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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — On June 21, 1898, the City of Alexandria outlawed the practice of street fires. In the days before municipal trash collection, Alexandria's commercial corridors had developed a recurring sanitation problem: litter collected in front of storefronts and along sidewalks faster than the city's irregular cleanup efforts could remove it, and local merchants had taken to building small fires in the gutters along King Street and the surrounding commercial blocks to burn off the accumulated trash. By 1898, the practice had grown from a quiet nuisance into what city officials described as a public health and safety menace — open flames burning beside wood-frame storefronts, in a city whose 19th century history was already marked by several catastrophic fires.
The new ordinance did more than ban the fires. To give Alexandrians somewhere to put their litter instead, the city commissioned its first set of wooden trash receptacles — painted with artistic advertisements and placed along the most heavily trafficked commercial streets. Residents were urged to deposit their refuse in the new containers rather than discarding it at will on sidewalks and gutters. The receptacles were among the earliest examples in Alexandria of what the late 19th and early 20th century called "civic improvement" — a movement to bring public infrastructure to bear on quality-of-life problems that had previously been left to private initiative.
Alexandria's first formal municipal trash collection would not arrive until later, building on the foundation the 1898 ordinance laid: that the city itself, not its merchants, was responsible for keeping its public spaces clean.
Information via the City of Alexandria's Office of Historic Alexandria.
Also on June 21 in Alexandria history: When the Friendship Firehouse's oversized steeple was repaired for the first of many times
On June 21, 1860, the Friendship Fire Company recorded a routine but telling note in its minute book. "Repairs to the Friendship Fire Engine House, ordered necessary by the damage done to building by storm of 26th have nearly been completed," the entry read. "The steeple has been plumbed and again covered with tin."
The Friendship Firehouse at 107 South Alfred Street had been built only five years earlier, in 1855, and its tall original steeple — captured in a Civil War-era photograph held by the Library of Congress — had begun causing structural problems for the building almost immediately. The June 1860 storm was one in a series that compromised the structure over the next decade. On June 4, 1870, the firehouse was again declared in dangerous condition, and all of the company's fire apparatus had to be temporarily removed from the building. Soon afterward, the company gave up on the original steeple altogether. The tall structure was dismantled and replaced with the smaller cupola that still tops the building today, more than 150 years later.
The Friendship Fire Company itself, founded in 1774, is the oldest fire company in Alexandria — its founding predating the country it would later help defend during the Revolution. The 107 South Alfred Street building it occupied from 1855 forward is, today, the Friendship Firehouse Museum, operated by the city's Office of Historic Alexandria.
Information via the City of Alexandria's Office of Historic Alexandria and the Library of Congress.
