Thiele Cottage

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1888–89 for Saul Wolfson, a leading merchant of post–Civil War San Antonio, this house is a showpiece of late Victorian taste. Brick walls with quoined stone corners and ornate carved pediments give way inside to marble mantels, inlaid wainscoting, parquet floors, and Moorish light fixtures — the comforts a prosperous Gilded Age businessman could command.

San Antonio, TX

Rising three stories of concrete and masonry in 1913, the Toltec was built for Dr. Augustus Maverick, who was murdered before it was finished. The Maverick family, long central to San Antonio's downtown growth, retained ownership until 1996. With its U-shaped plan, white stone detailing over red brick, and a cast-iron staircase climbing from basement to top floor, the building preserves its early twentieth-century classical revival design almost intact.

San Antonio, TX

George T. Southwell, a Victoria County rancher's son, moved to San Antonio in 1912 and two years later bought a rubber-stamp company whose roots reached back to 1866. Under his son Wilson, the firm grew from a handful of employees to more than fifty, adding a foundry to cast metal signs and plaques. Renamed The Southwell Company in 1953, it became a leading maker of official Texas historical markers, producing bronze pieces for the 1936 Centennial and thousands of markers since 1962.

San Antonio, TX

As San Antonio surged from frontier town toward the largest city in Texas, this bend of the San Antonio River filled with the ambitious homes of a rising middle class. Mary Frances Drake, a widow who arrived in 1890 and began buying up river lots, completed a turreted Queen Anne house here in 1895. Lumber executive Van Alvin Petty bought it in 1901 and, in a 1910–11 remodel by noted architect Atlee B. Ayres, recast it in symmetrical Neoclassical dress with two-story Corinthian columns. In 1947 it passed to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post.