DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, it's 1863, and the Confederacy is at war — and war, as anybody who's ever marched a mile in bad boots will tell you, eats through leather something fierce. Footwear, harness, saddlery — the South needed all of it, and it needed it bad.
So right here, on what was then a stretch of land sitting two miles above the San Antonio city limits, somebody made a decision: we're building a tannery. A Confederate tannery. And not a modest little operation, either.
This place was built to treat six thousand hides at a time. Six thousand. Let that number settle in for a second.
The plan was to concentrate the shoemakers of Confederate Texas right here on this site. One place. One operation.
Boots for an army. Now, here's where it gets interesting — because every tannery in those days had a problem with the heat. Most tanning agents just couldn't hold up through a Texas summer.
Hides would spoil, the whole process would stall out, and you'd lose your product to the weather. But the folks running this operation had a solution, and it came from something that grows just about everywhere out here: mesquite. They cooked up a soup — and that is the word the marker uses, soup — made from chopped mesquite wood.
That mixture soaked so deeply into the hides that unlike other tanning agents, it prevented loss in the hot weather. Which meant this plant could run summer and winter both. Full year operation.
That was no small thing in 1863. And the tannery wasn't even the whole of it. Right there on the same site, they built a cotton and woolen mill, powered by the San Antonio River.
The war was pushing Texas to produce, and produce it did — salt, hats, cotton cards, all of it coming out of a state that was digging deep to supply a cause that was already running short on nearly everything. A tannery built on mesquite soup, running through the Texas heat, turning out six thousand hides at a stretch, with a river-powered mill right next door. That's what wartime necessity looked like on this patch of ground — two miles outside the city, doing everything it could to keep an army on its feet.
What the marker says
To fill footwear, harness and saddlery needs of the South; established 1863 on this site, then 2 miles above city limits. Operated in summer as well as winter, because tanning agent, a soup made of chopped mesquite wood, soaked deeply into hides. Thus, unlike other tannins, this prevented loss in hot weather. Plant treated 6,000 hides at a time. Shoemakers of Confederate Texas were to be concentrated here. A cotton and woolen mill, run by San Antonio River power, was also built on plant site. Other wartime Texas products included salt, hats, cotton cards. (1965)