San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Installation in photo likely not Camp Bullis
These photos are from a panoramic photo taken by M. F. Weaver in the 1920s. Do you think it could be Camp Bullis?
Most likely, the photo was taken a few years earlier — Miles Frank Weaver was hired by the U.S. Army to take pictures of its units and installations during the nation's participation in World War I (1917-1918) — and experts don't think it looks like a San Antonio installation.
John M. Manguso, author of “Camp Bullis,” a history of the facility established in 1906 for tactics and marksmanship practice, said the background of your photo looks “too built-up for the 1920s. By 1919, a row of mess halls had been built, but no buildings (like these).”
Camp Bullis and Camp Stanley, as the Leon
Springs Military Reservation, were in use and under the auspices of Fort Sam Houston by World War I, along with some temporary camps used for specialty purposes.
The one depicted in the panoramic photograph is “definitely not Camp Bullis, Stanley, Funston (used for officers training and renamed ‘Stanley' to avoid confusion with Camp Funston,
Kan.) or John Wise (balloon observation in the Olmos Basin, covered here Dec. 16, 2011),” said Jackie Davis, director of the Fort Sam Houston Museum. “The land is too dry, and there's a town next to it,” unlike Camp Bullis, which is on former ranch land far northwest of the San Antonio city limits.
Davis noted a railroad, an arroyo and a bridge in the photo, as well as a building marked “Estrada Lumber Co.,” which had a location in Eagle Pass.
Given the style of the photo and the buildings, she concluded, “I'd say we're looking at one of those small border posts along the river from1911 to the 1920s.”
With all these features, the best match is Fort Duncan, established in 1846 as the Camp at Eagle Pass during the U.S.-Mexican War and used thereafter to protect nearby settlements from Lipan Apache raids and later from bandits and during border skirmishes.
There were 12,000 troops stationed at Fort Duncan during the war, so it was significant enough to
be documented by the Army for information as well as public-relations purposes.
Mass-produced panoramic cameras first became available around the turn of the last century and often were used to get complete pictures of military units, events and installations. There's one on the Library of Congress website at loc.gov of men at attention at Camp Funston (Texas) in 1917 by C.W. Henningsen, and one of a ceremony with spectators at Fort Sam Houston on Flag Day 1918 by M.F. Weaver, whose name and San Antonio business address appear on the panoramic photograph.
Weaver, born in 1879 in Pennsylvania, took a circuitous route to his profession. During his first marriage
to Pauline Glemason Weaver (1900-1906), he became a prospector for minerals. They divorced in Teller County, Colo.
With his second marriage, to Etta Hazle Judkins (who went by “Hazle”), he segued into work as an “oil well driller” for the North Star Oil Co. in San Luis Obispo, Calif., according to the 1910 census. It couldn't have been especially lucrative, since 19-year-old Hazle is listed as “boardinghouse keeper,” and the Weavers lived with three lodgers in their rented home.
Miles Weaver may also have been working for his father-in-law, David Robey Judkins, a Santa Barbara, Calif., photographer who died in 1909, because by 1911, Weaver seems to have taken over Judkins' studio in Santa Maria, Calif., where he took what may have been his first panoramic photo, of the
“North side of Main Street, Santa Maria,” and sent it to the Library of Congress, presumably to protect his copyright of the image.
The couple moved their studio, where Hazle was business manager, in 1916 to Los Angeles. His career, according to an article on the Library of Congress site, “was typical of many studio photographers in the early decades of the 20th century.” After the
U.S. entered World War I, he “realized the lucrative business potential of photographing the military troops at various southwestern Army bases and forts.”
From a business address at 121W. Houston St. in San Antonio, he booked jobs where he used a Cirkut panoramic camera — the same model used by San Antonio's Eugene Goldbeck, with his own modifications — to capture patriotic scenes for the Army while his wife ran the business back home.
Weaver was listed at this address in the 1919-1920 city directory (probably compiled in late 1918) but missing in the 1921-1922 volume, according to research by a volunteer at the Conservation Society of San Antonio library. His residence was given as Los Angeles, indicating that San Antonio was a temporary base for him for the duration of the war.
In 1918, Weaver was 39, with a wife and two kids. His draft registration card was filed Sept. 9, 1918, with the “Local (draft) Board, Maverick County, Texas” — Eagle Pass is the county seat of Maverick — and stamped again three days later by “Local Board No. 8” in Los Angeles County.
Through the 1920s, Weaver sent several more panoramics to the Library of Congress, mostly of bathing-beauty pageants and “fashion parades” along the coast of Southern California. The 1920 and 1930 censuses show the Weavers owning their own business and mortgage-free home, eventually with four children.
After Miles Weaver died in 1932, first Hazle then their two sons operated the studio into the 1960s. Unfortunately, says the Library of Congress article, “When the company was dissolved, all of the negatives and business records were destroyed.”