzer seemed to live a separate life from that of his family. Gone for long stretches of time as he shipped from racetrack to racetrack with the racehorses, his family was left in Wooster to fend for themselves. Despite the fact that Deception earned Kinzer a large amount of money racing during the 1870s his family did not seem to benefit from that money and one has to ask where did all the money go? The Kinzer’s never owned a house or bought a farm and what became of the W.P. Kinzer store at the foot of Beall Ave. is unknown. Sadly the most likely answer is that the money was frittered away gambling or spent on risky business ventures.

When Deception's race career ended Kinzer never had another racehorse he could consistently campaign on the race circuits. When the Wayne county fairgrounds were sold after the 1880 Fair, Kinzer moved his family to Mansfield, Ohio where he could utilize the racetrack at the Richland County fairgrounds to continue training racehorses. After moving to Mansfield his stable was immediately hit with a run of bad luck. The one horse in his stable with any trotting talent, Daniel The Prophet (2:27), died unexpectedly on January 14, 1880 of colic. Kinzer sporadically raced four horses between 1882-1891 but had little success. He tried standing a horse, Harry Blandy, as a stallion to collect stud fees but the horse never produced any good racehorses and was gelded. Furthermore, Kinzer suffered more bad luck when he lost a promising 4-year-old trotting colt, Judge Welker, to blood poisoning in October of 1888. Then while shipping a horse, The General, to race at the 1891 Ohio State Fair the horse was badly injured in a train wreck on the Scioto Valley Railroad near Columbus and was never able to race again.

It was after the Wooster Driving Park Association re-formed and leased 42 acres at the intersection of West Liberty St. and West Larwill St. (everything north of Christmas Run creek on the present-day fairgrounds) and built a half-mile racetrack in the Fall of 1886 that Kinzer moved his racehorse stable and family back to Wooster. When the Driving Park was so enthusiastically embraced by the citizens of Wooster, people quickly moved to re-form the defunct Agricultural Society and merge the two organizations together to form the Wayne County Agricultural Society and fairgrounds that is still in use to this day. William P. Kinzer served as the first Superintendent of the Race department during the first Wayne County Fair held at our present-day fairgrounds on October 4th through 7th, 1887.

When Kinzer no longer had any racehorse prospects he tried to create a new sport or at the very least a traveling sideshow starring his twelve-year-old son Charles in the early 1890s. In 1892, the Wayne County Democrat reported, Little Charlie Kinzer, a son of Wm. P. Kinzer, is making the rounds of some of the County Fairs, and creating somewhat of a sensation by the fast time he makes in trotting his trained dog "Watch" around the race course. At Mt. Sterling last week he won a $50 purse by beating a pony in a half mile race Furthermore, Kinzer and his son figured out a way to hitch four dogs to a sulky of some type and taught them to pull it and the boy while doing a dog-trot. The Wooster Republican newspaper reported on August 26, 1893: W.P. Kinzer and son Charley tonight start for New York with their four trotting dogs. The canines will give exhibition trots in the metropolis five days next week. Engagements have also been made for the dogs at several points in the New England states and in New York. Should the dogs meet with no accidents young Kinzer will make quite a bunch of money this summer, as the animals are certainly well trained and travel well together. Charles Kinzer campaigned the “trotting dogs” until 1896 and while at Hornellsville, NY (now Hornell, NY) in July of 1894 young Charley Kinzer supposedly drove his team of trotting dogs a half-mile in 1:52 flat, the fastest time ever made, thus creating a world’s record. Charles Kinzer likely still holds this “world record” because it could not be determined if “trotting dogs” was a sport anybody else ever participated in thereafter.

Sometime during 1894 William P. Kinzer moved away from Wooster, Ohio. It was reported that he went to Toledo, Ohio to become the presiding judge for the Miami or Maumee Trotting meets but this could never be verified. He may have actually travelled to Missouri where he was embroiled in a legal battle with relatives over a land deed transaction in Poplar Bluff, MO that his father had been involved with at the end of the man’s life. The way William Kinzer treated his father in the man’s final days was revealed in an 1895 Supreme Court of Missouri case of Kinzer v. Kinzer, where a sitting judge had this to say about William P. Kinzer:

The conduct of the witness, to say nothing of contradictory and inconsistent statements made by him in regard to other matters, in standing by, and even signing as a witness, a deed executed by his father in his presence to valuable property, knowing at the time his enfeebled condition, both in mind and body, is so inconsistent with the duty of the son to the father, and the experience of mankind, it is hardly worthy of consideration. Not only this, but within a few days thereafter he borrowed from his father, whose condition had been gradually growing worse, the whole amount of the purchase money, $1,800, giving his note therefor, which was somewhat inharmonious with the statements which he had theretofore made, that his father was indebted to him, and that he was incompetent to contract.

