H and H Coffee

Dedicated to the history of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. est. 1899 in San Antonio, Texas.

The San Antonio Historical Association is an avocational local-history society organized “for the purpose of promoting the study and appreciation of the history of Texas with special emphasis on San Antonio and its environs.” It operates under a state charter approved February 15, 1940, with fifty-two charter members; Joseph William Schmitz was its first president. By the 1980s–early 1990s it met at the Fort Sam Houston Officer’s Club; the TSHA entry (last updated 2021) documents no activity past that period, so its current status is uncertain / likely dormant.

For the H&H Coffee Factory project, the Association matters as a node in San Antonio’s local-history community — the same avocational-plus-academic audience the Listening Tour targets — and as a lead on the Yanaguana Society’s publications, which it absorbed in 1947. No direct Hoffmann-Hayman connection is documented; relevance is community and archival-lead, not provenance.

Organization and meetings

  • Charter: State charter approved February 15, 1940; 52 charter members.
  • First president: Joseph William Schmitz (CSC; St. Mary’s University historian of Texas).
  • Governance: Board of five directors elected annually — president, vice president, secretary-treasurer among them.
  • Meetings: Third Friday of January, February, March, May, September, October, and November.
  • Program: Members present papers on local topics of historical interest (Southwest-wide subjects also accepted). Originally business/professional avocational historians; over time, more professors and graduate students from local universities participated.
  • Texana giveaway: A book on Texas is given as an attendance prize at each meeting — over the years “quite a library of Texana has been given away” (i.e., dispersed to members, not retained as an institutional collection).

Meeting places (a tour of SA civic venues)

Era Venue
Early (post-1940) No regular meetingplace
Adopted as permanent Cos House, La Villita
By the 1970s Alamo Hall
1980s – early 1990s Fort Sam Houston Officer’s Club

Fort Sam Houston is independently in this wiki as H&H’s largest documented single institutional customer — an incidental overlap of venue, not a documented H&H link.

The Yanaguana Society publications (1947)

The Association “has no publications of its own,” but in 1947 it received the publications of the Yanaguana Society upon that organization’s dissolution. The Yanaguana Society (founded 1933) was an early San Antonio historical/folklore publishing group; its imprints are a primary-source resource for early-SA history. Where that print inheritance physically resides today — and whether the Association’s own meeting papers survive in a SA repository (SAPL Texana, Conservation Society library, UTSA ITC, Witte) — is an open research question for the project’s archive program.

H&H / 601 Delaware touchpoints

SA history community and the listening tour

The Association is the membership-society form of the Listening Tour — SA History Community audience: people who research and present San Antonio history as an avocation. Its speaker roster — William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), George Washington Littlefield, James Stephen Hogg, Samuel Maverick, Asa Mitchell, and others — models the lecture-and-paper format the Coffee Museum program could host. If the society is still active or revivable, it is a low-cost partner for a Delaware Street local-history evening.

Mid-century-SA context

Chartered 1940 — contemporaneous with H&H’s consolidated mid-century era (post-1937 inflection, Crystalvac plant humming on Delaware Street). It is a fixture of the same mid-century San Antonio civic-history milieu in which the factory operated.

Open questions

  • Current status. Is the Association still active (or formally dissolved)? The TSHA entry documents nothing past the early 1990s.
  • Yanaguana publications, now. Where did the 1947-inherited Yanaguana Society publications end up — a library, a successor society, a private hand-off?
  • Association papers. Do the society’s meeting papers / records survive in a SA archive, and do any touch the Delaware Street / East Side industrial corridor?
  • Schmitz network. Joseph William Schmitz’s St. Mary’s University history circle — any overlap with documented H&H-era SA chroniclers?

See also

Places

Operations

  • SAPL citizen-historian research tools — parallel local-research infrastructure; candidate home for Yanaguana/Association print materials

Future