Koehler Park: A Historical Gem in San Antonio's Brackenridge Park
By: Lewis F. Fisher
Published: April 24, 2024
Updated: April 25, 2024
Koehler Park is an integral component of Brackenridge Park in San Antonio. Comprising approximately fourteen acres between the San Antonio River on the south and the path of the former Upper Labor Acequia on the north, it was given to the city of San Antonio as a Christmas gift in 1915 by brewer Emma Koehler.
Koehler Park’s land housed a Civil War tannery (see CONFEDERATE ARMY TANNERY) on an otherwise unoccupied seventy-eight-acre tract purchased by the Confederate government from the city of San Antonio in January 1863. The city repurchased the tract from the U. S. Army’s Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in 1870 and five years later sold most of it to private buyers. In the 1880s Helen Madarasz opened Ilka Nurseries on the part that was to become Koehler Park. It became one of the largest commercial nurseries in Texas.
After Ilka Nurseries closed, in 1901 its land was purchased by Otto Koehler, who owned the San Antonio Brewing Association, producers of Pearl Beer, a mile down the river. Koehler was annoyed by George Brackenridge’s requirement that alcoholic beverages not be permitted in Brackenridge Park, which at that time was opening across the river from the former nursery. On his new property Koehler opened Madarasz Family Park with a beer garden and bandstand. Permission for use of alcoholic beverages was a requirement of her gift when Koehler’s widow, Emma, gave the park to the city as Otto Koehler Park.
Emma Koehler also leveraged away a troublesome quirk of Brackenridge Park. In trying to keep Brackenridge Park intact and keep the city from selling off pieces to adjacent landowners, George Brackenridge had stipulated that title to a twenty-five foot perimeter strip around Brackenridge Park remain with the San Antonio Water Works Company. Termed “a Chinese wall” by the media, this barrier prohibited legal access into, among other places, the adjacent Koehler Park. Emma Koehler made a requirement of her gift the abandonment of that claim by what was then named the San Antonio Water Supply Company, which agreed to transfer the strip’s title to the city.
A main entry to Koehler Park from Brackenridge was a low-water crossing that delighted generations of children crossing it in their parents’ cars. Southwest of the crossing, in 1919 Parks Commissioner Ray Lambert opened a tourist camp, complete with restrooms, canteen, and gas tank, that soon drew more than 3,000 cars a season, causing the camp to be moved in 1925 to the southern tip of Brackenridge Park. In 1935–39 the Works Progress Administration (see WORK PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION) replaced Otto Koehler’s bandstand with a new pavilion.
A red sandstone gate stands at the park’s southern entrance beside the vanished path of the Upper Labor Acequia, but otherwise boundaries of Koehler Park are unidentified. Nearly half of Koehler Park is occupied by the San Antonio Zoo, which expanded from the north. The depot for Brackenridge Park’s miniature train, now known as the San Antonio Zoo Train, is on the site of the onetime tourist camp.
Bibliography:
Lewis F. Fisher, Brackenridge: San Antonio’s Acclaimed Urban Park (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2022). San Antonio Light, December 24, 1915.
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Lewis F. Fisher, “Koehler Park,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/koehler-park.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
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- April 24, 2024
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