Valeriano Ozuna

RIP 1867 - 1938


This is my great-grandfather, he was baptised on Feb 15, 1867 at Sacred Heart in Von Ormy, Texas (born Jan 30 1867) and died in San Antonio, Texas. I would not call him a man of the world. He was a very hard worker at the Perrin Ranch and later in San Antonio at the Belgian Farm (the supplier to San Antonio's truck markets) running the irrigation pumps. He lived in a very small home on San Patricio street, his neighbors were the Pecan Shellers and other laboring people. Tuburculosis is endemic at during the 1920's - 1930's, his two daughters and brother died prematurely from complications.

My daughter says his face looks kind. I am peering into his face looking for family resemblances. I don't see it yet, maybe one of the nephews will grow a mustache soon.

In the photo, his tie is painted on. I don't think he owned a tie. He is something of a mystery, I don't know a lot more than I know about him. My Dad gave me a set of papers that chronicle my great-grandfathers city lot acquisition, his relationship with tenants (not very good), and his partial ownership of a dance hall on 1220 Montezuma in 1924. He was one of the founders of the Club Patritico Colonial Nicolas Bravo, formed as a benevolent association. The main purpose was to have all Hispanic children in San Antonio attending public school.

I still think its pretty cool that I found his photo a put him in the blog.

I was thinking about Fiesta Week and machine guns ...

I liked the way the people in the 1910 era San Antonio threw themselves into Fiesta Week, they hosted a lot of parades with a lot of money as prizes. One of the first places in town to get outdoor lighting was the parade stands at Alamo Plaza. In 1917 the governor of Texas took the week off and spent it in San Antonio so that he could soak up the party atmosphere. I especially liked the fact that the festive atmosphere in the Spring of 1917 led to the Sons of St. Vitus (the burlesque parade) allowing a loaded Singer machine gun to be fired into the air.

Take a look at the google map I created - click on the parade routes, I have pictures of the floats for some of them. For some of them I added the people responsible for making the parade a success. Who knew Porter-Loring of funeral home fame was such a party animal?


View San Antonio Fiesta Parade Routes 1917 in a larger map

Highlands Christian Church

There is a church on the corner by my house - made of limestone - the original name and build date of the church was a mystery. Nina and I got used to calling it the Beat Down Church ... the sad looking sign on the corner has it named "Clift of the Rock".. the church needs a powerwash in the worst way. I knew it had to have some kind of history because it is a substantial looking building .. limestone, stained glass, arched windows all that stuff. Thanks to the Historic Homeowners Fair sponsored by the City of San Antonio I was able to use an 1954 City Directory to lookup the the original church name - Highlands Christian Church ... Finally, I have a research hook.

October of 1951 was the groundbreaking - Roy D. Holt was the first Reverend of the church at this location.

Will N. Noonan was the architect : He built out some of the Monte Vista homes of the 1930's. He also designed a home for A.H. Wilde in 1933 , the N. stands for Nelson, he was born in 1885






April 2 1950 San Antonio Express
Riverside Baptist Church
3600 S. Presa
Plans are drawn




The Harlandale Masonic Lodge went up in 1925 and is still standing ... it was ugly to start with and has only gotten uglier ... amazing that its still around ..

Otto Linnartz

I have spent the last couple of days hunting down the Linnartz Home. Otto Linnartz was a manager/executive/owner lumberman for the PETRICH SAUR Lumber Co. He lived on South Street for a while and relocated to Avant when Highland Park was newly developed. Finding the location of this house was a little more complicated than the other searches I have done. I found the advertisement first while I was looking up a totally different house in Inverness (the neighborhood just south of Steves). As newspapers in 1920's San Antonio had no concept of privacy, I thought it would be easy to pop in Mrs. Otto Linnartz and find the bridge club or singing troupe or temperance society meeting with the address. It turns out that Mrs. Linnartz only showed up at other people's parties ... she never threw her own. So I had to revert to another way to track down Otto and family. I used the Bexar County Clerk's website and searched the historical records for Otto Linnartz as a grantee of a deed of trust in 1924. I found the pdf only after I asked a good friend with Internet Explorer to perform the search. It turns out that the Bexar County Clerk's office used a contractor named Landata and the bid was completely oblivious to the world of browsers, the website only works for Internet Explorer. That piece of crap application crashed three different browsers on my Mac ... Firefox, Safari and Opera all crapped out when I went to get the pdf.

The pdf of the deed of trust listed the neighborhood / block and tract numbers for the property. Here is where I had to get crafty. With the numbers off of the deed I want into the bcad (Bexar County Appraisal) search engine and looked up a property I knew was in the neighborhood. That lookup gave me the neighborhood number. What I wanted was the geographic ID ... so using the neighborhood number I used the map search interface of the BCAD and turned on the GEO-ID layer under the parcels option. I started scanning through the neighborhood looking for a block and tract number that matched the ones on the deed and sure enough ... I found the street and bounding block. I then switched over to google maps street view and walked the street until I found the house that matched the picture of the Highland Park advertisement. I also pumped in the geo-id into the Bexar County Appraisal District search engine and did a sanity check for the street number and name and valuation of the house.





View Historic Highland Park San Antonio Homes in a larger map

More houses in Highland Park 1925

Highland Park Blvd was developed to be 100 ft wide, if you drive down the street today the broad swath of land between the street and the sidewalk was called a parkway, it was intentional. The developer's planted palms and crepe myrtle alternating every 35 feet along the boulevard. In addition the developers privately funded the streetcar track build-out to connect to the downtown line.