Guenther House: Pioneer Flour Mills

Carl Hilmar Guenther arrived in San Antonio in the early eighteen fifties from Germany, where he had trained as a millwright. He heard the city needed a gristmill, so he walked about two hundred fifty miles inland from the Gulf port at Indianola to San Antonio, and later built one on Live Oak Creek near Fredericksburg. In eighteen fifty-nine, after years of floods and droughts, he relocated to San Antonio, bought a plot along the river, and built the mill that would become Pioneer Flour Mills, still family-operated today after more than one hundred sixty years.

The limestone house he built beside it was one of the first structures in what is now the King William Historic District. It opened as a restaurant and museum in nineteen eighty-eight, and the family flour mill still operates next door.