San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Balloonists’ tie-down blocks likely recycled
Is there any truth to the rumor that some of the balloon tie-downs from Camp John Wise, historically located in the Olmos Park area, were so large that instead of destroying and removing them when this neighborhood was created in the 1920s, the builders worked around them, or in some cases, built homes around and over them? I know there is a very big block of concrete in the Olmos Basin Park, about 100 yards west-northwest of the intersection of Devine and Park roads. which appears to me as if it could have easily been an aviation balloon tie-down.
Camp John Wise — named after a 19th-century advocate for military use of lighter-than-air craft — inflated and deflated quickly, midway through America’s participation in the last years of World War I. Planned for training and later mobilization of soldiers in the U.S. Army’s Balloon Service, the facility was established on Jan. 19, 1918, on 60 acres of land leased from the Herff-Dittmar estate, increased to an eventual 211 acres. The floating fleet went from a single balloon to a high of five, filled with hydrogen gas to rise as high as 3,000 feet above the undeveloped ground of the Olmos Valley.
The site was deemed ideal because of its splendid isolation and temperate climate. Four miles north of downtown San Antonio and far from airplane activity, then mostly on the city’s South Side with Stinson Airport, Brooks and Kelly Field, the balloon camp predated Olmos Basin Park and the neighborhood
(later incorporated) of Olmos Park, both created in the late 1920s. Because the observation balloons’ mission was to gain perspective to guide groundbound troops, it was important that its personnel train in friendly skies. San Antonio’s atmosphere was “wonderfully adapted to observation,” camp commandant Lt. Col. James Prentice told the San Antonio Light, March 31, 1918. “On a clear day, you can see the Gulf of Mexico.”
The balloonists, also known as balloon men, rigged and flew cigar- or sausage-shape craft, riding in what looked like giant wicker picnic baskets, hoisted into the air by motorized winches and kitted out with canvas backpacks for their maps and navigational instruments. Captive balloons were tethered by steel cables to trucks that ferried them around. There were free (untethered) balloon flights on Saturday mornings, sometimes pranked by military aviators in comparatively safe and sturdy wood-and-fabric biplanes.
Soldiers at Camp John Wise were highly visible members of their temporary community, virtually adopted by the nearby Laurel Heights Methodist Church, whose congregation invited them for home cooking and fellowship; fielding baseball, football and polo teams to compete in local leagues; and showing up at Victory Loan and recruitment drives, where members of the public were invited to see and touch one of the outlandish craft as “expert balloon men demonstrated the balloon and its work,” according to the Light, April 27, 1919.
Although 29 balloon companies were trained at Camp Wise, few were sent to try their skills abroad. Both Allied and enemy balloons, filled with highly flammable gas, proved vulnerable to incendiary bullets fired from airplanes. The war ended with an armistice signed Nov. 11, 1918.
Often said to be a “permanent” installation, the balloon camp was closed March 30, 1919, and its mission and remaining personnel were transferred to Brooks Field. The government’s lease on most of the land — where barracks, office and recreation buildings had been hastily constructed — was set to expire midway through 1920, so the structures of what had been known as “Balloonton” were pulled down and sold for parts. Buyers could call at the soon-tobe ex-camp on McCullough Avenue and, for half of market price, haul away lumber, pipes and plumbing fixtures, electrical and telephone wire, radiators and hot-water heaters.
One item not mentioned were the “large concrete blocks with large metal rings in the center,” as described by reader Frank Macias in this column, Dec. 11, 2016, who remembered seeing them off McCullough as a child in the 1950s, noting that “the blocks are no longer there.” An undated partial copy, from the
Conservation Society of San Antonio library, of a story in the North San Antonio Times — remembered by former publisher Lewis Fisher as having run in the early-to-mid-1970s — includes a photograph “from someone’s scrapbook” of a single block at McCullough and Primera Drive, described as “one of (former) rows of concrete stanchions, often obscured by weeds, which anchored training balloons.”
In the Light, Dec. 10, 1979, columnist Joe Carroll Rust notes that “many of those huge rock moorings for the old balloon school had been carried off ” from the site of a then-new apartment complex, 102 Primera under construction in that area.
Primera was “well inside the boundaries of the camp,” said John Manguso, author of “San Antonio in the Great War” as well as many other books on local military history. The block in the North San Antonio Times photo looks as if it could conform to the dimensions Manguso cites — 3 feet square and 3 feet deep.
The location of the foundation in your picture “puts it on the perimeter of the camp,” the author said. “None of the photos that I have of the camp show a balloon tethered near the perimeter (and) the Camp John Wise yearbook does not show any balloons tethered to something like the item in (your) photo.”
There was an elevated water tank at the camp, Manguso said, “but its foundation would be square, not irregular like this one. Foundations for the woodframe buildings in the camp consisted of several stone blocks,” the size of the tie-down block in the North San Antonio Times photo.
The city of Olmos Park — incorporated in the 1940s — began in 1927 as Olmos Park Estates, a residential development bounded by McCullough, Olmos Drive, Contour Drive and Olmos Basin Park, its area approximately matching those of the balloon camp, which predated platted streets.
The site of the irregular slab in your picture “is just outside the city limits of Olmos Park, and we are unsure if the slab is related to the balloons,” said Olmos Park City Secretary Kyndra Munoz.
Some of the original houses of Olmos Park Estates, built from 1927 through the early 1930s, have been advertised as having a “rock foundation” or a “concrete on rock foundation,” but that may refer to naturally occurring rock.
Anyone with information about the structure in the contemporary photo or what happened to the balloon tie-downs may contact this column.