REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
While researching the history of garbage in San Angelo, a few people asked me about the smokestack associated with the Way Back In Club, later known as Jack Daniel’s Old Time Eatery, situated on the side of the Mertzon Highway heading west out of town.
For decades the brick tower was the first thing travelers would see of San Angelo after passing by the Twin Buttes, but its exact origins were somewhat shrouded in the mists of history.
History of the City’s Incinerators
As a major inland shipping point for cattle on the railroad, beginning in the 1890s, San Angelo had to deal with a great deal of livestock loss, because many animals were exhausted from the long walk, and died after arrival. Burning was the only “sanitary” method of disposal available.
On May 2, 1902, the San Angelo Press reported the following news item:
“Two hundred dead cows have been hauled out to the dumping grounds during the past two or three weeks. Many of the cows that have been shipped from there were very poor and without the most careful handling will not reach the [Indian] Territory alive.”
During my interview with Bob Bluthardt, I learned an original town dump was located where the McNease Convention Center now stands, not far from the forks of the Conchos.
A portion of this area was still being used as a dump in 1903, as attested to by a warning advertisement regarding illegal dumping that appeared in the San Angelo Press July 22, 1903:
“Any one found dumping trash or refuse on the Spencer Addition near the scouring mill will be prosecuted. The dumping grounds for the city are at the forks of the river. — Austin Spencer
Needing more space before the turn of the century, another dump was opened at a site 3-miles west of City Hall, near the intersection of what is today Sherwood Way and the Arden Road some years before.
A Refreshing Change
It was around this time that “Keeping San Angelo Clean” got a big boost as a group of ladies in town met on Nov. 25, 1902, to organize a special society dedicated to improving the deplorable conditions around the young city.
News of that meeting was published in both local newspapers.
FROM THE SAN ANGELO PRESS
WEDNESDAY, DEC. 3, 1902
The ladies of the city, ever mindful of the welfare of our citizenship have organized for the purpose of effecting improvements in the sanitary condition of San Angelo, and when their attention is directed to, and their energies exerted for a movement, something of a substantial nature may be anticipated.
As previously announced, a meeting was held at the courthouse on Tuesday evening of last week for the purposes of perfecting an organization to be known as the “Civic League.”
The meeting was called by Mrs. M.E. Lee, who explained the objects of the proposed organization, and illustrated the success of similar movements as demonstrated by the history of other places. She called attention to different lines of work, upon which much good could be accomplished, mentioning the cleaning of public streets, the stationing of garbage cans at convenient points, planting shade trees, etc.
Those present expressed themselves as favoring a stock law for the city, and to accomplish this innovation it being necessary to incorporate, they therefore placed themselves on record as advocates of reincorporation, and will use their best efforts to secure this result.
The Civic League was campaigning full-tilt by the following year, working hard to make a difference.
FROM THE SAN ANGELO PRESS
WEDNESDAY, AUG. 16, 1903
A Cleaner San Angelo
All this rubbish on the streets; all these scraps and sheets of paper blowing up the street today and down again tomorrow; these alleys with their watermelon rinds, tin cans and other refuse — all these speak loudly concerning the city’s cleanliness and sanitation. Clean Up!
Rid the streets of their rubbish and the alleys of their tin cans and unsightly refuse! Get ready for the Carnival!
There are going to be people here from abroad at that time and can’t afford to have them laugh in our faces concerning the filthy conditions of our city.
Visitors will come here from other towns and see these things and then every citizen who has any civic pride will be ashamed of our streets. Anticipate these things. Look forward to the future welfare of San Angelo. Be in a position to be proud of your hometown.
And that’s not all. The health of the people requires that these things be done. Look out for fever — for epidemics. All this waste in the alleyways breeds disease. Get it away; Clean up!
The Civic League has provided garbage cans downtown, yet the streets are full of paper; the Civic League employs a man to haul the contents of these cans away, and yet it doesn’t all go into the cans. If the cans are not large enough you can afford to provide others — just so the street doesn’t look like a village throughfare. And at home provide your own garbage can. Put your waste into them. Pay the man who does this work a little extra to haul it away. You can afford it. Better do this than pay doctor bill.
