San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Before logos, letterheads used to build image
I’ve most enjoyed the articles on the Peacock (Military) Academy and others. Just thought you might like to see this beautiful depiction of the school. Unfortunately, I can’t find an indication as to who the artist was, only a small notation on the left side that says “Maverick-Clarke, S A Tex,” which is a firm attached to a number of old drawings like this. Maybe they had an artist on staff who did the work. I’m quite amazed at the details and time (this illustration) must have taken for (the artist) to remain anonymous.
From the mid-19th century, as printing processes improved, pictorial letterheads became an important promotional strategy, creating an often idealized image of attractive premises in a prosperous setting. Drawn freehand or from photographs, the pictures were engraved and printed on paper for correspondence, as most business was done by letter until use of the telephone became common. They served as a logo, creating a favorable first impression of the business and its surrounding community, with a moreor-less literal, if enhanced, visual of the company’s premises and the place where it was located.
One of the best-known San Antonio pictorial letterheads was drawn by German-born artist Erhard Pentenrieder, whose vignettes of Main Plaza and other landmarks are arranged along the top and both sides of stationery first published in the 1850s and reprinted until well into the 20th century.
The scenes of San Fernando Cathedral, the Alamo and other Spanish colonial missions, interspersed with depictions of frontiersmen and Native Americans, gave the city a romantic charm when new. The design, drawn free-hand, aged well because once the vaqueros and wagon trains were gone, their presence on paper cast the city in the mellow light of history. A local business using this letterhead was seen to be writing from a place tied to a colorful Western heritage, yet up-todate enough to have access to trained artists and luxury boutiques like Pentenrieder & Blersch, whose shop was on Main Plaza at Commerce
Street.
At the time of the 1910 letter by Wesley Peacock Sr., owneroperator of the Peacock Military School (later Academy),
the institution was 16 years old. The campus itself was front and center in the letterhead, representing it as well integrated in its suburban West End (later Woodlawn) neighborhood, with a spacious campus, lots of buildings, uniformed cadets on the parade ground, a tall flagpole and a convenient church right across the street.
Donna Peacock, granddaughter of Professor Peacock, as he was known, and author of “Parade Rest,” a two-volume history of the school, doesn’t have information about the letterhead but identified the buildings that would have been there at the time the note was written. These were “The Brick” (later Johnston Hall), the main building; a canteen known as “The Exchange,” run by student salesmen; the residences of Professor Peacock and his family; mess hall, infirmary and armory; and East Barracks (later McKinnon
Hall). In context, they look trim and right-size for their surroundings — substantial but
not too crowded. Peacock was head of school, but the other names on the letterhead show he’s no longer going it alone as he was in the school’s 1894 founding announcement (“I give all the instructions myself ”).
This was the letterhead that would have been received by prospective families, vendors, bankers and anyone else who might draw a positive impression from its representation of the school. Here, it’s used for a condolence letter to an acquaintance — probably Benjamin Wyshe (also occasionally spelled “Wysche”), who was the first librarian of San Antonio’s first real public library, the Carnegie Library (1903-1929) completed in 1903 with funds donated by industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
Wyshe was a professional librarian who earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina and took “library training” at Amherst College, according to the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography.
He came to San Antonio after serving as librarian at the University of Texas from 1897 to 1903. He married his first wife, Zoa Knowlton Woodward (who went by “Knowlton”) in 1898; the couple had no children, and she died Nov. 17, 1910, of “surgical shock” (excessive blood loss and low blood pressure) a few days after a hysterectomy to treat fibroid tumors (the typical treatment of the time).
Peacock, who acknowledges that he also has experienced “the shadow of death,” is inviting Wyshe to dinner at his home. The school founder had lost his first wife, Seline, mother of his first son, Wesley Jr., in 1898; several years later, he married Edith Wing, with whom he had three more children. Perhaps he wanted to give hope to the librarian by his own example. It may have worked, since Wyshe remarried in 1914 to Ethel Cheshire Deaver, and they had two children together.
Wyshe was a popular guest speaker at clubs and conferences, so he and Peacock may have known each other through educational circles, but they were also both members and officers of the Methodist Epworth League for younger adults. (That church across the street from Peacock’s school is West End Methodist.)
The Maverick-Clarke Litho Co. — referring to “lithography,” a print-making process — was a leading local printer founded in 1874 by, yes, one of those Mavericks, Samuel Maverick Jr., who was also a farmer, storekeeper and banker. It became Maverick-Clarke in 1895, renamed to reflect a partnership with relocated Galveston printer Robert Clarke, according to Clarke’s entry in the Handbook of Texas.
In 1929, a Maverick-Clarke newspaper advertisement included a clip from a Joske Bros. letterhead that featured a picture of the department store and extolled the printer’s “design quality” and “over 30 years” of supplying companies with “letterhead in keeping with their businesses.”
That indicates an emphasis on this part of the printing business as far back as the turn of the last century, around the time Maverick-Clarke announced, “We have it — the only copper-plate press in this city,” in a series of 1901 ads in the San Antonio Light. “Do not have your copper-plate work sent away, for we have the best engraver in the South and can fill your orders promptly and in the very latest styles.” (It wasn’t unusual for San Antonio businesses to send work to out-of-town printers and publishers, as C.H. Guenther flour mills and the Menger Hotel did, working with John Gast of St. Louis to develop their letterheads.)
The “best engraver” may have been Fred (also “Frederick” or “Friedrich”) F. Weiss, a native of Germany who apprenticed at the printing firm at age 17 in 1894. By the time he turned 21, the “popular engraver” was congratulated on his milestone birthday in the Light, Dec. 4, 1897. From San Antonio city directory listings, it appears that he may have later changed professions but could have still been with Maverick-Clarke when Peacock ordered his stationery — which may have been yeaÉrs before the date of the Wyshe letter.
Anyone with more information about the identity of Maverick-Clarke artists may contact this column.