Our Historic Building
Giving our art a home
"Mum’s Flower Brick" by Maria Gould
VISIT US
130 King William Street
San Antonio, TX 78204
Tuesday – Saturday: 10am – 3pm
Sunday: Closed
Monday: Closed
Admission is always free!
Visitors often assume the Art League's home is a restored Victorian mansion. The truth is more surprising — and more interesting. The building began as a carriage house, and its history runs all the way back to the lands of Mission San Antonio de Valero.
Visitors to the San Antonio Art League & Museum often ask about the building itself, and they are usually surprised by the answer. With its wraparound veranda, turned posts, and stained glass, the house looks like a classic King William Victorian. In fact, as architectural historian Diane Elizabeth Williams put it in her detailed history of the property, the building has a "very non-Victorian pedigree." It was never built as a grand home. It was a carriage house — and much of what makes it look Victorian today was added nearly eighty years after it was built.
Mission Land
The ground beneath the museum has a long memory. In 1731, the agricultural fields associated with Mission San Antonio de Valero — the mission we now call the Alamo — were surveyed, stretching north and south of the mission and east of the San Antonio River. When the mission was secularized by royal order in 1793, those fields were distributed among the families who had lived and worked there. The surveyor Pedro Huizar received a portion of the land, and according to early maps, the northeast end of today's King William neighborhood, including the Art League's property, sits on what was once part of Huizar's holdings. A plaque honoring Huizar still stands nearby, at the corner of King William and St. Mary's streets.
From Athletic Field to Carriage House
Over the nineteenth century the land changed hands many times. By 1870 the lots now owned by the Art League belonged to the Gymnastic Association of San Antonio — a German athletic and cultural society, or Turnverein — which used them as an athletic field. The German imprint on the neighborhood runs deep: the name "King William" is said to honor Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, and in the nineteenth century the area was sometimes dismissively called "Sauerkraut Bend."
In the 1890s the lots came into the hands of Col. Charles C. Gibbs, a real estate investor and land agent for the Southern Pacific Railway. Gibbs commissioned the well-known San Antonio architect Albert F. Beckmann (1855–1900) — himself a King William resident, married into the family that founded Pioneer Flour Mills — to design a large two-and-a-half-story home. In 1896, Gibbs presented that house to his daughter Virgilia, known as Virgie, and her husband, Dr. Alfred C. McDaniel, as a wedding gift. The following year Gibbs acquired the adjoining lots and built the two-story carriage house to serve the home. That carriage house is the building the Art League occupies today.
An Auto House, Then Apartments
For its first decades the carriage house did exactly what its name suggests. But times changed quickly. The McDaniel family kept the building even after Virgilia's death in 1912, and by then the carriage house had already taken on a new role as an "auto house" — a garage for the family automobile. In 1925, as the family reorganized its assets, the building was converted into a duplex. A wood-frame porch was added across the front, and the address became 130–132 King William Street. Around the same time, a small garage and storage building went up on the adjoining lot; that structure is the building SAAL+M now uses as the Semmes Studio.
For the next several decades the building was a home. A local chiropractor, Dr. George Loftin, owned it in the early 1950s and rebuilt the porch in brick. In 1970 it passed to Charles and Kathryn Scheer, and it was the Scheers who gave the building the look it has today.
Becoming a Victorian
Between 1971 and 1973, the Scheers converted the duplex back into a single-family residence and dressed the building in period detail. They bought architectural elements salvaged from other 1890s San Antonio buildings and worked them into the house — replacing a 1920s iron balustrade with 1890s-style woodwork, installing a stained glass window, and building the wraparound second-floor veranda with replicated posts and brackets. According to a 1973 article in the San Antonio Express, some of the interior hardware and stained glass came from the old Jefferson Hotel. The current address, 130 King William Street, dates from this period.
As Williams notes in her history, these additions were never part of the carriage house's original design and create "a false sense of the building's history." But they also did something valuable: they made the building visually at home among its grand King William neighbors. The carriage house had finally come to look the part.
A Protected Neighborhood
The building's transformation coincided with the neighborhood's recognition. In 1968 the City of San Antonio designated King William as its first local historic district. In January 1972 the King William Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the nation's official list of places worthy of preservation. King William Park lies directly across the street from the museum, and a Texas Historical Commission plaque there describes the neighborhood as "the most diverse and intact collection of architecture in San Antonio."
Home for the Art League
The San Antonio Art League had been founded in 1912 and had occupied several homes over the years before finding a permanent one here. In 1987 the League purchased the property, and over the next two years, through the generosity of many donors, it paid off the mortgage in full — a milestone the membership celebrated with a "burning the mortgage" party. A plaque near the interior staircase still lists the major donors who made it possible.
Since then the building has been shaped to serve art. Interior walls were opened up in the early 1990s to create larger gallery spaces. In 2017, a Semmes Foundation grant funded the remodeling of the studio building for classes and educational programs. What began as a place to keep a carriage — and then a car — is now one of the oldest art institutions in San Antonio, free and open to everyone.
This history draws on the SAALM Property History Timeline researched and written by architectural historian and former SAALM board member Diane Elizabeth Williams.