The Menger Hotel on Alamo Plaza, shown here in 1877, was founded in 1859. It grew from a modest boardinghouse to a sophisticated hostelry, serving fine food and offering a variety of travelers’ amenities. It remained in family hands until it was sold in 1881.
UTSA Special Collections
Shown here in firefighting gear, William Menger was a member of a volunteer company that protected the area around his Alamo Plaza businesses. As chief of Alamo Fire Co. No. 2, he bought the city’s first steam-powered, water-pumping fire engine for $4,000.
UTSA Special Collections
The three surviving Menger children pictured are Louis, left, Barbara and Gustav. The family lived in the Menger Hotel as it grew from a boardinghouse into a full-service inn.
UTSA Special Collections
German immigrant William A. Menger became one of San Antonio’s leading residents, founding a brewery and a hotel. His widow Mary Menger ran both after his death at 44.
UTSA Special Collections
An unidentified, undated photograph in the collection of the San Antonio Fire Museum may depict William A. Menger, a fire department pioneer, and his family.
Courtesy San Antonio Fire Museum
I am looking for a picture of Mary Menger to submit to the Daughters of the American Revolution, as I wish to include her in the DAR database of Women in History, and the DAR requires some likeness to include with the short write-up I have prepared.
I came across your (March 9, 2024,) article in the Express-News about the old photo found in the firehouse, asking if anyone could confirm that this is the Menger family. Can you tell me if you received any further information confirming the identities of William and Mary Menger in this picture?
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The San Antonio Fire Museum was interested in a photograph of William A. Menger (1827-1871) because the founder of the Menger Hotel also was a prominent member of the city’s volunteer fire department.
His wife Mary Menger (1816-1887) was twice widowed – by her first husband, butcher Charles Guenther, in 1850; and by Menger in 1871, when he died at 44 in the hotel from an unknown illness. Both times, she kept a family enterprise going. With her first husband, she kept a boardinghouse where Menger was a guest and handyman before their marriage in 1851.
The meeting of these two German immigrants led to some impressive 19th-century vertical integration. William Menger first operated a cooperage or barrel-making concern, which would supply the brewery he started in the mid-1850s. Mary Menger was a good cook, used to tending to boarders, so after their marriage, the couple upgraded their boardinghouse to a hotel on Alamo Plaza. Menger beer eventually was rolled in Menger barrels through a connecting tunnel to the Menger Hotel, to be consumed by thirsty travelers.
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Opened in 1859, the Menger was an inn that catered to stagecoach passengers, visiting cattlemen and Army officers. San Antonio in those days was “a Baghdad of the wilderness,” says local historian Sam Woolford (covered here June 17, 2023) in a 1959 San Antonio Light series that marked the hotel’s centennial.
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When dusty travelers arrived at the Menger, they would find “a bath, a cool room, good food, a tree-shaded patio or a dining room with real linen,” Woolford said in the Light, Feb. 22, 1959. “It was a respite from the eternal jostling, the sound of horses’ hooves and the never-ending unfolding of a landscape which might conceal danger.”
The hotel was successful enough to need an almost-immediate addition, and the couple’s public profile flourished. As a pro-growth businessman, William Menger was elected alderman, similar to a present-day city council member. He became chief of Alamo No. 2, the fire company that protected the area around his hotel and adjacent brewery. Out of his own pocket, he purchased the city’s first fire engine for $4,000.
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He died from unknown causes in 1871, when he was just 44. His widow, with whom he had three surviving children, took over the operation of both the hotel and brewery. Three days after his death, March 18, 1871, Mary Menger announced in the San Antonio Express that “the death of the late owner and proprietor will cause no change in the affairs of the Menger Hotel as well as the brewery. All other businesses of W.A. Menger, deceased, will be carried on by the undersigned … Mrs. W.A. Menger.”
Through the 1870s, his legacy kept growing. Brewery sales reached No. 1 in the state, while Mary Menger used its profits to buy more land for another hotel addition, anticipating the coming of the railroad in 1877. According to Woolford, who perused the hotel’s mid-1870s ledgers, Menger interests “operated a ranch, sold wood to the Army, beer to far-flung oases in Texas and even conducted a small-loan service for transients and townspeople.”
The hotel further expanded its amenities, says Mary Menger’s entry in the Handbook of Texas, to offer sample rooms for sales representatives, meeting facilities, stage and railroad offices, livery stables, a barbershop, bar and billiard parlor.
Mary also continued her husband’s community support, giving to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, an orphanage and the city’s first Jewish synagogue. She contributed to political campaigns and “succeeded in lobbying Post Office officials and congressman Gustav Schleicher to move the United States Post Office in 1877 to Alamo Plaza, right outside the Menger Hotel,” says an article in the online Journal of San Antonio.
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Faced with national competition, she closed the brewery in 1878. With her son, L. William Menger, Mary ran the hotel until 1881, when it was sold to J.H. Kampmann, builder of the original hotel.
Verification of the Fire Museum’s photo is still iffy. This was the response to the 2024 column from Tim Draves, lecturer in history at the University of the Incarnate Word, who wrote Mary Menger’s Handbook entry as well as the Journal of San Antonio article.
After conferring with his wife Nancy Menger Belcher Draves, also a Texas historian, he said, “We don’t think those are Mengers, and here are reasons.”
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The man in the photo appears to part his hair on the left, but in other photos, William Menger parts his on the right. His head looks elongated, while Menger looks more round-faced in the photo where he’s wearing his firefighting uniform.
Also, the people pictured “don’t match the timing” of the Menger family. William was almost 11 years younger than his wife, Draves said, “and these two seem closer in age.” One boy is pictured, but the Mengers had three children: Louis William (1852-1919), Peter Gustav (1857-1914) and Catherine Barbara (1860-1947).
“Where are the other two children?” Draves asked. “Rather odd to include in a formal portrait only one child and leave out the other son and daughter.”
Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of Mary images for comparison. None is found in the collections of the University of Texas at San Antonio Special Collections Library or in the online Portal to Texas History, and there’s no picture of her in “The History and Mystery of the Menger Hotel,” a well-researched history by the late Docia Schultz Williams.
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While the names “William” and “Mary” often were reused in later generations of Mengers, the few pictures available of the original family either depict William alone or a group of their three children. It’s possible that Mary Menger was sensitive to the age gap between her and her husband. Also, she was 44 when her youngest child was born, an age at which many women of her time were grandmothers.
“Mary had lived a hard life and had ably helped William manage the hotel,” Williams wrote. “She was a very down-to-earth German housewife who apparently was completely devoid of ‘putting on airs.’ It was not unusual to find Mary, the hotel owner, sitting on the patio, peeling potatoes or shelling peas, which seemed rather shocking to some of her wealthy and socially prominent female patrons.”
Anyone who has or knows of a photo or portrait of Mary Menger may contact this column.
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