San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Postcard brings Alamo table into clearer focus
I was reading an old (Aug. 22, 2020) column on the origin of the Alamo table. If the mystery of the table has not been solved, I have a postcard showing the table, its location and the table’s name.
The postcard I have of the Alamo Table is the front cover of an accordion style booklet that does not have the typical back sides that separate postcards normally have. It contains 10 postcards printed on each side of the other for a total of 20 postcards. The back of the Alamo table (card) was a postcard showing a herd of elk in Brackenridge Park.
I am enclosing the entire front cover of the booklet, which shows the Alamo table with a place for a 2-cent stamp. Also enclosed is a copy of the postcard flap, which shows the publisher but no date.
The caption on your postcard — “Bridal Breakfast Table at Otto Koehler Park” — cracked the case of the Alamo-motif picnic table mystery, first investigated here in 2020 when a reader sent a family photograph of it. Experts on San Antonio city parks, the Alamo and concrete sculpture drew a blank while admiring the table’s folkarty distinctiveness. Thanks to the postcard’s identification with Otto Koehler Park, we now know when it was created, where it was located, who ordered it, who made it and why it came to be … just not what happened to erase it so thoroughly from municipal memory.
Back when this city had at least two daily newspapers and a much smaller population, very little got past its reporters, including the origins of the Alamo table. This “rustic seat and table with a replica of the Alamo at either end,” as described by the San Antonio Light, Sept. 19, 1916, was “a new feature provided for Otto Koehler Park,” then pretty new itself, donated the previous year by Emma Koehler in memory of her husband, Otto, a wealthy brewer who was shot dead in 1914 under murky circumstances.
Her gift of just under 11 acres of land stipulated that beer could be sold there on every day but Sunday — the opposite of the adjacent teetotaling Brackenridge Park at the time.
Park visitors may have quaffed some Pearl beer — the Koehlers’ products — at the table in question while it lasted. Based on a few available photos, its top and backrests were made of wood. According to the Light, “the supports of the table and the two seats facing it are of concrete, and those (supports) beneath it are the ones fashioned like the front of the Alamo.”
The artisan credited was Joseph Wilkens, a city employee. As such, he went back a long way; the San Antonio Freie Presse für Texas, a Germanlanguage newspaper, Sept. 5, 1883, notes that Wilkens had been put forward and announced as a new police officer. In city directories, he’s listed as a laborer for the city; and in the 1910 U.S. census, he’s a custodian at Cassiano Park. If he was a sculptor, it was as a hobby or side hustle.
The Alamo table was ordered and probably imagineered by Ray Lambert. He was a former stonemason who became San Antonio’s parks commissioner in 1915 and developed a vision for Brackenridge Park — an aggregation of donated and purchased land that included a disused quarry — that took
advantage of its natural, unspoiled qualities and developed it as the location for a municipal zoo. The Light says that Lambert considered the new table to be “one of the most attractive features of the park” and that he “plan(ned) to have others constructed.” The others — who knows if any were built? — might have depicted other Spanish colonial missions. “They are older than the missions in California and are finer examples of architecture,” Lambert said. “It has always seemed to me that we don’t make enough display of (them), and I’ll venture to say there are thousands of visitors who come here every year and never see any of the missions save the Alamo.”
OK, but why was the first of (maybe) many a “Bridal Breakfast Table”? The benches look as if they might seat six comfortably. No offense to Wilkens’ skills, but it doesn’t look like a particularly accommodating spot for a morning wedding reception or a honeymoon breakfast. So “bridal” — wedding-related — might have been a typo or misspelling of “bridle” — as in “bridle path,” a trail for horseback riding.
Part of Lambert’s vision for Brackenridge Park included 9 miles winding through the “almost primeval beauty” of the park’s rocky setting, which were “drawing an ever-increasing number of early-morning riders,” as reported by the Light, July 6, 1925. “To ride along quietly on horseback and to regard nature at close hand … is giving restful divertissement to many business men before they start for the office.”
Some prominent names are mentioned — Chittim, Gage, Halff, Kampmann, Negley and others — and maybe some of the regular riders were sent off by wives or servants with a packed breakfast to enjoy at trail’s end. Maybe Luther Bynum “L.B.” Clegg, head of the San Antonio Printing Co., or some of his associates or customers were among them, which could be why the Alamo table would be thought of as significant enough to make the cover of the “Park Scenes in San Antonio” booklet.
From the turn of the last century through the mid-1920s, this growing business was known by the name on the postcard booklet, changing to the Clegg Co. and branching out from lithography, printing and engraving into office furniture and supplies. (It was later the Marshall Clegg Co., until it was sold in 2000.) As printers, the firm produced brochures, calendars, checks and stock certificates, and business and social stationary. According to Southwest Texans, a biographical reference published in 1952 and provided by the Conservation Society of San Antonio library, the Clegg Co. eventually printed telephone books for more than 85 South Texas cities.
The San Antonio Printing Co. name indicates that the postcard booklet was published not later than 1927, based on city directory references and company advertising. The firm was producing booklets before that, on the evidence of its 1924 publication of “The Romance of San Antonio’s Water Supply and Distribution,” by Bert J.
McLean, a 24-page paperback with some park-scene illustrations of its own, as noted by Gregg Eckhardt, environmental scientist and curator of the Edwards Aquifer website, www.edwardsaquifer.net.
If San Antonio Printing was like most postcard publishers, it based its products on existing photos as much or more than new ones commissioned for the project. The tinted Alamo table image on the cover appears to have derived from a more detailed photograph in the collection of the Witte Museum, said Lewis Fisher, author of the forthcoming “Brackenridge Park: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park” and “San Antonio’s Historic Plazas, Parks and River Walk.”
He confirms the photo’s location in Koehler Park, suggesting that “the row of rocks along one side of the roadway about upper-right center could be bordering the river, which curves back sharply to the left at what looks like a bridge.” The original Koehler Pavilion could be “hidden by the dense trees toward the upper right. So the table may have stood on the site of the present (miniature) train station and also on the northeast corner of the tourist camp Lambert opened in Koehler Park in 1919, which could have used some picnic tables.”
The elk postcard on the reverse of the Alamo table card fits the timing.
Along with a buffalo herd and other animals, the elk were a project of Lambert’s predecessor, Ludwig Mahncke, who started a menagerie in Brackenridge Park that became the foundation for a municipal zoo. The elk and buffalo herds were procured from the Goodnight Ranch in the Panhandle and arrived in 1902. The elk did almost too well here; thanks to their successful breeding and the cost of their feed, the city began selling them off in the 1910s, and the remainder were moved to an enclosure in the San Antonio Zoo by the late 1920s.
Since the Alamo table appears a bit dilapidated in the photo and postcard images, in which the main supports appear to be leaning, its construction may have been faulty, and the table may have been removed by the end of the 1920s, which would explain the relative scarcity of photos. Anyone with more information about this table or any similar ones may contact this column.