Those driving on Russell Road aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico to or from the Commissary, Exchange or back gate may have noticed a memorial plaque near the sign for the North Bank trail bearing the word “Gracias.”

If they notice the plaque at all, that one word is probably all drivers are able to read before traffic carries them along. “Gracias?” they might wonder. “Spanish for ‘thank you?’ What’s that all about?”

Gracias was actually a horse, a horse favored by Gen. Lemuel Shepherd, commandant of the Marine Corps during the Korean War, when he was posted to MCBQ as commandant of Marine Corps Schools from 1948-50. The plaque marks the site where Gracias was buried in 1962.

Gracias, born in 1935, was a “flea-bitten gray” (meaning that his coat was white with flecks of red throughout) of average size who spent a redoubtable 27 years in the Quantico stables, serving as a training horse for lieutenants learning to ride and load pack saddles. He was also shown and ridden by Marines and civilians in the annual Quantico Horse Shows, which were held through the 60s. In his later years, Marines and their families were able to take Gracias on leisurely recreational rides.

 “He had heart with a capital ‘H,’” wrote retired Lt. Gen. Louis Metzger in an April 2003 article for the Marine Corps Gazette.

“He was very old and swaybacked [a condition that occurs in elderly horses where the back appears to dip] when I knew him,” remembers Pat Lynn, a 1965 graduate of Quantico Middle/High School (QMHS) who rode at the stables every day. “I remember the riding instructors telling me he was ‘older than God.’”

When Gracias died, Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak, then serving as counterinsurgency adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, remembered how much he and his children had loved the gentle old horse when they lived aboard Quantico. He requested that Gracias receive special burial. According to the book Quantico: Semper Progrendi, Always Forward by Bradley E. Gernand and Michelle A. Krowl, it took the work of the Maintenance Department and a front-end loader to do the job, but Gracias was given an honorable resting place.

“I was elated the first time I was back on base for a high school reunion to happen upon the marker,” said Barbara Horner-Miller, whose father was posted to Quantico from 1960 to 1963. “I jumped out of the car and took a picture to send to my brother, who was also a rider.”

Horner-Miller said that Gracias was allowed to roam free in his retirement. He would leave his stall in the base stables, which at the time were located on what is now the campus of Marine Corps University, and wander the base.

“He would occasionally find himself on the streets of Quantico town,” she wrote. “Someone in town would call the base stables and they would send one of the Marines over to retrieve him.”

Only two of the instructors were allowed to ride Gracias in his final years, Horner-Miller said, but he would still join the other horses when they were used for riding lessons and would “happily” jump the cavalettis with them.

Metzger was an instructor at the Marine Corps Schools in 1951 and was also assigned the duty of post equitation officer. He often rode Gracias in jumping events at Quantico horse shows and wrote that the horse “gave me more than my share of blue ribbons and bowls.”

In Metzger’s time, Marines still used Gracias and the other 49 government horses living in the stables—which in many cases had been bred by the Army and moved to Quantico when the Army stopped using horses—for training. Historically, horses were used by the Marine Corps for troop and supply transport and as “officer’s mounts.” As late as the Korean War, despite the fact that wars were fully mechanized, horses such as the decorated war horse Staff Sgt. Reckless served as pack horses, carrying supplies and ammunition and sometimes evacuating the wounded.

Metzger wrote that lieutenants waiting for their Basic School class to begin were selected for the two-week equestrian course “with no consideration of whether or not they wanted to learn to ride.” They learned about equine anatomy and temperament, how to feed, water, and groom a horse, how to saddle and bridle, how to load a pack saddle and how to ride.

By the time Lynn and Horner-Miller lived at Quantico, the stables were used for recreational purposes only. However, they were still very active.

“I was at the stables every day,” Lynn remembered. “I was a fixture. It was an eclectic mix of people who used it, who were drawn by horses. My dad was a master gunnery sergeant and I ended up being best friends with colonel’s kids and general’s kids who I met at the stables.”

The Quantico stables were also respected. Lynn recalls that when President Kennedy had horse trails put in at Camp David for his equestrienne wife, he asked for mounted Marines to guard them. Lynn’s father, Master Gunnery Sgt. Charlie Browning, went there every weekend, taking a few of the Quantico horses with him for Jackie Kennedy to ride. Browning received a hand-written note from Jackie, also signed in a kindergarten scrawl by her daughter Caroline, thanking him for “all he did for the President and for our children.”

In the 1970s, the stables burned. They were rebuilt off of Purvis Road and operated by Marine Corps Community Services through 2004 and then by the Quantico Riding Club until they were permanently closed in 2012. They are remembered fondly by those who used them in Gracias’ day.