They keep garbling my posts...............so here it is again..........
Historic Comanche Lookout Park towers above San Antonio
You
couldn’t ask for a more fitting landmark at Comanche Lookout Park than
its old four-story limestone tower, which looks like the remnant of a
medieval castle.
After all, the 96-acre park is home to one of the most majestic views in San Antonio, with a history just as sprawling.
“Just
having that building there is so iconic, (along with) the fact that
people knowing it was an Indian settlement,” said Sandy Jenkins, parks
project manager for the Parks and Recreation Department. “And I think
just every bit about the walking trails. And now there’s a great library
and a playground. (There are) just really great things in that park.”
Located
on the Northeast Side just inside Loop 1604, the park is home to
Comanche Hill, the fourth-highest point in Bexar County, with an
elevation of 1,340 feet. (The highest is Mount Smith at 1,892 feet in
Northwest Bexar County.)
As
a park site marker notes, Comanche Hill lies at the southeastern edge
of the Edwards Plateau and makes up the western edge of the Blackland
Prairie. Around 4½ miles of paved and natural trails wind and intertwine
through countless live oak trees, along with cedar, mountain laurel and
mesquite, with the occasional bench to take in the scenery.
According
to Parks and Recreation, American Indians used the hill as a vantage
point for warfare and hunting, with the Apache and later the Comanche
Indians especially dominating the area, hence the name Comanche Lookout.
But the roots of this land run much deeper than its namesake.
Paul
B. Barwick used to work with the department and put together a history
of the site. He traced the area’s use back to 9200 B.C. when aboriginal
hunters and gathers likely used the hill to scout for mammoth and bison
watering along the nearby Cibolo Creek, and generation after generation
of prehistoric man quarried the region’s abundance of flint to craft
arrow points and tools.
According
to Barwick, various fossils had been found along the creekbed banks,
with artifacts such as undecorated ceramics and small arrow points
discovered in the region along Cibolo Creek.
“I haven’t heard of any in recent times,” Jenkins said. “People do look.”
Another
major marker of Comanche Lookout’s more distant past — its place on a
historic trail used by Spanish explorers and missionaries more than 300
years ago.
Comanche
Lookout lies near part of the El Camino Real de los Tejas National
Historic Trail, the U.S. corridor of the Spanish colonial “royal road”
that runs 2,580 miles across Texas from Mexico City to northwest
Louisiana.
According
to Barwick, the Spanish laid claim to this east-west artery of commerce
in Texas in the late 1600s, lining the route with numerous missions,
including the Alamo, to monitor French movement westward from what’s now
Louisiana into the current Lone Star State.
The
Comanche were the most notable of the American Indians to inhabit the
area in and around the hill, Barwick noted, where they would “silently
lie in wait for unsuspecting travelers, supply trains and soldiers, then
quickly swoop down, stealing ammo, supplies, horses and mercilessly
killing men, women and children.”
But by the mid-1800s, the hill became a lookout post against
the Comanche. An 1848 deed showed the hill and its surrounding property
belonged to Mirabeau Lamar, the second president of the Republic of
Texas.
Comanche
Lookout would later pass from Lamar’s daughter Loretta Caldwell to
German immigrant farmer Gustav Reeh in the 1890s. Reeh sold the area
that included Comanche Lookout to its most colorful owner, retired Army
Colonel Edward R. Coppock.
A
veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I with more than 40
years of service, Coppock took over Comanche Lookout in 1923. The parks
department describes him as a romantic and a history aficionado, whose
time in Europe may well have inspired him to try transforming the
hilltop into a courtly compound straight out of the Middle Ages — only
also with an aesthetic twist that truly reflected his love of the land.
The
department noted Coppock began crafting his personal Camelot with the
help of his two sons and a man named Tarquino Cavazos. The site included
a windmill, a barn and storage sheds, a stone Indian council ring, a
three-car garage with attached servants quarters, and the stone tower,
which was completed in 1928.
The
Comanche Lookout tower was designed to store grain and hay — though,
according to Barwick, Coppock’s daughter said the tower’s roof also made
the perfect launchpad for Fourth of July fireworks and kids’ pretend
battles.
Coppock
planned a U-shaped castlelike residence but only got as far as a
foundation because of concrete rationing during World War II and his
declining health. Both he and Cavazos died in 1948, and the grand
project died with them.
Two
singular fixtures did come and go from Coppock’s creative vision: a
pair of giant 400-pound Indian head sculptures, created by none other
than Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor behind Mount Rushmore National
Memorial.
According
to Barwick, Coppock commissioned Borglum, who had his studio in
Brackenridge Park during the 1920s. Barwick noted the Indian heads were
even rumored to bear Coppock’s likeness, though with “appropriate
changes” made to their hair and shoulders.
The
Indian heads once guarded the entrance to Comanche Lookout and were
believed to have been made in 1925, Cavazos’s daughter Romana
Cavazos-Morones told the Express-News in 2005. Her family looked after
Coppock’s compound, where she was born in 1927.
At
the time of the 2005 article, the family believed one of the Indian
heads was on a South Texas ranch, while the other was thought to be at a
home in or near Alamo Heights. Jenkins suspects there may be renewed
interest in bringing the Indian heads back but doesn’t know what
happened to them.
In
any case, Coppock’s children did not share their father’s passion for
his land. They sold it in 1968 to a developer who cleared all the
structures except for the tower and some remnant foundations, according
to the Parks and Recreation Department. The property would go through a
few other owners until the federal government took it over in 1990.
That led to Comanche Lookout’s second life as a public park.
A
grass-roots group named Save Comanche Lookout lobbied the city to
purchase and preserve the area. The city took an interim loan to do so
and repaid it through the 1994 General Obligation Bond package, which
provided $1.4 million to acquire and develop the site.
The land then got off-street parking, trails and drinking fountains to go with that iconic tower.
“We
definitely wanted to keep that tower. It’s such a striking element on
the site,” said John Laffoon, the landscape architect who prepared the
original master plan for Comanche Lookout Park.
Development
followed on what would become the area’s other standout feature: the
$4.2 million Julia Yates Semmes Branch Library, which opened Nov. 5,
2005 at the southwest end of the park.
Built
as a “green library,” the nearly 16,000-square-foot facility collects
rainwater to help with irrigation demands on the park, while the
library’s main reading area takes advantage of its lush surroundings
with a 20-foot glass wall. A nearby playground came after the library,
followed by more trail connections.
Laffoon
said the primary intent of the park’s design was always to keep it as
natural as possible and to preserve its green space in the midst of
rapid development surrounding it. Now that mission is upheld by an
informal group called Friends of Comanche Lookout, which meets monthly
at the Semmes library.“It’s like the woods in the middle of the city,” said Gloria Anderson, who founded the group with her husband, Michael, more than a dozen years ago.
Anderson said she would love to see those Indian monuments restored — or perhaps recreated by a local artist. Other than that, she just wants Comanche Lookout to remain the same verdant escape from the hustle and bustle of city life.
“We’re not against progress,” Anderson said. “We just don’t want it all paved over.”
And for a fellow San Antonio native like Jenkins, that means Comanche Lookout Park continue to provide an unfettered view amid relatively untouched nature — with its towering heritage intact, of course.
“Comanche Lookout is one of those places that’s going to become even more popular and more sought out because it is such an incredible jewel of undeveloped land with such beautiful views,” Jenkins said. “I hope people will come and experience the opportunities that are there.”
rguzman@express-news.net
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