Sally Goswell, 72, longtime general manager of Maryland’s Fair Hill Training Center, died peacefully at her home in Newark, Del., on Sept. 28 of pancreatic cancer.

Sally BoswellSally was born Oct. 6, 1953 in Washington, D.C., to Frank R. Stoner III and Sarah Sutherland Stoner.

She grew up in Sewickley, Pa., northwest of Pittsburgh and rode show horses, including a top pony named Ace Of Spades.

Sally’s love for horses continued into her  college years while attending Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she galloped horses at Pimlico Race Course every chance she got and met her future husband, Michael “Mike” Goswell.

Sally and Mike were married in 1976, began operating a Thoroughbred training business on the Maryland racetrack circuit and eventually bought a barn at Fair Hill.

“I was working for Kenny Field and she was galloping for Billy Christmas,” said Mike this week of their early days together. “When I went out on my own, she was the groom for the two or three horses we had and kept working in the barn even after we had our boys. She had a backpack and one of them was in it most of the time.”

 

MIKE TRAINED the horses and Sally put her college major to use handling the business side of the training business as it grew and later used those same skills to manage Fair Hill.

Shortly after Mike retired from training and the Goswells sold their barn, Sally became the general manager of the 350-acre Fair Hill Training Center in 1994 and retired in February 2025.

Under Sally, the training center – after nearly going bankrupt – stabilized and grew into one of the country’s top Thoroughbred facilities.

Kentucky Derby winners Barbaro and Animal Kingdom trained at Fair Hill, as did Eclipse Award winner Main Sequence, Belmont Stakes winner Union Rags,
Dubai World Cup winner Mystic Guide and multiple Breeders’ Cup winners starting with Da Hoss in 1996.

“She had a passion for making Fair Hill the best it could be,” said Dr. Kathy Anderson, a Fair Hill-based veterinarian, barn owner and member of the board. “That covered so many different factors of the job and the ups and downs of everything we went through.”

Sally’s career path wasn’t necessarily straightforward, but she more than made it work.

“My mother thought I should be a stockbroker,” she said in a 2002 feature in Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred magazine.

“I went to college and did the whole thing to do something other than horses, but never did. I went to school at Johns Hopkins and have been in Maryland ever
since. I did not graduate . . . I’m outside a lot. I’m not sure I could do what these 9-to 5 people do, sit behind a desk. I’m probably incapable of doing that.”

She didn’t have to.

Sally oversaw a facility with 18 independently owned barns housing hundreds of horses, a maintenance staff, two racetracks, miles of internal roads and horse paths, a lease with the state of Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources and the other details of a mid-sized business.

She used to laugh about her job description: “That varies from day to day. Anything they call me about.”

As proof, her phone rarely stopped ringing, though the job went far beyond merely answering calls.

Fair Hill evolved, replacing a wood-chip track with a Tapeta Footings synthetic surface, regularly upgrading its dirt track, installing a fiber line to bring high-speed
internet to every barn, managing environmental and drainage concerns and navigating the needs of the individual barn owners.

Opened in 1983, Fair Hill nearly closed before the end of its first  decade as several original investors exited and barns sold for a fraction of their construction costs.

Fasig-Tipton Company briefly took ownership, but left after two years.

The remaining barn owners, headed by Sally, retrenched and put Fair Hill on its path to success.

“I like to think I had something to do with it, but I don’t deserve all the accolades,” Sally said as part of a Trainer magazine feature in 2011. “There were other people and really a part of me just refused to believe it wouldn’t work. When I started, I was a barn owner too, so I had to pay a part of every bill I agreed to. We didn’t have much money when I first started, but it was very well spent.”

In addition to her husband Mike, Sally is survived by sons Bill and John, and two grandsons.