ALEXANDRIA, Va. – On this day in the summer of 1898, Alexandria was a city in motion. The Spanish-American War had turned it into a military waystation, with thousands of soldiers, supplies and animals passing through on their way to and from the front. The U.S. Army had commandeered the stables of the old St. Asaph racetrack in Del Ray — a horse racing facility that had been operating since the early 1890s under the name Gentlemen’s Driving Club before being renamed St. Asaph after an 1894 renovation. By 1898, the track had become one of the more colorful institutions in Northern Virginia, operating a poolroom that by some estimates was generating $150,000 in annual profit through creative bookkeeping designed to skirt Virginia’s gambling laws. The city’s police looked the other way. The racetrack wouldn’t be shuttered until 1905, when a crusading Commonwealth’s Attorney finally forced it closed. Today the site is Del Ray — the quaint suburban-style cottages having replaced whatever chaos once lived there.
But in the summer of 1898, those stables were full of Army mules. Thousands of them, essential to military transport in the era before motorized vehicles. And on the night of August 2, a passing freight train set off a chain of events that the city would be talking about for some time.
Nearly 200 mules stampeded.
Spooked by the train, the animals broke loose from their corral and scattered across the Duke Street corridor in every direction. What followed was several hours of Alexandria residents watching bewildered mules wander their streets, crash through property and generally refuse to be recovered. The damage stretched from the village of West End, near Diagonal Road, all the way into downtown Alexandria. It took hours to round them all up.
That same evening — and it is unclear whether the mule stampede was a factor — a soldier appeared at the Alexandria Police Department. He was not wearing clothes. He reported that his clothes had been stolen from his body…