The History of the Confederate Tannery in San Antonio

A ten-acre Confederate army tannery was the only tenant of a seventy-eight-acre tract purchased by the Confederate government from the city of San Antonio in January 1863. The tract’s northern boundary was a holding pond on the San Antonio River in what is now northern Brackenridge Park. The pond was created by a diversion dam built by the Spanish in 1776 to supply water to the new Upper Labor Acequia. From there the narrow Confederate property extended west and south, bordered by the Upper Labor Acequia on the west and the winding San Antonio River on the east.

By expanding the holding pond, the Confederate army could gain a water supply sufficient for industrial use. Since the acequia flowed along an elevation higher than the river, water for the tannery could be channeled from the acequia to supply tanning operations and drain downward into the river. Elsewhere on the tract the water could power a woolen factory, clothing factory, cotton mill, and a shoe factory serving the needs of the entire Confederate army west of the Mississippi River. Planned additional industries, however, were never built.

Commander of the tannery was Maj. Thornton Washington, a great-grand-nephew of President George Washington and graduate of West Point. Washington’s first job as commander was to enlarge the water supply by raising the level of the dam and holding pond and to deepen the acequia itself. Since a greater flow of water would also benefit acequia users beyond the tannery, Washington was granted free use of rock from adjacent city quarries to make the improvements.

Some 300 yards down the acequia from the holding pond, a lateral sluiceway was dug across the Confederate land to the San Antonio River. Along the sluiceway was built the tannery’s main building, an 80-by-265-foot frame structure with 100 tanning vats eight feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep embedded in the flagstone floor. They were linked with reservoirs and cisterns by pipes of gutta-percha that also served an underground network of stone channels emptying into the river. A half dozen smaller buildings included a combined dormitory and dining hall, blacksmith shop, stable, sheds, and a shoe shop and tailor shop for local needs. Mules and horses were kept in a corral fenced within a nearby bend of the river.

Since Confederate currency was not widely accepted in international commerce, bales of cotton had to be procured and, to avoid the Union blockade of the Texas coast, hauled across the Mexican border to Matamoras and shipped to Liverpool to be exchanged for supplies needed in the tanning process, which included bales of japonica grown in England and bales of sumac shipped to Liverpool from Sicily. Once across the Atlantic, most of these supplies were warehoused in Matamoras—along with Mexican huisache beans sometimes used in the process—and brought by wagon to San Antonio as needed. Operations began by late fall 1863.

Fear of a Union invasion with the landing of a Union force in the Rio Grande Valley by Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks in November 1863 prompted orders to Major Washington to use tannery workers to build a defensive fort around the tannery in case the invaders reached San Antonio. The tannery, sitting on level and open ground, was ultimately deemed undefendable, but no invasion of San Antonio materialized.

At its height the San Antonio tannery furnished the Confederate army with a monthly average of 1,500 tanned hides (produced at half the price of leather on the open market) that could be made into shoes, harnesses, and saddles for the army. An inspector found regular production to be “not quite as good as Yankee leather,” though the leather made for harnesses “approximates it.” Labor shortages, however, kept tannery production from exceeding 50 percent of plant capacity. Washington at first rented forty enslaved workers from a plantation owner near Seguin, but they were no longer working there by September 1864, and Washington could find no replacements. Other than a few enslaved workers who were cooks or stable hands, the half of the tannery in use was then operated by nearly 100 conscripted soldiers, who received additional pay because of their hazardous work conditions. By the close of 1864 there was a serious backlog of orders, and as the war came to an end months later Washington was having trouble even finding food for his workers.

After the war the U. S. Army’s Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands took over properties owned by “the late, so-called Confederate government.” Maj. Gen. Joseph B. Kiddoo, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas, was able to lease out the tannery sawmill for a year but in January 1867 put the entire seventy-eight acres up for sale. The tract was repurchased by the city of San Antonio in 1870. The Freedmen’s Bureau used some proceeds to help finance San Antonio’s first school for Black children, much of it built with stone salvaged from the tannery.

The city held on to a northern section of the former Confederate property, where eight years later the San Antonio Water Works Company began the city’s first modern water system. The rest was sold to private owners in 1875. A central section of approximately fourteen acres became Ilka Nurseries, owned by Helen Madarasz and one of the state’s major commercial nursery operations, which enclosed some former tannery vats with glass to become hothouses. The nursery property was purchased in 1901 by brewer Otto Koehler and opened as Madarasz Family Park, given to the city by his widow Emma in 1915 to become Otto Koehler Park, a component of Brackenridge Park. The Confederate tannery received recognition with a Texas Historical Marker in 1965.