Kenner's Horse Stables: An End to a 200 Year Tradition

Last month saw the demolition of the last horse stable on Williams Blvd in Kenner. With its demolition comes the end of a storied history of horse stables and horse racing, mired in corrupt police, corrupt Jefferson Parish government, and the Mafia.


The last remaining structure from Kenner’s two centuries of fabled stables, near the corner of Williams Blvd and Sunset Drive.

Kenner as a municipality began with aristocratic northern European roots when Philip Minor Kenner established it as plantation town in 1855. Minor, though, was prescient, and knew a plantation economy was not the future. He enticed farmers to move to the area, knowing that the slave economy was on its way out.

The Kenner family had a heritage of power and wealth. Minor Kenner was a 5th generation American, whose great, great, great grandfather, Richard Kenner had migrated from Oxford, England around 1660. The family's apex came with Minor's son, Duncan. Duncan was educated at Miami of Ohio and became through family connections and natural talent a powerful landowner, slave owner, banker, and soon became one of the most powerful political forces in the Confederacy. Duncan became a de facto Confederate diplomat to France and Britain. He desperately sought recognition for the Confederacy by those nations. Upon his return from a trip there, he convinced Jefferson Davis that in order to gain foreign recognition, the Confederacy must emancipate all slaves within its borders. As you know, it never happened, perhaps because the Confederacy had already lost the war at that point.

Like many Southern aristocrats, Duncan returned from the war still as a rich man. Their nation had failed and their economies were in ruin, but their individual wealth was largely untouched. He turned much of his attention to horses. By the 1880s, Duncan had the largest horse stables in America.


1901 image of former Jefferson Parish Sheriff Frank Clancy at Duncan Kenner’s son’s stables

Duncan Kenner encouraged more than just farmers to move to his land -- he envisioned it as a center of entertainment. When certain forms of entertainment, like open knuckle boxing and gambling were outlawed within New Orleans city limits, it became a convenient spot where aesthetes from the city could gather to waste their money and watch men bloody and kill other men with their fists. Farmers, too, flocked to Kenner, many of them Sicilian immigrants fresh from boats docking at the port of New Orleans. These immigrants moved upriver while many of Kenner’s freed slaves moved down river to the city to look for work.

Most local horse enthusiasts know Kenner for its former Jefferson Downs. This horse track's birth comes from the opening of parimutuel gambling. In 1908, the Louisiana Legislature, under influence of noble Governor Jared Sanders, outlawed this form of gambling whereby winning bets are paid out from the collected pool of gambled money on a certain event, unlike fixed odds gambling (both of which are reprehensible). When the law passed, horse racing in Louisiana was decimated. Wishful degenerate losers, it turns out, didn't want to watch horses race. They wanted to make money. When it became illegal to gamble, the degenerates stopped coming to watch the horses and the tracks closed.

In 1916, parimutuel gambling was legalized again. Just like heroin junkies looking for a fix, the degenerates flooded back to throw money at horses running around a track. Multiple horse tracks were built in the New Orleans area. The first in Jefferson Parish was built in Old Jefferson and another was built nearby in Shrewsbury. These tracks were replaced by Jefferson Downs, first at current day Lafreniere Park, and later in northwest Kenner. In the 1990s, it was razed to make room for Gabriel Estates in Kenner, where Zion Williamson recently moved

Who supplied these tracks with the thoroughbreds? That’s right. Kenner’s stables.

Kenner’s next chapter in horses comes through its own son, Frank Clancy. Clancy’s father, John, had moved to Kenner in the mid to late 1880s to farm its fertile soils. The family found favor with the Kenners and Frank grew up working in the Kenner’s stables, where he developed a life-long love of horses. Clancy became one of the most powerful local politicians in America in the early to mid twentieth century. As Jefferson Parish Sheriff, he had strong alliances with an eclectic cast of figures, from Huey P. Long to Carlos Marcellos to Frank Costello to your ordinary Kenner farmer. One thing’s for sure: even when national media and Senate Special Committee criticized and decried Clancy’s rule of Jefferson Parish and Kenner, he never lost the favor of the ordinary Kenner farmer. Through all the turmoil of Clancy’s thirty year reign as the Jefferson Parish Sheriff, his love of horses never failed.

Clancy parlayed his power and dubious connections into enormous wealth. At one time Clancy owned much of Kenner. He owned many stables along what was to become Williams Blvd. He also owned and used for cattle grazing and horse raising the huge plot of land that was to become Esplanade Mall. Chateau Estates? That was his and his horses’ as well. Before Kenner’s 1970s population boom, much of it was land for cows and horses. Slowly one watched as horse stables along Williams became convenience stores, the Pontchartrain Center, and now housing.


New construction replaces a two centuries tradition of Kenner stables

Sadly, as there is no longer a true paper of record for the city of New Orleans and its environs, no one will document this except TulaneLSU at TigerDroppings. Its sad that something with such a history can disappear without so much as a mention in the media. Local television stations and their pretty faces and mindless minds will not fill the void. I have tried to do my part to make sure history doesn’t simply disappear when its edifices no longer stand.