Boy do I wish I could get a letter from the mayor like this when I travel to Mexico!
From a large private collection of San Antonio historical documents...
An introduction letter from the San Antonio Mayor Charles Kennon Quin for Mr. & Mrs. Atlee B. Ayres for their trip to Mexico!
QUIN, CHARLES KENNON (1877–1960). Charles Kennon Quin, mayor and judge, was born in Tangipahoa, Louisiana, on March 24, 1877, the son of Henry Columbus and Cora Rosalee (Kennon) Quin. The family moved to Texas when Charles was a child and settled in Columbus in Colorado County. Charles attended local schools and in 1893 graduated from the Weimer Institute; he received a teaching certificate from the University of Texas in 1903. He then taught and served as superintendent in the Colorado County schools. He studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1908. Quin married Elizabeth Townsend Marston on July 27, 1904 (she died in December 1945). He later married Janice Houston Brown on August 20, 1949. Quin had one adopted daughter. He practiced law in Columbus, served as a major in the Texas National Guard during World War I, and was district judge (Twenty-fifth District) from 1921 to 1923...
ATLEE BERNARD AYERS was born in Hillsboro, Ohio, on July 12, 1873, the son of Nathan Tandy and Mary Parsons Ayres. The family moved to Texas, lived in Houston, and then moved to San Antonio in 1888, where Ayres' father managed the Alamo Flats luxury apartment hotel for many years. In 1890, Ayres went to New York to study at the Metropolitan School of Architecture, a subsidiary of Columbia University. There, he won first prize in the school's annual design competition. His teachers included William Ware, a student of Richard Morris Hunt. Ayres took drawing lessons at the Art Students League at night and studied painting under the noted teacher and artist Frank Vincent DuMond.
Upon his graduation in 1894, he returned to San Antonio and worked for various architects. He subsequently moved to Mexico, where he practiced until 1900. That year he moved back to San Antonio and began a partnership with Charles A. Coughlin that lasted until Coughlin's death in 1905. One of their projects was the three-story home of Ethel Draught, at 1215 N. St. Mary's St, now part of the campus of Providence Catholic School.
Early in his solo career in San Antonio, Ayres designed a hotel (1907) later known as the Heimann Building, and now occupied by Avance, a non-profit serving children and families in need. He also made the plans for the still-surviving Halff house (1908), and for a villa for Col. George Washington Brackenridge that was later torn down. He also designed the David J. and May Bock Woodward House, which currently functions as a club house for the Woman's Club of San Antonio and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places listings in Bexar County, Texas on February 16, 1996...
Used condition... 7.3 x 10.7 inches.
D-9
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