The Yturri-Edmunds House: Adobe and Acequia

This quiet corner of San Antonio holds one of the oldest intact adobe houses in the city. Manuel Yturri y Castillo, a Tejano businessman, built it in the eighteen forties on land he had obtained from Mission Concepción. Running alongside it is a remnant of the Pajalache acequia, the ancient irrigation channel that Mission Concepción's padres engineered as early as seventeen thirty-one to carry water from the San Antonio River.

The thick adobe walls, hand-hewn ceiling beams, and the stone grist mill on the property show how San Antonio's earliest residents managed land and water before Texas was a republic. The San Antonio Conservation Society acquired it in nineteen sixty-one and restored it a few years later. It remains one of the few surviving adobe structures from that generation of Tejano life.