Office of Historic Preservation
Phone: (210) 215-9274
When the Presidio of Adaes in East Texas was closed in 1773 and its residents moved to Mission San Antonio de Valero (later known as the Alamo), competition for desirable property increased, and the growing population settled on lands surrounding the mission. In 1792, the Conde de Sierra Gorda noted that a fairly large settlement of families, most of them agregados (squatters), had grown up adjacent to Mission San Antonio de Valero and just outside the Villa de San Fernando. By the 1780s, Mission San Antonio de Valero was in decline, and in 1793 the official order was given to distribute the surrounding lands among the mission Indians and the resident Spanish soldiers and civilians. From 1795 until 1809, the Pueblo de Valero, as La Villita was then called, had its own government with an elected alcalde (mayor), Don Vicente de Amador.
Physician, geologist, and botanist John Leonard Riddell, who
visited San Antonio on September 25, 1839, described the
construction he observed in the La Villita area: "Four-fifths of
the houses are thatched with a kind of reed, the cat tail flag
it may be, but I think it is some kind of sledge or grass. Some
are in progress of erection on the Alamo side of the river."
During the mid-19th century, La Villita became a diverse
neighborhood in terms of the ethnicities and trades of its
residents. Another period of growth and prosperity occurred
after the Civil War through the 1870s.