San Antonio Firm Chartered — Hoffman-Hayman Coffee company — Light, 6 Feb 1912
The 6 February 1912 San Antonio Light (page 5) runs a short Austin-wire item headed San Antonio Firm Chartered., reporting the previous day’s charter for The Hoffman-Hayman Coffee company (the clip spells Hoffman in the name), $20,000 capital, and incorporators W. E. Hayman, Mrs. William R. Hoffmann, and Gustave Menger. The bureau line is dated Austin, 6 February; the Express-News piece for the same filing uses a 5 February dateline and adds detail (Neeley on the first board, fifty-year term, “general merchandising”)—so we treat the two clips as one charter story in two papers. The figure is the embedded newspaper bitmap from the PDF (pdfimages), not the Newspapers.com chrome frame.
Why it matters: A few weeks after the founder’s January 1912 death, this item is dated primary print for the legal incorporation of the business as The … Hoffman-Hayman Coffee company—a capital filing in Minnie’s and Gus Menger’s names alongside Hayman, matching the February 1912 charter line on the History page. Listing Mrs. William R. Hoffmann as an incorporator is a contemporary anchor for her place at the top of the new firm, not only for later officer lists in trade or society pages. A second San Antonio daily corroborates the same filing without leaning on the longer Express-News piece alone; that cross-check is useful because the site’s other 1912 “merger” cite for Hoffmann and Hayman comes from a 1925 Light article looking back, not from a same-week filing notice.
Transcription
San Antonio Firm Chartered
AUSTIN, Tex., Feb. 6. —Chartered yesterday The Hoffman-Hayman Coffee company of San Antonio; capital stock, $20,000. Incorporators, W. E. Hayman, Mrs. William R. Hoffmann and Gustave Menger.
Source
- Newspapers.com — San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Tex.), 6 Feb 1912, p. 5. Accessed 1 May 2026.
- Download PDF (archived copy of this export).
