Today is the anniversary of the great NoVa Elephant Excape

 From the arlington County Historical Society:

On this day in Arlington history, August 16, 1906: The Alexandria Gazette announces “Several elephants which are to be exhibited at Luna Park next week are expected to arrive via the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. They will be led through the city on their way to the resort. Luna Park, which has been a decided success from the day it opened, grows in popularity and continues to be visited by thousands.” Little do our forebears know that these four elephants—Tommie, Queenie, Annie, and Jennie--will stampede and remain at large for almost 2 weeks in Northern Virginia.

Luna Park was an amusement park that opened in 1906 at South Glebe Road and Jefferson Davis Highway. According to John Kelly of the “Washington Post,” “It featured fanciful buildings in a mishmash of styles, along with such rides as a roller coaster, a log flume and the "Old Woman's Shoe": a 30-foot boot that patrons could slide down. The Edisonia Palace displayed the latest advances in ‘mutoscopic, phonographic and electric inventions,’ while the Scenictorium featured a series of

On the morning of August. 21, the four elephants escaped. Annie was quickly caught. The others headed toward Alexandria where they smashed a barn, decimated a cornfield, and trampled a graveyard. By nightfall, Tommie had been apprehended and owner P.W. Barlow was offering a $500 reward for the capture of Queenie and Jennie. He persuaded Maj. Gordon W. Lillie to dispatch some of his men after the pair. Lillie was in town with "Pawnee Bill's Wild West and Great Far East Exhibition." When he put on his red cowboy shirt, he became Pawnee Bill.

On Sunday, August 26, a horse-mounted procession set off from Alexandria toward Baileys Crossroads, where there had been an elephant sighting. They found Jennie in a thicket and a “Wild West" performer named "Mexican Joe" lassoed her.

Queenie remained the last hold out at large. Wrote Kelly, “She was captured the next night by Barlow and his men in a pine grove 20 miles south of Alexandria. Having been chased all day by country folk wielding pitchforks, sticks, baseball bats and stones.”

1906 was Luna Park's first season. The park occupied 34 acres near the intersection of South Glebe Rd and Jefferson Davis Highway (US Route 1). A fire in April 1915 destroyed the park's signature roller coaster. The damage was extensive and it forced the park to go out of business. The structures in the park were mostly dismantled later in the year, though traces of the park were evident until as late as 1988. The site is currently occupied by the Arlington county sewage treatment facility.