Remembering Penny Chenery on her Birthday, January 27
Enslaved workers cemetery at Meadow Farm
1937 photo - taken a quarter mile up the hill from the Chenery house
January 27, 2026
Every year on this day, I go with my friend, Leeanne Ladin, who is my co-author on Secretariat’s Meadow and President of Secretariat for Virginia, to Woodland Cemetery in Ashland, Virginia, to lay roses on my mother’s grave. She lies near her father and mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents in the Chenery plot.
It is a serene place surrounded by trees, grass, and flowers, so quiet that my visits sometimes startle pairs of grazing deer. Leeanne and I bring a bottle of bourbon to toast her, and my grandfather, Chris Chenery, the founder of Meadow Stable, and we say a few words in tribute to them. Mom would be 104 today, and I still can’t believe it has been nearly a decade since she left us.
After her great successes on the track with Secretariat and Riva Ridge, Mom threw herself into her role as a leader of the racing industry. She spoke to legislatures nationwide in support of thoroughbred racing, and for several years she led the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association. She lobbied for stricter performance-enhancing drug laws and for horse safety. She helped to found the movement to create safe retirement and retraining for off-track Thoroughbreds. In doing all these things, she was embodying her father’s oft-repeated injunction: “Of those to whom much is given, much is expected.” In other words, when you have had great luck, you must give back where you have received.
One of the ways she chose to give back was to establish the Secretariat Foundation in 2003. The foundation is a small charity supported by fans and others whose charter is to support the racing-related institutions Mom cared most about: off-track Thoroughbred aftercare, injured and disabled jockeys, laminitis research, and Secretariat’s legacy.
On that list is always the Permanently Disabled Jockey’s Fund, or PDJF, which we support in honor of our jockey, Ron Turcotte. Ron was one of the iconic jockeys of his era, a great rider until a racing accident in 1978 left him piloting a wheelchair. That he did so with good grace and courage for 47 years is a testament to his valiant character. He died last year in August, and so our 2025 donation has his name held in special poignancy.
The foundation gets requests for grants from worthy organizations all over the country. Sadly, we cannot support the many excellent horse therapy organizations that contact us, although we would like to. Instead we focus on causes close to Mom’s heart and to the legacy of Secretariat.
In 2025, for the first time we supported a new cause, one that I know would have made Mom very proud. We have contributed to a college scholarship for the descendants of the grooms and other workers whose talents gave the Meadow the great success it had from the 1930s through the 1980s, including those who raised Secretariat.
Many of these people descend from workers enslaved at the Meadow before Emancipation. Until the 1840s, The Meadow was a 4000-acre plantation where 84 enslaved people toiled for my grandfather’s great-uncle, Dr. Charles Morris. The nearby community of Dawn, a freedmen’s town established after the Civil War, is still home to many of these descendants.
Since 2022, I have been part of The Meadow Families Linked Descendants, which includes both enslavers and enslaved, both white and black. Together, we are working to uncover the true history of the Meadow, to build community, and to find common ground in repairing the legacy of slavery. The new scholarship program, just launched in 2025, has long been a goal of this group.
Another big project has been to locate the lost burial ground for the Meadow’s enslaved workers. We know roughly where it is but in order to pinpoint its site, we have had to use ground-penetrating radar, cadaver dogs and archeological research. One of our pieces of evidence for it is a photograph Mom took with her Brownie camera in 1937 when she was just 15 years old. Nowadays, the land is quite different, so its exact location has been elusive. When we do find it, we will honor the site with a plaque and a community-wide blessing ceremony.
Our group has also sponsored oral histories of the elders and genealogical research to build trees for many of the families, as well as community wide barbeques and gatherings. This project is one both Granddad and Mom would have been thrilled to support, as they always acknowledged the importance of the workers in generating The Meadow’s great good luck. It is a way to give back, something in which they both deeply believed.
©Kate Tweedy
