Mary Fields Horse and Heritage Museum
Ebony Horsewomen, Inc.
Hartford
October 3, 2025
History is a constant site of struggle, despite our tendency to think of events as set in stone once they’ve occurred. The present has an enormous influence on the past, and the way that we learned history says as much about the time period we were taught in as much as the actual dates of the events.
Patricia Kelly, president, CEO and founder of Ebony Horsewomen, Inc., knows that full well. Her equestrian center in the North End of Hartford hosted the grand opening of the Mary Fields Horse and Heritage Museum on a seasonable and bright Friday afternoon.
Kelly said that she opened the museum because African Americans need to learn their own history with horses.
“This is our legacy,” she said. “We’re not ‘Johnny-come-late’ with the equestrian situation.”
Case in point: the eponymous inspiration for the new museum.
Kelly told me the story of Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary for her reliability and her preferred method of travel. Born into slavery in Tennessee, Mary gained her freedom after the Civil War. She worked various roles at a Catholic mission in Montana she was living in before becoming a star route carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, the first African American woman to do so.
“Mary was six feet tall, 200 pounds,” she said. “The lady was no joke, but they threw out the convent because she drank a lot and she'd shoot you. If you got on her nerves she would shoot you and I guess the Bishop was like, well no we can't have all of that.”
I’d never heard the story of Stagecoach Mary. I’d never heard that 15 of the first 28 Kentucky Derbys were won by African American jockeys, until Jim Crow and racist violence forced them from the sport. I didn’t know that the term “cowboy” is basically a reference to how Whites called African American male cowherds “boy” as an epithet.
The history of cowboys and horse-riding had been taught to me by old Ronald Reagan movies and more modern films like Tombstone, which completely erased African Americans as cowboys. That’s why the Mary Fields Museum is necessary.
Kelly knows better though. A love of horses runs through her family- her father was a jockey, and her grandparents, who were enslaved, relied on horses, mules and donkeys for their existence both before and after emancipation (note: if anyone tries to tell you that slavery is ancient history, yes, there are people still alive today only one generation removed from it).
So it’s awesome to see so many African Americans wearing cowboy hats, not as an affectation, but as a real symbol of the lives they lead and the history we come from. Kelly estimates that since she founded Ebony Horsewomen, more than 15,000 children have passed through their various programs to connect them with horses and their heritage.
History is a struggle, and Patricia Kelly wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I'm an equestrian. It's my duty before I transition to a higher plane to tell these kids who they are.”
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