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There’s a huge house surrounded by trees in downtown San Antonio that you may have missed, even though it’s located on a very busy block.
It’s called the Maverick Carter House, and Paul Carter knows the 132-year-old beauty like no one else. This was his grandmother’s house.
“I used to run around as a kid with my grandmother, Aline Badger Carter, and Aline was just the most fun to be with,” Carter said.
Carter's grandmother loved young people, and she loved education, in particular, science and the arts.
“I was probably seven and eight when she would give some of her astronomy lessons, and I got to be one of the youngest students in her class and had a great time,” he said.
If you wonder how she made astronomy exciting to children, Marlene Richardson said the Maverick Carter house was rigged like few others in Texas to make the universe real.
“Anybody who goes to the Tobin and who looks at this house will see that domed observatory on the roof,” she said.
Richardson has for 20 years now, inventoried the house room-by-room, box-by-box to determine what was there. She’s also done oral histories of Paul Carter and his father David and others. And that observatory on the roof was legit.
“We say it's four stories because of the observatory on the roof. This is kind of off the beaten path, unless you're going to the Tobin or the Baptist Church, then you see it all the time,” Richardson said.
While the Maverick Carter house is right across the street from the Tobin Center, that view is largely obscured by large trees. It actually faces the Tobin parking garage.
And Aline Carter didn’t just dabble in the arts and poetry.
“We call her the lady of the house because she lived here the longest and it was Aline who was the poet laureate of Texas for two years,” Richardson said. “She was a musician, an artist and an astronomer. She taught children from the Witte astronomy and would bring them over here and take them up to the observatory and let them look through the telescope.”
That refractor telescope was made by Bausch & Lomb and features a four-inch mirror. Despite it being made in 1918, that telescope still works well. The observatory’s roof opens so that you can gaze into the heavens.
Paul Carter's father and uncle served in World War II.
“We have a lot of memories from my father's exchanges with his parents during World War II, because that's where he was,” Carter said. “He and his brother Frank, were over there all those years in Europe.”
That father, David Carter, put his musical abilities to work, serving as a bugler. After the war, and 20 years later, Hemisfair ’68 was being built in San Antonio, when Carter and a friend contributed one of its oddest innovations: buñuelos.
“My father and Tony Specia, good friends from the war, got together, and they made a pitch to enter a recipe that Tony's family had, the buñuelos, and they wanted to put it into Hemisfair as a food,” he said.
Turns out, revealing a delicacy to Americans that few visitors had had before was a hit!
Buñuelos came in great variety in dozens of places worldwide, but its re-introduction here gave Hemisfair another point of uniqueness. The Maverick Carter house also had a carriage house out back.
“And he turned that into the buñuelos factory. And he ran that thing for decades,” Carter said. “And every Christmas there'd be a line out the door down the street. It was phenomenal how many buñuelos they would crank out.”
Marlene Richardson says the Carters have re-introduced the house to the public for tours, both guided and alone.
“Although the tours are free, we suggest that you can make a donation, or we suggest that you can make a donation for the tours to help upkeep a house like this. You can imagine what that is. It's a big burden,” she said.
Paul Carter thinks back on this house’s 132-year history. “Yeah, lots to explore as a kid and even the observatory. [We} had a rope you would pull, and it would lift the ceiling up, and that's how you'd get access. So again, for a kid to be able to open trap doors with cables and things was just a fun experience. There's lots of room here, yeah, lots to explore as a kid!"
You can read more about the Maverick Carter House here.
