Eagar House

Duane's take

Here's what the official marker on the Eagar House has to say, and I'll tell it the way it deserves to be told. Down Alamo Street, just a little removed from the noise and bustle of the Plaza, there sits a six-room stone house. Built at the end of the Civil War.

Quiet, sturdy, patient as stone tends to be. This was the home of Mrs. Sarah Eagar.

And Mrs. Eagar was no ordinary San Antonian. She was born February 19, 1842, and the marker makes a point of telling you exactly why that matters: she was the first Anglo-American girl born in San Antonio.

The first. Let that settle a moment. The city was already alive with history and motion and the crossing of cultures, and into all of that, on that February day, came Sarah.

The land the house sits on has its own story. It was bordered by the Alamo acequia, one of those old irrigation ditches that carried water through the life of early San Antonio. And that land was no ordinary purchase, no ordinary transaction.

It was given to Mrs. Eagar as a wedding present from her father. A house, a piece of land, an old ditch running alongside it, all of it bound up in family and occasion and the particular tenderness of a father sending a daughter into her own life.

The acequia is gone now. The ditch dried up and disappeared the way so many old things do. But the house?

The house still stands. Right there on Alamo Street, sitting behind a curtain of greenery, like it's in no particular hurry to be noticed. It's been waiting this long.

It can wait a little longer.

What the marker says

Down Alamo Street, removed from the excitement of the Plaza is a six-room stone house built at the end of the Civil War, the home of Mrs. Sarah Eagar, born February 19, 1842, the first Anglo-American girl born in San Antonio. The land on which the house was built was bordered by the Alamo acequia and was given to Mrs. Eagar as a wedding present from her father. The ditch is gone, but the house still stands today behind a curtain of greenery.