The relationship William P. Kinzer had with his wife was tumultuous at best and by 1900 the Federal Census shows he was living separately from his wife and children in a boarding house in Canton, Ohio with seven other people. Both would tell people they were divorced, but no legal divorce was ever decreed and both always listed their true status as “married” on Census forms.

A sad but humorous story shows the spite William P. Kinzer held toward his wife when a Wooster Weekly Republican newspaper report in 1908 revealed he was arrested in Canton, Ohio for the theft of his “divorced” wife’s store-bought teeth, eyeglasses, and gold watch.

His two sons eventually moved to Chicago, IL. His eldest son, William S. Kinzer, found work in the booming Chicago mail-order business when Montgomery Ward and Sears catalog sales drove a major sector of the American economy. Charles Kinzer became a traveling salesman that sold slot machines during the infamous Chicago gangster era. His wife and daughter lived together in an apartment in Canton, OH until William P. Kinzer’s death when they moved to Chicago and joined the rest of the Kinzer family.

William P. Kinzer died alone in Toledo, OH at the top of the Secor Hotel employee elevator shaft on November 17, 1917 at the age of 72. His skull was crushed in the iron-work cage of the elevator after he suffered a heart attack and fell against the fence as the elevator continued to ascend and automatically stopped at the top where he was found dead by a maid. He had so alienated his family that while working in Toledo people there believed he was a lonely single widower even though his wife was alive and well at the time. Furthermore, Kinzer’s obituary in the Wooster newspaper made no mention of his wife Francenna and stated he was survived only by his three children. Examining William P. Kinzer’s life and the actions he took throughout reveal a man that was likely a pathological gambler that squandered every penny he ever possessed and ruined his life and that of his family.

The remnants of William P. Kinzer’s family became a close-knit unit all staying together and living in a rented house until they were separated by death. Francenna Kinzer died 1933, Charles Kinzer died in 1935, William S. Kinzer died in 1945, and the last surviving member of the family, Clara Kinzer, died in 1969 at 80 years old. Charles and Clara Kinzer never married. William S. Kinzer married but followed the path laid out by his father: he left his wife and lived with his mother, brother and sister and told people he was “divorced”, but never legally obtained a divorce from his wife. Ironically, William P. Kinzer, his wife Francenna, his son Charles, and daughter Clara are all buried together in the Wooster Cemetery.

Despite Kinzer’s many character flaws the expertise and knowledge he gathered and brought back to Wayne county while racing horses across various parts of the mid-west in the 1870s likely shaped how our first crop of racehorses were trained and how horse racing was conducted in Wayne County, and at the Wayne County Fair. He likely influenced which rules to follow, how the racetrack should be sized, shaped, and maintained to attract good horses to race here, and how entry fees should be handled and how the purse money should be divided. Kinzer raced at many different racetracks and at some of the best in the region and saw first-hand how those places were operated: what worked and what did not work. Sharing this type of information with the local horsemen and the Fair Board helped to build a solid foundation upon which harness horse training, breeding, and racing could thrive in Wayne county.

Vital Records

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Marriage

• Feb. 29, 1872 married Francena "Frank" J. Stitt

Death

• Nov. 17, 1917 in Toledo, Ohio

Burial

• Wooster Cemetery

Places of Residence

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• Wooster, Ohio
• Mansfield, Ohio
• Canton, Ohio
• Toledo, Ohio

Court Records

1872 marriage license of William P. Kinzer and Francena "Frank" J. Stitt

Tax Records

These include personal tax (chattel such as horses, cattle, carriages) and real tax (land).

Land Records

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Denomination Affiliations

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Military

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Occupations

• 1870s Business owner: W.P. Kinzer's Groceries & Provisions E. Liberty St., opposite Beall Ave.
• Harness horse racehorse owner-trainer-driver

Notes

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References

• Zimmerman, S. Wayne County Fair Horse Racing: 1869-1880 Wooster: Lulu Press, 2011.
• "The Big Winners." Scientific American Supplement. New York: Munn and Co., etc., March 24, 1883: 6020 Google Books.
• Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and West Publishing Company. The Southwestern reporter, Vol. 31: containing all the current decisions of the Supreme Courts of Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, and Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals, and Courts of Civil Appeals of Texas. St. Paul, Minn: West Pub. Co., 1895: 577-578. Google Books.