Yturri-Edmunds Historic Site
128 Mission Road, San Antonio Guided tours are given by appointment on Fridays for $10. 210-224-6163 saconservation.org“I never get tired of coming here. It’s a rare chance to see frontier life in San Antonio.”A limestone-lined dry channel from the mission’s ancient irrigation system, the acequia, brought water to the home as early as 1731. The land became available when Spanish authorities began to secularize Concepción and other missions in the 1790s. Then after Mexico won its independence from Spain, Manuel Yturri de Castillo obtained acreage through grants in the 1820s. Born in Spain’s Asturian Province, he immigrated to Mexico then moved to San Antonio to represent a mercantile business. In 1821, Yturri married Maria Josefa Rodriguez, a descendant of the original Canary Islands families sent to populate San Antonio by authorities of Nueva España in 1731.

The music room in the Yturri-Edmunds home where Ernestine Edmunds lived until her death in 1961.
Photo: Will van Overbeek
Originally, the home included only two rooms, represented today by the music room and parlor.An unplastered section of the 18-inch-thick wall on the home’s front porch provides a look at the adobe bricks. The exact formula for such bricks varies greatly, and the Yturri-Edmunds Home builders are said to have mixed goat’s milk and goat’s hair with earth for its bricks. Originally, the home included only two rooms, represented today by the music room and parlor. A bedroom was likely added in the 1860s to the house’s main wing, then three smaller rooms—a kitchen, dining room, and school room—were at some point built onto the back of the structure. Ernest Edmunds died in 1874, the same year the couple’s youngest of three children, Ernestine, was born. To support her family, mother Vicenta taught school, a profession notably followed by Ernestine. Miss Edmunds, as Ernestine was often called, lived in the home until her own death in 1961, upon which she bequeathed the site to the San Antonio Conservation Society. About a quarter of the home’s furnishings are items owned and used by the family, and the rest are period pieces representing the late 19th century. Ernestine played guitar and piano, and the music room features both a parlor organ and her own piano with its distinctive bench with a back. There’s also a family rocking chair and a cabinet of toys, curios, and souvenirs, many of which were given to her by appreciative students.

Ernestine Edmunds