by Scott Zesch

During the dreary winter hours of February 11, 1908, the people of San Antonio, Texas, were chattering in shops and barrooms about a startling headline in a local daily, the Light: “Miss Adina De Zavala Enacts Siege of the Alamo Over Again and Defies Deputy Sheriff.” The previous evening, the most vocal historic preservationist in the American Southwest had barricaded herself inside the famous Spanish mission to protect it from commercial exploitation.(Figure 1) Over the next three days, the diminutive woman single-handedly holding the Alamo made the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Atlanta Constitution. Americans from every region of the country applauded her fortitude. Her standoff ensured that the Alamo’s convento de monjes (monastery)—believed to be the oldest surviving building in San Antonio today—would not disappear quickly or quietly.(1)

A century later, this remarkable episode is largely forgotten, even in preservation circles. For American conservationists, however, it was a seminal event. Adina De Zavala’s seizure of the Alamo was one of the first nationally publicized acts of civil disobedience in the cause of historic preservation, the grandmother of every lying-down-in-front-of-a-bulldozer incident that has made news since. Overnight, De Zavala became the darling of the national press, and her fellow preservationists across the country learned a critical lesson about using publicity in support of the cause. A New York Times editorial celebrated her for “heroically reviving memories” of the Alamo siege of 1836.(2) John B. Adams, a descendant of former President John Quincy Adams, sent her a telegram that read: “Win or lose, we congratulate you upon your splendid patriotism and courage. We are proud of you. Texas should be.”(3)

This 3-day spectacle was actually 15 years in the making. In 1893, De Zavala had founded the San Antonio chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), a statewide women’s lineage society that was dedicated, among other things, to preserving historic sites. De Zavala summed up her lifelong preservation philosophy when she wrote that “true progress and culture remembers the past and profits by the memory.”(4) She elaborated to one interviewer—

If people—especially children—can actually see the door through which some noble man or woman passed, or some object he or she touched, they’ll be impressed, they’ll remember, they’ll be inspired to read everything they can find in print about that man or woman. Inevitably they’ll be filled with high ideals, the desire to emulate.(5)

Historian L. Robert Ables describes the fiery San Antonio preservationist as a small woman, about five feet three inches tall, with soft brown hair and blue eyes.(6) Born in 1861 of Mexican and Irish ancestry, De Zavala was considered Texas royalty. Her grandfather, the accomplished Mexican statesman and writer Lorenzo De Zavala, had cast his lot with the Texas independence movement and served as the first vice president of the Republic of Texas.(7)

The principal object of De Zavala’s early preservation crusade was one of the last, endangered vestiges of the state’s most revered historic site, the Alamo. Originally called San Antonio de Valero, the Spanish mission was founded by Franciscans in 1718 to christianize Native Americans. Its compound once occupied about three acres in what is now downtown San Antonio. After the Catholic Church secularized the mission in 1793, it was used as a military garrison. The property became better known as El Álamo (cottonwood) after a Spanish cavalry unit from Álamo de Parras, Mexico, occupied it in 1803. In 1836, the fortress was the scene of the most memorable siege and battle of the Texas Revolution, during which Mexican forces commanded by General Antonio López de Santa Anna felled all of the Texan combatants.

The United States Army later took over the deteriorating property for use as a quartermaster’s depot. The Army started making repairs in 1847 and added the trademark bell-shaped parapet to the church in 1850. As downtown San Antonio expanded eastward, the land occupied by the Alamo became increasingly coveted for commercial purposes. By the turn of the 20th century, only two of the mission’s many original buildings still stood. One was the large 1750s church, the structure most commonly identified as “the Alamo.” The State of Texas had acquired it in 1883. The other was the adjacent monastery, an older limestone building constructed around 1727 to house the mission’s clergy and later known as the “long barrack.” Used as a store and warehouse since 1877, it was disguised behind a wooden facade.(Figure 2)

In 1903, Adina De Zavala and her DRT sisters rallied to prevent a hotel syndicate from acquiring the monastery-turned-warehouse at the Alamo. The stakes could not have been higher, for developers considered this site “the most valuable ground in the city.”(8) De Zavala’s chief ally in the DRT was Clara Driscoll, a young philanthropist and ranch heiress who garnered national acclaim when she bought the warehouse property for preservation in 1904. The following year, the State of Texas assumed the purchase and rewarded the women’s organization with custody of the Alamo.

This “second battle of the Alamo” was part of a larger movement to save America’s material heritage decades before the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 extended federal protection to historic structures. Early preservationists, mostly women, were motivated primarily by patriotism and viewed historic sites as shrines to American heroes. The movement began in earnest in 1853, when Ann Pamela Cunningham organized the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union to save George Washington’s estate along the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia from being converted into a hotel and racetrack. Cunningham, who understood the importance of publicity, valued journalists as her allies. Her success fomented the creation of the Valley Forge Association (1878), the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (1888), the Ladies’ Hermitage Association (1889), and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (1910). The DRT, founded in 1891, became the vanguard of historic preservation in Texas.

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