dead zip 01 said:
I hope it works out for you, that would be an awesome project. I'm glad that you appreciate the building for its history.
I have a guest house that was originally an army barracks at Fort Sam Houston during WWII. The guy who built my house bought it at a government auction after the war and moved it onto this property to live in until he built the main house. Once he built the house he used the barracks as a woodshop and somehow managed to use one room as his smokehouse for decades without burning the place down.
I finally got around to completely gutting and rebuilding it into a guesthouse/party barn a few years ago and love the fact that it has more history and more stories than if it had just been built where it's currently sitting for the sole purpose of being a guesthouse. My favorite example is the smokehouse room has hundreds of hooks on the ceiling in rows to hang sausages. I kept them and just painted over them because it's a great story and you can't replicate that kind of history.
I wish I knew more about the buildings history and how it was used during the war. I know that some Nazi POWS were held at Fort Sam Houston during the war, specifically some of Rommel's Afrika Korps were held there in barracks. I always hoped that when gutting it I would find some writing behind the walls or an old newspaper or something in the wall to help trace the buildings history but was disappointed to find nothing of significance.
Ugh, just spent the past couple of hours reading about the POWs in Texas when I should have been working.
It looks like most of Ft Sam's housing was tenting, but I'm sure there were some auxiliary buildings sold after the war.
This is the best photo of the main structures up on that section of Ft Sam following the war. Most, if not all, are gone now. Maybe it was one of them?
The article states that the remaining structures of the camp is just at the curve in the road. (All of it is now covered by the National Cemetery.