San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Is mystery tower artist’s fancy, a mistake?
I was looking at the 1891 San Antonio Light Birds Eye map of San Antonio, and noticed in the hills north of Fort Sam Houston (maybe Terrell Hills or Alamo Heights), there is a tall tower beside a large square structure. I have looked at all of the period maps and cannot figure out what this is. I thought at first it was the tower at Comanche Lookout
Park, but that was not built until 1928. Any ideas?
It looks like a second Quadrangle — the original rectangular storage and office building with a water and watch tower built in the late 1870s at Fort Sam Houston is on the map, too — but the second one is a little farther north of the Army post and set in what appears to be undeveloped land.
You’re not the only one to be puzzled by the doppelganger tower. Weighing in on your question were some of the heaviest hitters on the localhistory scene, and they’re also stumped by the unmarked landmark. Despite the double quadrangle, when artist Augustus Koch was first shopping this map around, this newspaper’s ancestor had no problem with it. “An enterprising citizen has recently completed a magnificent birds-eye view of San Antonio,” reported the San Antonio Express, Feb. 25, 1891. “The plan of the city and suburbs can be distinctly traced and all the prominent buildings are shown plainly.”
In a tradition of itinerant mapmakers that goes back to Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, the German-born Koch brought his craft to this country in time to serve as a draftsman with a Wisconsin infantry unit during the Civil War. According to the Vintage City Maps site, “He began his bird’s-eye-view career with a few pictures of Iowa cities” during the late 1860s. From there, he made his way to Texas, whose cities and towns he depicted for most of the last three decades of the 19th centu- ry.
His 1891 map was an update; he already had published San Antonio maps in 1873 and 1886. In between, he traveled the state. A list of his works on the website of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth shows he also was active in at least 17 other Texas cities, including Austin, Corpus Christi, Houston and Galveston and smaller towns such as Bastrop, Brenham, Cuero, New Braunfels and Schulenberg. Our city may have been the only one he mapped three times; in 1891, he is thought to have been about 51 years old.
Koch is a man of mystery himself. He was just below the top producers of these maps but seems to have just dropped out of sight. His date of death is not known; the map in question is one of his later productions.
Koch’s last San Antonio map “was published in a special issue of the San Antonio Light in December 1891” as the centerfold, according to a sales site, Copano Bay Press Gallery. Readers could save and use it or more likely frame it. It’s hard to know what expectations they had for its accuracy, although it is studded in the central city with recognizable places, such as “Alamo Plaza planted with palms and the (Alamo’s) Long Barrack ‘enhanced’ with Hugo & Schmeltzer’s wooden (store) facade.”
Known as “perspective mapping,” the preparation for this work was demanding, taking “a vast amount of painstakingly detailed labor,” stated an unsigned article, “The History of Bird’s Eye View Maps,” on the Vintage City Maps site. “The artist gathered up any existing surveys and plat maps and then walked in the streets, sketching buildings, trees and other features to present a complete and accurate landscape.”
So … if Koch walked all the way up to the northernmost reaches of the city and saw a tower next to a much lower, squarish building, what was he looking at?
The rest of his map in this area is substantially true to the area and might hold some clues. “The line going from the tower to the lower right generally follows the old Tilden Street,” notes John Manguso, author of “The Quadrangle” and retired director of the Fort Sam Houston Museum. “The building at the left edge above Fort Sam is the Cunningham House. So, the tower is along Tilden Street and some distance north of Wilson Street. Tilden stopped at the reservoir, around John Street, which is now approximately Funston Place. That puts the tower near the reservoir,” a then-open reservoir that was part of G.W. Brackenridge’s water system and is now the amphitheater at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.
Because of the elevation, higher than at Fort Sam, Manguso postulates that, “A water tower would be useful in maintaining water pressure in water mains leading (from the reservoir) to other parts of town.” When he checked photos of the area taken in the early years of the 20th century, however, none showed anything that looked like the tower drawn by Koch.
In 1891, the year the map was published, the water works was going in another direction. “That was the year Brackenridge drilled the first large Edwards (Aquifer) well for municipal supply,” said Gregg Eckhardt, curator of the Edwards Aquifer website. “They were going straight to distribution, no towers.” The city’s first water tower was built in 1925, just north of Hildebrand Avenue, between Shook Avenue and Devine Street, he said, citing a story in the City Water Board’s newsletter, the Water Log, May 1965, which refers to “the city’s first elevated storage reservoir.” Taken down in 2008, Eckhardt said, “It was a round tank on legs, very different from the rectangular tower in question.”
Koch’s previous San Antonio map, published in 1886, “essentially ends at Fort Sam, though it does look north to show some scattered houses,” said Maria Watson Pfeiffer, author of several nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and a former city parks historian, who has done a report on the history of the area, including the reservoir, and “didn’t find any evidence of a tower.”
Also consulted were Institute of Texan Cultures photo curator Tom Shelton and independent researcher and local photo historian David Haynes, co-author with Pfeiffer of “The Historical Narrative of San Pedro Creek,” as well as a few others — none of whom could identify what’s beginning to look more and more like a fairy-tale tower. This may be, said one of them, “the first time these collective minds have run up against a brick wall.”
Although it’s not otherwise a “Here be dragons” kind of fanciful map, “It seems possible that the mapmaker might throw in a fake feature way off in the background just for fun,” said San Antonio Conservation Society Librarian Beth Standifird, “especially since people at the time had limited means of magnification.”
Or maybe Koch was just having a bad day and needed to move on to the next town, the next pile of plats and the next newspaper payday.
The mystery tower may have been nothing more than “the artist’s first impression of the Quadrangle, incorrectly drawn and mistakenly placed,” Haynes proposed. “When the artist realized his mistake, he just left it on the edge of the (map) and drew the Quadrangle in correctly, rather than redrawing the whole thing. I mean, it’s way up in the corner, way out of town; who the hell would ever notice?”
Anyone who can explain Koch’s extra Quadrangle may contact this column. All responses will be forwarded and may be featured in a future column.