King William Historic District
a.k.a. See Also:Bonham, James Butler, Elementary School
Roughly bounded by Durango, Alamo, Guenther Sts. and the San Antonio River, San Antonio, TXLarge trees, generous lawns, picket and iron fences frame the rows of Victorian houses and mansions of the King William Historic District. The area was primarily established by prosperous German businessmen in the second half of the nineteenth century. The district is only a few blocks south of the simple, vernacular La Villita Historic District and downtown San Antonio. In contrast, the King William homes are opulent Victorian buildings with Italianate towers, mansard roofs, or fancy scroll work.
The lands now occupied by the King William Historic District, are on the meandering San Antonio River and were once an irrigated farm belonging to Mission Concepcion. When the mission were secularized, the land passed to Pedro Huizar, Vicente Amador, and Juana Fuentes, and then was purchased in the 1840s by Thomas Jefferson Devine, a San Antonio lawyer and land speculator. Devine sold most of the northern section to Catherine Elder who transferred it to her husband, Newton Mitchell, when she married in 1857. Devine and Mitchell subdivided their properties into lots. Carl Guenther, a German miller, had purchased the southwestern section of the area, in 1859, and established a mill and his home there. These have been modernized and have grown, but still form the terminus of the King William District.
Bibliography
100th Anniversary Pioneer Flour Mills, San Antonio, Texas 1851-1951. She Naylor Company, San Antonio. 1951.
Ramsdell, Charles. San Antonio, a Historical and Pictorial Guide University of Texas Press. Austin. 1959.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.