Decline of the Track Grounds

The physical decline of the race track property had begun almost as soon as the Commonwealth banned betting on horse racing. The track itself ceased operation at the end of 1895, and with that the stables were abandoned, as was the judges' tower. The large grandstands building was kept in some repair as its indoor ground floor was used as a pool room.

This all changed with the outbreak of the Spanish American War on 25 April 1898. War fever was pronounced and in very little time the Army had mustered 223,000 men into the US Volunteer Forces, to supplement the much smaller US Army and the state militias. These men had to be clothed and equipped; in addition, once out in the field supplies, such as food, ammunition and forage had to be moved forward to where they were. The Army began scouring the country for horses and, more importantly, mules, to pull the wagons needed to keep hundreds of thousands of men in the field supplied.

The troops could be put on base, given tents, and they (generally) did what they were told. Horses and mules, on the other hand, needed paddocks and stalls. Fortunately, almost within sight of the brass in DC and Ft Myer, was the St Asaph racetrack. In its short heyday the track housed hundreds of horses in its stables, now sitting empty. It must have seemed a Godsend.

A lease was quickly arranged and by the third week of May a railroad siding had been completed and by early June there were 2,000 mules and 1,500 wagons held there. The mules had been shipped from St Louis and the wagons came as components from various places around Martinsburg, WV to be assembled at the new depot.

To run all this the depot needed a commander and Elias Parsons put himself forward for the job. He had served in the 46th Ohio Infantry Volunteers during the Civil War, as its the regimental quartermaster. Moving to Utah, he became a US marshal and on the outbreak of war with Spain stepped forward and was appointed a captain of volunteers and brought to Washington, where he was given command of the St Asaph Quartermaster Depot.

Volunteer Captain Parsons' tenure was not without controversy. On 9 March 1899 a board of survey was sent out from Washington to examine reports of shortages of equipment. On 4 June two former workers at the depot filed a complaint with the Secretary of War alleging that crews had regularly been dispatched to Parsons' private home in DC to repair, paint, hang wallpaper, fix or build furniture, etc. Parsons replied that they were simply disgruntled employees he had fired. The results of the investigations were never made public, but it seems likely that they were inconclusive and on 25 May 1901 he was relieved of his duties at St Asaph and on 30 June he was mustered out of the service. That December he applied for placement on the retired list, entitling him to retired pay, but this was denied as he had never served in the Army, only in the volunteers.

His command was a busy one, as it was the transit point for many of the animals and wagons being dispatched to the troops in Cuba. Not only were animals coming and going, with the need to be inspected and, if need be, treated, but the teamsters who ran the wagons were civilian contractors, adding another layer of confusion. The fighting in Cuba ended on 12 August and the entire process was reversed, with volunteers now eager to get home and mules and wagons being repatriated at a great rate, usually passing through St Asaph. Thus, while there were only four or five mules left at St Asaph on 20 August, six or seven hundred were expected in the next few weeks from the camps further south, even before the animals from Cuba arrived. The wagons, of course, were worn and damaged by that point and the animals tired and hard-done, so there was further work to be done at the depot.

By mid-September the Army held thousands of excess mules, many of them at what one newspaper called “the great mule depot at St Asaph's”. Most of the mules were sent out around the country, but by October St Asaph still held 800 head of stock, mostly horses. Public auctions started in November, the first selling 46 horses, 22 mules, 25 Martinsburg wagons and tons 

(literally) of miscellaneous supplies, including 125 large tents with walls. The sales continued for the next year, but by then action was heating up in the Philippines and further sales were halted. The animals were sent west but the depot remained, using the upper level of the old grandstand for storage of QM material and stables for wagons.

The supplies stored there were of a very general nature.  For example, the depot sent a thousand hospital tents to Jacksonville, Florida after their great fire of 1901.  A more mundane example arose from a 10 April 1903 order from the War Department that toilet paper be supplied be supplied to Forts McKinley and Levett in Maine because the troops were using regular paper which failed to disintegrate and clogged up the “odorless excavators” in use.  This latter was a pumping device used to empty out septic tanks and cesspools, presumably in a relatively odor-free manner.

The St Asaph Corral in 1902

One result was a directive of 25 April 1903 to ship three odorless excavators and 68 “closet and urinal troughs” from the St Asaph depot to the two forts. It seems likely that St Asaph was also the source of tents, stoves and field ranges sent to those two forts at the same time.

When the pool room on the ground floor of the grandstand finally closed down in early 1905, the Army moved in, taking the northwestern end for two offices and a general storage area of roughly 71 feet square. The second floor, which held the grandstands themselves, had a roof and was thus suitable for storage as well, and was retained for harnesses and tents, and canvas partitions set aside an area 20x43 feet for a harness repair shop. The depot was finally closed down in 1906.

The St Asaph depot was briefly reactivated in early February 1909 as the Army began its withdrawal from Cuba. As part of the new lease JM Hill gave Samuel DeVaughan, local contractor in Del Ray, a $2,500 contract to rehabilitate the stables for the arrival of several hundred mules. The Army was gone by early April, apparently leaving damaged buildings in their wake. A troop train had pulled off overnight on the rail siding and, without power or lights, the troops suffered greatly from a freak late winter storm in March. It would not be surprising if some of the enterprising troops “salvaged” some wood from the grandstand and stables for fires. JM Hill was not pleased and sued, to an unknown result.  (continued below)

Below: A 1906 plan of the grandstand by the Army, showing the ground floor (left) and the upper floor with the seats (right).

With the closure of the pool room and the departure of the Army the former racetrack was left abandoned. Not for long, however, as squatters moved in. The stables that lined the east side of Mt Vernon Avenue near the old entrance to the race track were quickly turned into tenements. Most of these, however, burned to the ground in a fire 16 June 1911.

The Washington Evening Star's feature writer J Harry Shannon wrote a series of articles for the paper describing his visits to little-known interesting places in the DC area. This piece of June 1914 included a description of the abandoned St Asaph Racetrack.  He describes the dilapidated state of the remaining buildings, the grandstand and the judge's stand, and notes that two African-American families were living in the grandstand building, down from a larger number a few years earlier.

Two years later the big building was gone. On 19 April 1916 the Washington Times reported “Flames that illuminated the heavens for miles around and were plainly visible from Washington, last night destroyed the big grandstand and other dilapidated buildings at the old St. Asaph's race track north of Alexandria”. The fire was blamed on squatters on the land, but the dry, rotted wood would have required little to set off. Chemical fire engines from Alexandria responded but could do nothing, leaving the former racetrack flattened.

The racetrack, now an empty field, would see one more use, as an active Army base for the 12th Field Artillery in 1917. The story continues here.