La Villita

You've climbed up from the river onto the south bank, and you're standing in La Villita, the little town. It's one square block of narrow streets and low buildings. Look at the walls around you. Some are thick, plain adobe. Some are cut Texas limestone. A few are trimmed like small Victorian houses. That mix is the story of this place, written in building materials.

Long before any of it, this ground was a Coahuiltecan village. The people who lived here were the first to choose this bank of the river, and it's worth saying plainly that the town that followed was built on their home.

In the 1700s, Spanish soldiers posted at the mission we now call the Alamo settled here with their Indian wives and children. They lived in jacales, huts of brush and mud. It was a soldiers' neighborhood, and a poor one.

You've climbed up from the river onto the south bank, and you're standing in La Villita, the little village. It's one square block of narrow streets and old houses: thick-walled adobe, limestone, a few Victorian fronts. Look at the walls around you. They are a record of everyone who lived in this one block, if you know how to read them.

First, whose ground this is. Before the Spanish, La Villita was a Coahuiltecan Indian village. Then it became a cluster of brush huts called jacales, homes for Spanish soldiers posted at the mission a few minutes' walk north, the one we now call the Alamo. Many of those soldiers lived here with Indian wives and children. In 1819 a flood off the river swept most of the huts away. People rebuilt in adobe, which is why the oldest walls here are so thick and earthbound.