The City of San Angelo, situated as it is, should be the cleanest city in America. Is it? And whose fault is it? Everybody’s, and everybody ought to contribute his share to a general cleaning up. Let’s all clean up.
The New Dump
This “west dump” had been in use for some time at that point, as attested to by a rather in-depth article on the matter — a touchy subject at that time — that appeared in The Press in 1905.
FROM THE SAN ANGELO PRESS
MARCH 23, 1905
CITY DUMPING GROUNDS
Health of City is Menaced and One of the Principal Roads to the City Disgraced by Dumping Grounds
San Angelo is not large. The health of the people is naturally good. But San Angelo is growing and the health of her people must be protected.
There is hardly a man in the city who will deny that ten acres of carcasses, refuse, offal and litter situated three miles west of this city will not in the end serve to do damage to the health of the people.
Dr. S.C. Parsons, alderman of San Angelo and chairman of the alderman committee on sanitation, requested the editor of The Press to visit the city dumping grounds and report to the people of San Angelo the impression derived from the visit. The trip was made Monday afternoon and here is what you will see to morrow if you choose to take a little drive three miles out on the Sherwood Road.
First, as you turn a corner about 2 miles out in a little tract of unfenced private ground, there are perhaps a hundred loads of tin cans, iron roofing, and litter of every character. These, bear in mind you will drive right through as but little attention has been paid to where the road runs. This wholesale dumping of trash has supposedly been done by irresponsible persons who considered it too long a drive to the city dumping grounds and consequently unloaded their litter on the first open space they found.
And it evidently comes of not having responsible men in charge of the scavenger work, men who are not too proud to be called “scavenger” and who can be held accountable to the city for the proper performance of their duties.
Then the dumping ground, proper, embraces a tract of ten acres of ground, enough if the deposits were properly made to last the city of San Angelo for a number of years. At the way dumping has been done six months more will find the city needing more room.
Now, the impression.
The editor of the Press saw the efforts of City Scavenger Green toward destroying the evil effects of the carcasses of horses and cows by fire. The bodies were saturated with oil and set afire. In some cases the destruction was well done. In other the attempt was a failure.
Now there is a solution of this problem and the city of Ballinger has found it. And that is a furnace. Ballinger has less than half the people San Angelo has but our sister city is far enough advanced in civic progression that she can follow the lead of the larger cities and construct a furnace for the destruction of her filthy dumpings. Why can not San Angelo do as well?
The pit method of burning carcasses and trash is pronounced a failure at Ballinger. The open air method is the same here. The furnace method is proportionately less expensive and has been proven a success.
Newly Incorporated San Angelo
Being not long after incorporation, the townsfolk’s appetite for taking on public debt was not strong, and it took about six years before the city council moved to take bids on a “crematory” to be situated on a new four-acre site along the north bank of the Concho River 2 miles from downtown, near what is today, Bell Street.
This first incinerator was designed to burn up to 14 tons per day and cost the city $3,000. They lit the fires for the first time in 1913, and the system reportedly worked well for a time, but within a year, news reports about odors began to appear.
In June of 1914, a taller chimney was built to increase the draught and create a hotter fire, along with new improved grating.
By the end of July, the improvements were pronounced a failure.
This time the mayor went to Dallas to consult with a chemical company, buying $50 worth of a compound designed to mitigate the terrible smells.
The chemical did not work satisfactorily, and the mayor made good on his promise to shut the problem down.
After being abandoned for several months, the whole structure burned down in 1915.
At this point the west dump had been cleared off, because for a time, a five-room house purchased by the townsfolk from the Park Heights neighborhood was moved to the site, and was serving as the city hospital for a short time.
A replacement incinerator was then constructed at the west dump on Arden Road, and after about a dozen years, that facility became problematic as San Angelo began to grow west of the river, heading out Beauregard Avenue and Sherwood Way.
