![]() ![]() 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. Huntress in 1951, included two children and their teacher in acknowledgment of Brackenridge’s educational philanthropy. The original design for the monument, commissioned from Alamo Cenotaph sculptor Pompeo Coppini by San Antonio Express news publisher Frank G. In fact, the figure of Brackenridge sits alone, which Fisher’s book reveals as another slight to his memory. 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. One lichen-covered plaque stands near the Tuleta Street entrance near the Witte. 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. Perhaps the most vexing fact about Brackenridge Park, Fisher said, is that many of its visitors might not know they’re in it. “We are very close to the park, literally and spiritually.”Īfter 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. “There’s so much history with the Witte and the park,” said Marise McDermott, Witte Museum president and CEO. 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.īut 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. Borglum rented a studio in the former Pump House No. ![]() 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. Water also at least indirectly connects Fisher’s book with the Witte Museum, which has stood in Brackenridge Park since its founding in 1926. ![]() 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.įrom 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 was realizing how important water really was to the evolution of Brackenridge Park,” Fisher said. ![]() Thornton Washington, who was charged with locating a site for Confederate industry.įisher’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. 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. 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. Some of Brackenridge Park’s history is visible, some is not, 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. That alone would make Brackenridge stand out among U.S. Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park by Lewis Fisher, 2022 Credit: Courtesy / Trinity University PressĬhapter 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. ![]()
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