same act also placed the long barracks as well as the Alamo chapel in the “custody and care of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, to be maintained by them in good order and repair, without charge to the State, as a sacred Memorial to the heroes who immolated themselves upon that hallowed ground.…”

For eighty years the Daughters have continued to operate the Alamo “without charge to the State” largely through the profits realized from the sales of souvenirs. The earliest mementos of the Alamo battle were actual relics of the fight. During the decade from 1836 until the U.S. Army moved in, visitors walked off with bits of stone, cannonballs, and pieces of broken weapons. In 1841, when the first historian of the Alamo, Reuben Marmaduke Potter, arrived in San Antonio, he found two men engaged in making pipes, vases, seals, and other small items from Alamo stone.

Fifty years later people were still chipping away at the Alamo, and the practice probably continues even today in a small way. Shortly after the turn of the century, however, the San Antonio Daily Express reported that the selling of cheap souvenirs at the Alamo had done much to alleviate vandalism.

German ceramic factories were probably the first to mass-produce Alamo mementos, beginning about 1890. By that time Germany’s well-established ceramics industry had supplied souvenirs for other historic sites, including the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876.

By the 1890s sterling silver spoons had become popular souvenirs all over the country: silver remained cheap; the spoons did not occupy much space in one’s luggage; and they weren’t breakable. Many surviving examples from the 189Os depict the facade of the Alamo in their bowls. Manufactured by several New England companies, most of these spoons have handles crowded with other Texas symbols, including cattle, cotton, bluebonnets, and the Texas Seal with the Lone Star. After about 1920 souvenir spoons greatly diminished in favor of other items.

Several souvenirs made of a soft, leadladen pewter dating from the turn of the century and early 1900s bear marks indicating Japanese manufacture—which is suggested by the Oriental motifs on many of them: a small pin tray, for instance, has a dragon curled around the image of the Alamo.

The extraordinary variety of souvenirs implies that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Alamo had become a tourist spot as popular as Niagara Falls, Mount Vernon, or Independence Hall.

When the outbreak of World War I in Europe cut off the import of souvenir porcelain from Germany, domestically produced souvenirs came to dominate the market, among them items of nickelplated pot metal and chalkware.

During this period, too, the Alamo Iron Works in San Antonio began turning out cast brass and iron advertising pieces which usually bore the famous facade and the company’s name. In the late 1930s and 1940s these also were produced in aluminum.

The state’s Centennial in 1936 naturally encouraged a great spate of Alamo souvenirs: a century

after the battle took place, the mission probably had become the most clearly recognizable symbol of Texas. By the 1950s the age of plastic had made itself manifest in Alamo memorabilia, including the hundreds of Davy Crockett items that followed the 1955 release of Walt Disney’s movie about the “king of the wild frontier.”

Sifting through the one hundred and fifty years of Alamo relics, one becomes aware that the Alamo’s identification as a “holy place” has greatly diminished during this century. In large part this cheapening of the image is due to the proliferation of tasteless souvenirs sold at the very portals of the Alamo for the worthy cause of keeping the site open to visitors.

With the 1986 Texas Sesquicentennial, the greatest of the state’s symbols will no doubt be recycled in new and curious ways. After the Alamo chocolate bar —which made an early appearance in San Antonio over a year ago—what next? —William E. Green