For Janet Terhune, preserving the history of harness racing is not simply a job. It is the continuation of a lifelong relationship with horses, science and a sport she came to see as part of who she was.
As executive director of the Harness Racing Museum & Hall of Fame in Goshen, Terhune has spent more than a decade helping preserve the stories, people and horses behind an American-born sport. But her path to the museum began long before she arrived in Goshen.
“I came from the U.S. Trotting Association (USTA),” Terhune recalled. While studying animal science at Ohio State University, she became interested in animal breeding and genetics. The United States Trotting Association was located only about a mile from campus, and she began working with its data.
“I really like math. I really like science,” she said. “And so I kind of tied those things all together.”
From science to harness racing
After graduate school, Terhune joined the USTA, where she became deeply involved in its developing online database, Pathway. At the time, the technology was still in its infancy.
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“This is 1995,” she recalled. “Nobody had high-speed internet. This is DSL times.”
She became the person colleagues turned to when they needed help navigating the database.
“She was the queen of Pathway,” Kristin Roberts joked during the interview. “I’m still the queen of Pathway,” Terhune added with a laugh.
Terhune ultimately spent 26 years with the USTA before being encouraged to apply for the museum’s director position in Goshen. Leaving the USTA was not an easy decision.
“I loved working for the mothership,” she said. “There was always a problem to solve.”
But she eventually accepted the position and came to Goshen in 2012.
Looking back, Terhune said she had always been drawn to horses. She grew up riding and owned horses as a young person. In college, her interest became more scientific as she studied heredity and speed.
The Standardbred particularly fascinated her because harness racing provided a relatively consistent measurement.
“The distance is always the same. It’s always a mile,” she explained. That consistency allowed her to study how genetics, track size and other factors affected performance.
‘We had to fight our way’
Terhune’s journey also reflects the challenges faced by women entering the horse industry decades ago.
She recalled that when she was growing up and attending school in the 1970s, career opportunities for women were far more limited.
“There was no guidance for women at all,” she said. “The opportunities were not there.”
Yet her love of horses kept her moving forward.
“We had to fight our way, and we lived through some crappy, crappy experiences and times, but we stuck it out because our love of the horse was greater than any unpleasant occurrence.”
Today, Terhune is especially aware of how much representation matters. The Harness Racing Hall of Fame has historically had very few women and people of color among its honorees, and she said the museum tries to recognize those stories.
“We really try to push those aspects of the sport because they’ve been covered up for so long,” she said.
Roberts, the museum’s education coordinator and sculptor, understands that history personally as well. Her career has included breeding farms, racetracks, horse training and animal reproduction, as well as teaching.
At the museum, she brings that practical experience together with her work as a fine artist, creating sculptures for the Hall of Fame.
Preserving more than objects
For Terhune, museum work is ultimately about connecting information and telling stories.
“I love preserving the history of the sport,” she said.
One of the projects she is particularly proud of is the museum’s Greyhound Gallery. In 2014, the museum was contacted by two Illinois women who had preserved Greyhound’s original stall and wanted to save it from demolition.
Greyhound, one of the sport’s most famous horses, won the Hambletonian in Goshen in 1935. The women dismantled the stall board by board, numbered the pieces and transported them to Goshen, where the museum recreated the structure.
“This isn’t just one horse,” Terhune recalled thinking. “This is like Elvis, or somebody similar.”
The museum eventually opened the Greyhound Gallery, giving visitors a physical connection to a celebrated horse and an earlier era of American harness racing.
The museum’s collection now serves a broader purpose: connecting the sport to the history of the country and the community around it.
“You have to be able to bring Kristin’s knowledge together with what Rebecca Howard, the Museum’s collections curator, knows,” Terhune explained. “Start that conversation and say, ‘Okay, what do you know about this? What do you know about this? Can we do an exhibit?’”
“As long as you can tie it all together and connect the dots,” she added, “you can write another story.”
That philosophy may best describe Terhune’s own career. From science and data to horses, museums and history, the pieces have gradually connected.
“I want my tombstone to say she was resilient, resourceful, and a girl who loved horses,” she said.
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