A Walk in an Old Neighborhood

Whenever my daughter and I have a need to go downtown in the morning, we like to go for lunch at the Guenther House - an old San Antonio mansion converted to a restaurant, museum and retail outlet, in the middle of a pleasant green garden a little way south of downtown San Antonio.  The Guenther House was originally built by a C.H. Guenther, a German immigrant who relocated from the Hill Country, and established a mill on the San Antonio River. Cannily, he figured that there were several mills grinding corn and wheat in the Hill Country, but none in San Antonio.

He built the house for his family right next to his mill - and there it still is, the Pioneer Flour Mill, with a crenellated tower that can be seen for miles. The little store sells all sorts of cooking implements and products from the Mills; mixes and flavorings and things, and Pioneer Flour Mills products are also served in the restaurant. The food is good, and served either outdoors in a garden pavilion, or inside. One of the dining rooms is in what was garden room, on a half-basement floor, with windows on three sides looking out into the garden, a lovely little room in green and white, with a floor in mosaic tile, and stained glass in the transoms, hanging plants,  and Chinese-style lanterns in metal and alabaster-finished glass.

Bussey's Flea Market -- The Other Marketplace

A couple of weekends ago, my daughter and I went out to what may be possibly the most marvelous permanently-revolving street market in a permanent place: Bussey's Flea Market, on 1-35 North, fifteen minutes brisk driving outside the 1604 Loop. My daughter calls it a yard sale on steroids, a range of three long parallel sheds extending uphill from the frontage road. You can't miss the gigantic concrete armadillo.

There are three tiers of vendor at Bussey's - the well-established ones have a space in one of the sheds, with a locking door, although what sort of permanence that can mean, when the shed is roofed in un-insulated tin and the walls are thin, I have no idea. Their stalls are packed so full, and are so well-organized it is obvious they are not going anywhere soon. Not without the aid of a couple of moving-vans anyway. Carpets, hardware, old military uniforms and memorabilia, books and potted plants ... but wait, there's more! 

Five Thousand Miles for a Camel

In the annals of the US Army, are recorded many strange and eccentric schemes, but none quite equals the notion of a Camel Corps for sheer daft logic. It was the sort of idea which a clever young officer would come up with, upon considering vast tracts of the southwest which the United States had acquired in the 1840s.  The country was desert - what better animal to use than one which had already been used for thousands of years in deserts elsewhere?

As a matter of recorded history it was 2^nd Lt. George Crossman who first raised the matter seriously. One senses that this notion had people falling about laughing, and then slapping themselves on the forehead with a strange gleam in their eyes and exclaiming, "By George, it's a crazy idea... but it just might work!"

Other forward-thinking military men kicked the idea around; it had the backing of a senator from Mississippi, who sat on the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. But Jefferson Davis was not in a position to make it happen until he became Secretary of War in 1852. Congress appropriated $30,000 for the purpose, and a designated ship set sail for the Mediterranean. Thirty-three camels were purchased in Egypt, and the officer assigned to the project, Major Henry Wayne also hired five camel drovers to care for them.

Juan Seguin - A Relatively Unsung Hero

Juan Nepomuceno Seguin was a man whose good and bad fortune it was to be on the border between Anglo Texians and Mexican Tejanos. He was born in 1806, in San Antonio. He came of a prominent local family; his father was a signatory to Mexico's 1824 constitution. Juan Seguin was himself elected to the office of alcalde - a cross between mayor and justice of the peace. Altogether, he was a promising young man in local politics, when Texas was merely a far-distant province of Mexico - and gradually becoming disaffected by the dictatorial actions of the Centralist President of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

When Santa Anna soon dissolved the Mexican Congress, moderates such as Seguin were thrown into opposition, right alongside their Anglo neighbors. Stephen Austin granted a captain's commission to Seguin, who raised a company of scouts. When elements of the Mexican Army under General Martin Cos were thrown out of San Antonio at the end of 1835, Captain Seguin's company assisted with the throwing. His men then became part of the small garrison of a tumbledown old mission known as the Alamo. Some historians have even speculated that Seguin might have been its commander - but that he personally was too valuable as a scout. He was sent out of the doomed Alamo as a courier. At Gonzales, when Sam Houston began gathering his ragged Army of Texans, Seguin raised another small company of Tejanos, who served as scouts and as rear-guard, as Houston fell back into East Texas.

Sic Transit Scriveners

On a September day a few years ago, I drove the 410 loop for the first time in a good few weeks, and saw that there was a bulldozer busily scraping away on the site of one of north-east San Antonio's best loved retail landmarks. What was physically left of Scriveners' made heartbreakingly small piles, but then it was never all that large a building to begin with, or distinguished, architecturally speaking. It was one of those places which just grew, organically, incoherently sprouting departments to no particular plan. The gourmet chocolates abutted the garden supplies and the kitchenware, and ran straight into the hardware department. Describing Scriveners' as a department store is kind of like describing Star Trek as an old TV show; technically accurate, but not even beginning to do justice to the reality.

Scrivener's started as a hardware store, just after World War II: a local GI returning from the service teamed up with two of his buddies, and set shop when the location was the other end of nowhere, adjacent to nothing but the airport, the intersection of 410 and Broadway being respectively, a two-lane roadway and an unpaved lane. The manager of  my own local hardware establishment pointed out that independent hardware and department stores in small towns have a tendency- if they pay attention to what their customers ask for-to stock all sorts of oddments, because there is really no other place to buy them. The original founder adhered to the same philosophy; he bought out his partners and listened to the suggestions of his sales staff.

First, they branched out to patio furniture, and tiki torches and barbeques, and paper plates and picnic things in the early 1950ies; all those necessary accoutrements of post-war baby-boomer suburbia. Suggestions to stock this, that or the other inevitably resulted in another addition to an already rambling structure -   I don't think there was a consistent ceiling or floor level throughout the place - and another department. Eventually, they sold collectibles, stationary, gourmet foods, embroidered baby and children's clothes, and installed a wonderful fabric and notions department, chock-full of imported laces and silk ribbon.