History of the San Antonio Jockey Club: From Formation to Disbandment
By: Lewis F. Fisher
Published: February 21, 2024
Updated: April 29, 2025
The San Antonio Jockey Club, organized in May 1893, unrelated to clubs of the same name existing in the 1860s and 1930s, was formed by Hermann D. Kampmann at a meeting in the Menger Hotel. Kampmann, son of the late building contractor and quarry operator John H. Kampmann, owned the Menger as well as the city’s gas and electric companies, making him a distant second in local wealth to financier George W. Brackenridge, one of the 130 members of the elite club.
That summer the Jockey Club formed a subsidiary, the San Antonio Park Association, to purchase from Brackenridge twenty-six acres between the San Antonio River and River Avenue (later Broadway), two miles north of downtown. They paid $26,000 for the property. A twisting three miles south of downtown, at Riverside Park, the International Fair was in its fifth year. The fair was cosponsored by the city and Mexican government and drew tens of thousands of visitors annually to its racetrack, exhibition hall, stock show, and amusement area. Kampmann and his Jockey Club associates set out to lure the International Fair to their more conveniently located site.
In November 1893 the Jockey Club’s first season began with five days of racing by several dozen horses. Ready for use in the spring 1894 season were a 1,500-seat grandstand and two-story clubhouse designed by member and architect James Riely Gordon. On two edges of the property were stables for 200 horses. That fall a stock show was planned along with agricultural and textile buildings, like those at the International Fair, but backers were unable to fund them. In 1895 a velodrome of banked boards was built on the outer rim of the half-mile horse track for bicyclists and drew national cycling stars. A summer theater and baseball games were tried. World heavyweight champion boxer Jim Corbett trained there for a few weeks in 1895 prior to an exhibition match at the Grand Opera House.
But the Jockey Club’s last significant race came in January 1898, and the area was deteriorating. In September the site was leased to the Fourth Texas Volunteer Infantry and named Camp Mosby. The Fourth Texas used the track as a campsite and parade ground for six months. After the end of the Spanish-American War, the unit mustered out and the camp closed.
With gentle persuasion having failed to attract the International Fair, the Jockey Club called the issue with a formal proposal to the San Antonio International Fair Association in May 1899. Moving the International Fair to the Jockey Club site was approved by the largest number of fair shareholders—165 to 147—but votes were counted by shares owned. The move was defeated, 2,558 to 1,438, and the San Antonio Jockey Club soon disbanded. Racetrack facilities were rented again to the military in July 1899, this time as Camp Capron for organization of recruits as the Thirty-third Infantry of the United States Army. Two months later that unit shipped out for the Philippines and Camp Capron closed.
In December 1899 George Brackenridge, who had regained title to the land, included it in his gift to the city of the original section of Brackenridge Park. The grandstand was taken down in 1900, but the clubhouse remained to become a home for park groundskeepers and, in 1916, the clubhouse for the new surrounding Brackenridge Park Golf Course until the present clubhouse opened in 1923. Lightly-attended bicycle, motorcycle, automobile, and horse races occurred intermittently on the old track until 1910. The track entrance road off Broadway south of Brackenridge Avenue survived as the main southern entrance to Brackenridge Park until drainage construction in the 1960s caused it to become a dead end.
Bibliography:
Lewis F. Fisher, Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2022). San Antonio Daily Light, November 6, 1893; May 5, 10, 1894; May 26, 1899; December 23, 1899.
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Lewis F. Fisher, “San Antonio Jockey Club,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/san-antonio-jockey-club.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
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- February 21, 2024
- April 29, 2025
