State House/McWhiney Foundation Press – förlag

By 1850, the frontier settlement of San Antonio had seen more than its share of hardships, Indians attacks, rebellions, and repeated military occupations.  These events all marked the towns recent past.  In 1854, though, the editor of the Alamo Star felt confident enough in the town’s progress to announce that the embattled outpost would soon be known as the “Queen of the West.”  The Star, of course, capitalized on the name of the town’s most famous landmark—the Alamo.

Although historians have written about the battle and the town, no one has yet adequately explained how they are connected to each other.  A deeper look at the development of San Antonio shows that it was not only the site of the Battle of the Alamo, it was the center of much of the history of Spain, Mexico, Texas, and the United States. 

Queen of the West: A Documentary History of San Antonio, 1718–1900 takes readers through a series of important writings detailing how San Antonio transformed from an important but threatened outpost to a thriving Edwardian city.  The author, Richard Bruce Winders, provides an introduction to each eye-witness account providing diverse perspectives on the history of San Antonio by the people who  actually lived it.  

The author is an internationally noted authority on the topic of the Alamo.  The work will be a valuable resource for students of history and teachers.  The book draws together a body of work that readers would have a difficult time finding on their own.

The cover art is by noted artist Don Yena.

Sulphur Springs native Frank Webster Pearce was a soldier in Texas’ own 36th Infantry Division and the 111th Engineer Combat Battalion. The Division’s story has been told before, but never from start to finish by a combat engineer, whose footprints stirred the sands of three invasion beaches, wallowed through the mud, and trudged in the snow of every battle. From training in the United States to the war’s end in Austria, Pearce chronicled it all..  With the combination of diary, numerous letters home, and official division reports, this is the most complete look ever produced on the 111th Engineers and their war against Hitler’s Germany. This is a primary account written daily as the events unfolded. It was the war years. Here you find out how to properly bury a man in the water soaked Italian soil, a fool proof way to smuggle liquor from the US to the soldiers overseas, the foul stench of death reeking across the battlefield, and the beauty of exploding artillery shells in the night sky. These are his thoughts and letters as he wrote them—raw and unfiltered.

Rachel Moores and her husband David operated a cotton plantation in the bottoms of the Sulphur River in North East Texas. From that vantage point, they viewed the changing fortunes of Texas as the American Civil War opened their privileged lifestyle. David went to war while the task of operating this large farming enterprise fell to Rachel. More than 2000 acres and dozens of enslaved people fell to her to manage. 

This dairy chronicles her struggles and provides a priceless voice of a woman having to adapt and overcome the adversities of that violent age. Female perspectives often get overlooked when discussing the American Civil War and the effects of distant events often had catastrophic implications on the folks back home. Rachel’s Moores diary provides a priceless window into the changing realities of Texans who once bet their futures on the value of cotton.  

This diary and journal will be an important addition to the scholarship about elite white women and their lives in the antebellum south.  This manuscript is unique in that is is an extensive and detailed look into the life of a woman of the slave-owning class in frontier Texas, offering not only her vivid view of the slave system but of the daily life of a plantation mistress and of an invalid seeking a cure for her disease from New Orleans to New York.

The Forty-Eighters of Possum Creek: A Texas Civil War Story is a departure for State House Press. This remarkable work of vintage historical fiction focuses on the life of one young man, Kuno Sartorius, who grows up and comes of age in a community of educated German immigrants during the waning months of the Civil War. Author William Trenckmann serialized the novel in his newspaper, Das Bellville Wochenblatt [The Bellville Weekly]. His novel, Die Lateiner am Possum Creek is one of the few works of fiction to treat the plight of the minority Texas Germans during the war.

However, it is more than a German story, and provides vignettes of all aspects of life, and of all classes in Texas, on both the home front and the Trans-Mississippi theater. Throughout are the young men from all walks of life brought together by Confederate conscription and facing the same hardships of war.

Expertly translated and annotated by James C. Kearney, this novel becomes a shadow memoir of the American Civil War. The educated German settlers of Millheim had fled their native land because of strife and revolution, choosing the bucolic life on the Texas frontier over the sophisticated university towns of Germany. Their children, though, faced uncertainties of their own as Texas seceded and joined the Confederacy and depended on all military aged men to do their part in a cause few Germans in the neighborhood cared for, and to perpetuate slavery which most abhorred. Kearney’s notes help the reader navigate the story, and reveal the “story behind the story.” 

A family business frequently involves enough drama to fill a book—this one in fact.

Pearl Sets the Pace tells the story of two landmark companies and a mighty dynasty. It begins in 1883, with the arrival of German brew master Otto Koehler in the bustling city of San Antonio, Texas. He establishes himself as one of the founders of a firm that eventually becomes the Pearl Brewery. In 1914, his murder at the hands of a disgruntled mistress becomes front-page news across the nation. Emma, his grieving (but tough-as-nails) widow, assumes leadership of the company and keeps it afloat during the dark days of Prohibition. In 1941, Margaret Bosshardt one of Emma’s granddaughters, marries David Earl Pace. After World War II, the young couple formulate a secret recipe for Mexican salsa. Like mad scientists, they experiment in their home kitchen and try out their concoctions on friends. From such humble beginnings grew a mighty enterprise, a real-world manifestation of the American Dream. By the early 1990s, Dave and Margaret’s picante sauce was the top-selling Mexican food condiment in the world. Their descendants sold the business to the Campbell Soup Company for $1.1 billion.

Through murders and mistresses, Depression and divorces, booms and busts, a passion for product sustained the Koehler-Pace clan. To make something, not simply for their neighbors to buy, but also something that would become integral to their daily lives. That became their defining principle. Yes, it defined them, but it also characterized their city. Can anyone really imagine San Antonio without beer and picante sauce? This is the story of a proud, complicated, and interwoven family and the two great enterprises they wrangled. But it is also the story of a unique Texas city and the people it breeds.

It’s a business story, a family story, and a story of a thriving, modern city; it is also our story.