A group gathers at the windmill, the tallest point of reference with the grounds of A Night in Old San Antonio in La Villita.
UTSA Special Collections
A volunteer displays the horseshoe sausage made especially for sale at Frontier Town, the Old West theme area of NIOSA.
UTSA Special Collections
The banner marking “Cowboy’s Paradice” of Frontier Town in the early 1970s advertises a couple of new novelty foods – calf fries and rattlesnake steaks.
UTSA Special Collections
The Circle C Band, performing here in 1974, was one of many country-and-western and later Tejano bands that have played in the Frontier Town cantina.
UTSA Special Collections
Crowds form near the NIOSA windmill in this 1998 photo. The windmill is a popular meeting spot for groups at NIOSA.
UTSA Special Collections
In this undated photo, former NIOSA chairs Betty Murray Halff (left) and Pinkie Martin pause in front of Frontier Town’s actual working Post Office in a golf cart tour of the event grounds at La Villita.
Courtesy San Antonio Conservation Society
Even early in the day in this undated photo, crowds form near the NIOSA windmill and lines for the Frontier Town beer booth.
UTSA Special Collections
As seen in the San Antonio Light, April 15, 1966, the brand-new Frontier Town area of A Night in Old San Antonio drew customers with cowboy cuisine and costumes.
San Antonio Light
If you’re a regular attendee at one of Fiesta San Antonio’s biggest and oldest events – A Night in Old San Antonio or NIOSA – you probably have traditions associated with the 78-year-old festival of food, drink and entertainment.
Maybe you always stand in the long, long line for Maria’s Tortillas, the fresh, hot corn tortillas made while you wait. Or you collect a stack of this year’s plastic NIOSA commemorative cups to take home and reuse.
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And if you go with a big group, you probably have a special spot to meet up after going your separate ways. That might just be the windmill in NIOSA’s Frontier Town area, a lighted landmark that shows up wherever you are on the festival grounds at La Villita.
As a fundraiser for the Conservation Society of San Antonio, NIOSA has 14 cultural areas – mini-theme parks with food and decor, some of which hark back to the heritage of the different historical influences on San Antonio, such as the Chinese, French, Germans, Irish and Spanish.
Frontier Town pays homage to the late-1800s era of the Old West, when San Antonio was a rough-and-ready trade crossroads. This year, the area is celebrating its 60th anniversary of cowboys and cowgirls, meaty menu items and the windmill that figures in so many people’s NIOSA memories.
RELATED: NIOSA ancestor events
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When the four-night festival expanded to Navarro Street in 1964, it first was known as “River Plaza.” The new area had a western band that served as “our Pied Piper to get people down to that area,” remembered former NIOSA Chair Nelle Lee Weincek, as quoted in Lewis Fisher’s “Saving San Antonio: The Precarious Preservation of a Heritage.”
Frontier Town as such debuted two years later as a “brand-new, old-time feature of NIOSA,” as described in the San Antonio Express and News, April 17, 1966. To the existing Fast Draw Suds beer booth, western-style food items were introduced, including barbecue, “Pedernales pinto beans” and horseshoe sausage specially developed for the new NIOSA area.
RELATED: Collectible NISOA cups
Designed by Bob Dale, an Express-News artist and cartoonist, the “town” between Presa, Navarro and Villita streets (later the corner of South Alamo and Nueva) consisted of “a series of store fronts patterned after original Western towns,” says the San Antonio Light, April 15, 1966. Volunteers built it using lumber salvaged from buildings torn down across Alamo Street to make way for the HemisFair ’68 world’s fair. Donated by Urban Renewal, the wood “in some instances (was) over 100 years old,” or as old or older than the period represented.
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One of those buildings was a post office (covered here April 23, 2024) from which visitors could buy actual stamps and postcards, to be hand-canceled with a custom NIOSA postmark. Another was a cantina for entertainment – flamenco dancers and a country-and-western band – with a concrete dance floor.
The windmill was built by employees from Pearl Brewing Co. (discussed here Feb. 5, 2022 and May 21, 2016), which in those days supplied the beer.
Over the next few years, Frontier Town kept the beer, the barbecue and the western bands and added memorable, dare-you-to-eat-it items such as calf fries and rattlesnake steaks.
RELATED: NIOSA King’s eggs
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Many of the area’s original elements are still part of NIOSA’s traditions. The windmill is particularly beloved; in 1987, it was featured on that year’s NIOSA poster by Caroline Shelton, the artist who painted the first poster in 1983 (covered here April 14, 2018)
This year, for Frontier Town’s 60th anniversary, the area’s theme structure is the focal point of NIOSA’s Fiesta medal, with the other areas represented in papel picado.
“The windmill was an easy choice (for) my first year as chairman, because when my family comes to volunteer at NIOSA every year and they need to find me on the grounds, I tell them to ‘Meet me at the windmill,’” said NIOSA Chair Julie Terrill. “It’s such a beautiful sight to see the windmill all lit up, surrounded by strings of lights and papel picado, with the Tower Life building or the Tower of the Americas in the background.”
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For the most part, it’s the same windmill you might remember as a meeting place, even decades ago. Most of its wood is still original. Like other NIOSA properties, it’s stored from year to year in a warehouse, where Manager Scott Cox took it apart earlier this year and reassembled it, saving as much of the HemisFair-salvaged wood as possible, with new pieces in pine similar to the original.
NIOSA will be open 5:30-10:30 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, April 21-24, at La Villita, 418 Villita St. For ticket information, visit www.niosa.org or call 210-226-5188. Medals will be sold for $15 at NIOSA in its souvenir booths.
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