Layers of earth hide the past, but industrious scholars dig deeply to uncover its secrets. One such scholar is Lewis F. Fisher, an author and publisher who could credibly be called San Antonio’s unofficial historian, and whose latest book is Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park, published by Trinity University Press.
Trinity’s Maverick Book Club will introduce the book during an online launch hosted by local personality Randy Beamer Tuesday at 6 p.m., and a companion exhibition at the Witte Museum will open to the public on Saturday, accessible with regular museum admission.
‘A crazy quilt’
The 400-acre park we know today is a patchwork “crazy quilt” of time, dedication, neglect and occasional infusions of interest and controversy, much of which is included in the 200 pages of Fisher’s copiously illustrated book.
“I think it raises the discussions of Brackenridge Park to a whole new level,” Fisher said of his deeply researched publication. Other than the 650-page, scientific and archaeologically-focused Cultural Landscape Report available for download on the Brackenridge Park Conservancy website, “there has been an absence of broad information on how the park evolved and what was in it.”
Chapter One of Fisher’s book, titled “Riverside Haven,” briefly touches on the estimated 12,000-year prehistory of the area, which Fisher notes “lies within three ecological zones, uncommon for an urban park” — the rocky, treed uplands of the Balcones Escarpment to the northwest, the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert to the west, and the grassy South Texas Coastal Plain to the southeast.
That alone would make Brackenridge stand out among U.S. urban parks, Fisher said. But because the park maintains its connections with its densely layered past, it also ranks among “America’s leading urban cultural parks,” he added, despite not being designed by a big name such as Frederick Law Olmstead, creator of New York’s world-famous Central Park.
Some of Brackenridge Park’s history is visible, some is not, Fisher said. Flint fragments dating back tens of thousands of years are still commonly found, he said, while a Confederate tannery that once stood in the area now occupied by the San Antonio Zoo was only rediscovered accidentally during excavation for a water treatment plant in 2012.
The book illuminates the Confederate history of the park with a never-before-published account in Chapter Three, gleaned from records kept by President George Washington’s great-grandnephew Maj. Thornton Washington, who was charged with locating a site for Confederate industry.
Fisher’s meticulous documentation revealed other secrets of the park, including that El Camino Real once traversed the San Antonio River at a point near what is now River Road and Anastacia Place, a fact illustrated on the detailed map introducing Part One of the book.
Then two miles from San Antonio proper, the site proved ideal thanks to the resource that had drawn people to the area for millennia: water.
From the headwaters of the San Antonio River just north of the park, to colonial acequias that still define some of its boundaries and features, to the pump houses that would help provide artesian water to the city and create a reservoir in what is now the San Antonio Botanical Garden, “what I also gained from all this [research] was realizing how important water really was to the evolution of Brackenridge Park,” Fisher said.
From the Witte’s archives
Water also at least indirectly connects Fisher’s book with the Witte Museum, which has stood in Brackenridge Park since its founding in 1926.
In its Texas Wild Garden on museum grounds, the Witte collection displays a bronze monument to Texas Trail Drivers by artist Gutzon Borglum, best known as the sculptor of the Mount Rushmore National Monument. Borglum rented a studio in the former Pump House No. 2 built in 1885 by the San Antonio Water Works Company, located near the southern end of the park in what is now Brackenridge Golf Course.
But the Witte’s Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park companion exhibition holds many other connections to Fisher’s book, which drew many of its photographs and documents from the museum’s archives.
“There’s so much history with the Witte and the park,” said Marise McDermott, Witte Museum president and CEO. “We are very close to the park, literally and spiritually.”
After the Maverick Book Club online launch, the Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park book will be available in the Witte Museum gift shop or through its online portal.
A lack of recognition
Perhaps the most vexing fact about Brackenridge Park, Fisher said, is that many of its visitors might not know they’re in it.
No identifying signs exist at park entry points to the south, west, and north, and drivers along Mulberry Avenue through the park’s midsection are prompted to slow to 25 miles per hour without necessarily realizing they are on a park road.
One lichen-covered plaque stands near the Tuleta Street entrance near the Witte. Otherwise, the only identification is a low-slung, smallish bronze sculpture of park founder and namesake George Brackenridge located off Broadway Street near the Brackenridge Drive entrance on the park’s eastern boundary.
In fact, the figure of Brackenridge sits alone, which Fisher’s book reveals as another slight to his memory. The original design for the monument, commissioned from Alamo Cenotaph sculptor Pompeo Coppini by San Antonio Express news publisher Frank G. Huntress in 1951, included two children and their teacher in acknowledgment of Brackenridge’s educational philanthropy.
Huntress was able to raise only enough to pay for the plaster mold of Brackenridge, and so the locally famed donor of his namesake park’s original 163 acres stares intently at no one.
Still, Fisher hopes his new tome might serve as a guidepost to ongoing efforts to renovate the park, to help preserve its history and maintain its features for future generations.
