San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Wolfson’s started in a small adobe house
I am an archivist and historian at First Baptist Church in San Antonio. I’m working on a story about the 1889 Wolfson House owned by our church, for our congregation’s magazine. In researching the store owned by the original home owner, Saul Wolfson, I encountered a series of photos of a resplendent store downtown … with several different labels. One accompanied an ExpressNews story of yours and was identified as the Dullnig building. The next was a postcard and identified it as Joske’s Department Store. Finally, another postcard identified it as the Saul Wolfson Dry Goods Store.
My understanding is that when Dullnig died, Joske bought the building and leased it to Wolfson. I know Wolfson’s original store burned down, that the business went bankrupt in 1923, and Wolfson died later that year. Do you have any additional insight into these events?
The images you saw online were correctly identified, tracing a succession of ownership or occupancy. That’s not always the case with old postcards, often produced in other cities where publishers had limited means to check the images they bought or copied.
“You have to be careful trusting postcard captions, especially when they deal with landmarks,” said Lewis Fisher, author of “Greetings from San Antonio: Historic Postcards of the Alamo City,” noting that he has seen four different identifications of one view of a building in San Pedro Park, all of them wrong. “In the rush to get cards on sales racks,” Fisher says in the “Greetings” introduction, “caption accuracy was a frequent casualty.”
Founded in 1868 and
originally known as L. Wolfson, after Saul Wolfson’s brother Leon, Wolfson’s took its place among San Antonio’s best-known stores, such as Joske’s, Wolff & Marx, Washer’s and Dalkowitz.
The brothers, born in Prussia, came here after the Civil War.
During the war, Leon lived in Mexico, where he “made a lot of money,” according to nephew Alexander Joske in the San Antonio ExpressNews, July 15, 1923. Meanwhile, elder brother Saul served in the Union Army, after which he opened a store in Gonzales. When the brothers reconnected, they went into business together.
A 55th anniversary advertisement for the store, published May 20, 1923, in the San Antonio Express-News, tells its origin story, leaving out Leon Wolfson, who had long since left the business. “An earnest young man (Saul, 38) courageously staked his all” on a store “in a little adobe house on Main Plaza.” There, “stagecoaches, ox teams and venturesome
horsemen” tied up at a hitching post out front, where “ladies … would pick their way around mud holes or domestic animals peacefully grazing” to shop Wolfson’s “new calico prints … or handsome silks.”
As business grew, the store moved from the adobe house to a bigger location on Main Plaza.
When the family of Julius Joske, founder in 1867 of the more famous emporium, arrived in 1874, the Wolfsons “were doing the largest retail business
in San Antonio,” says Alexander Joske, who worked at L. Wolfson as a young man.
As L. Wolfson, the store sold “general merchandise,” mostly fabrics and clothing. This store burned down Jan. 24,
1904, with losses estimated at $200,000 (nearly $8 million today). The store and most stock was destroyed.
By the time of the fire, the partnership with Leon Wolfson already had been dissolved.
The store moved to the
Dullnig Building on the northwest corner of Alamo Plaza and Commerce Street. Reopening as Saul Wolfson’s, it sold fabric, ribbon and lace trim for sewing, as well as readymade men’s, women’s and children’s clothing and accessories and household goods.
At Christmas time, ground-floor windows were filled with merchandise and decorations, including an artificial fireplace in a room setting where a live Santa Claus was seated. All four Wolfson sons — Abe, Emil, Jesse and Milton — worked in the store and lived with their parents into adulthood.
It has been said that Wolfson’s business practices didn’t change with the times and that his sons — all born when he was nearly 60 or beyond — were trained in outmoded methods.
Newspaper ads promise “plenty of salespeople” and for each of the many departments, maybe too many? For the company’s last anniversary sale, ads allude to a “line of delivery trucks and express wagons constantly unloading packages and boxes” for weeks — maybe priced too low for profit?
By September 1923, the Saul Wolfson Dry Goods Co. was going through bankruptcy proceedings but continued to operate through May 1924.
Saul Wolfson, who according to an ad in the Express, May 20, 1923, “regularly visit (ed) the store,” died Dec. 16, 1923. He was buried in the Temple Beth-El Cemetery on East Crockett Street.
In the course of researching this column, you offered me a tour of the Wolfson House on Broadway at McCullough Avenue — the paintedbrick “blue house” across from the former San Antonio Light building. As a family residence, later a business building, the Wolfson House has had more permanence than the store’s locations, even if its address has changed over the years.
The Wolfson House, built for Saul Wolfson and his family, was completed in 1889 on what was then called River Road. It was occupied by the merchant’s widow, Emelia, then their son Abe until it was sold to an antiques dealer. It then housed an advertising business until 1982 when the nearby
First Baptist Church bought the property.
The Victorian house has retained many elegant features — tiled fireplaces, a Tiffany window, Lalique window sidelights and the painted door of a former walk-in safe — for having undergone extensive renovations for safety and security.
Through the years, the Wolfson House has been used by various church ministries such as a prayer group and an annual craft show. The ground floor is being readied to accommodate a counseling program, expected to begin early next year.