The question of where to put a new incinerator triggered petition drives in several neighborhoods.
Eventually it was decided that a new west dump would be opened 1.5 miles further out the Sherwood Road on a 25-acre site occupying a knoll.
Engineering plans for a taller chimney stack of 80 feet and the more westerly location would keep noxious odors and smoke from being carried over east San Angelo by the prevailing winds, which had been a major problem before.
Several reports put the construction of this incinerator in 1927, but it actually wasn’t built until 1930, completed in the late summer of that year.
The facility was designed to handle 25 tons of garbage in an 8-hour period. At that time, the city was producing about 16.5 tons of trash per day.
That is also the year that the City of San Angelo began garbage collection, buying fleet of five small trucks to make regular rounds.
Setting the Record Straight
Many of the reports on the incinerator’s history seemed to focus on the shortcomings of the incinerator facility, some to the point of making it sound like the construction and operation of the furnace were a giant fiasco.
This is not historically correct.
The furnace worked exactly as advertised and exactly as designed for a number of years, until the inflows of local refuse exceeded the design specifications due to an always-growing population.
Between August of 1931 and the beginning of World War II, San Angelo produced about 13 tons of garbage per day, which was very typical of the national average at that time.
It was not uncommon for municipalities to require strict sorting of garbage, but the trend of more and more “wet” food scraps being included changed the nature of the what was being incinerated.
Coupled with that fact, the emergence of convenience packaging in the mid-1930s led to a major increase in the amount of trash produced by each household.
(Interestingly, it was around 1937 that a new type of “sanitary landfill” was opened in Fresno, California, which became the new industry standard over the next 30 years.)
The changes in the local waste stream also changed the nature of chemistry within the smokestack, resulting in acidic residues that compromised the brick.
By the end of World War II, San Angleo had officially outgrown its incinerator’s capacity to keep up, and trash trucks were bigger than they had been before, so the new compactor units wouldn’t fit inside the facility anymore, meaning garbage was being dumped on the ground and then sorted and loaded into the furnace for quite some time.
The real fiasco with the incinerator had to do with financing. Bonds approved in 1927 for $25,000 weren’t actually utilized for a few years because of handwringing over whether the city was allowed to build an incinerator beyond the corporation limits.
It took a few years to work that out.
Meanwhile, the non-refundable issue of 40-year bonds were carried at 5-percent interest, and only $4,000 of the principal had been retired as of 1941, a decade after it was actually built.
(In fact, when the last principal payment of $7,000 was made in 1967, the city had paid out $32,150 in interest, bringing the price tag to $57,150.)
The incinerator was shut down in 1947, although the city continued to collect scrap metal there for many years.
By this time, San Angelo had several dump grounds around the city, which were all slowly phased out in favor of the landfill method of disposal.
A New Lease on Life
The next significant chapter for the landmark smokestack building came in 1963, when the Big Stack Skeet Club leased a portion of the land for shotgun sports for a few years, according to an Action Time article by Shirley Alford.
She reported that the city had actually entertained bids to demolish the structure in 1952, but never went through with it, and then they transferred the city dog pound from Bell Street to the west dump site in 1954.
Residents of the new developments on that side of town began to protest the dog pound being there, and in 1958, it was decided that they would move the dogs somewhere else.
After sitting idle for many years, a group of enterprising actors, artists, actors and writers leased the building and opened Chimney House in 1972.
Alford reports that a small army of volunteers worked to transform the interior of the building into a useable space, but the venture only lasted about a year-and-a-half.
In 1974, the property was leased by a pair of entrepreneurs with an eye to create a unique local eatery.
According to Alford, Robert H. Martin and Luis Casabonne opened the Way Back In in mid-August of 1976, with an extensively decorated interior and changes to the building’s facade, which utilized elements from the Eola train depot which had been dismantled around that time.
In 1979, Jack Daniel’s Old Time Eatery was operating out of the location, and the doors closed forever some months before the structure burned down May 17,1980, and all that remained was the smokestack.
According to another Action Time column by Alford in June of 1988, the property was sold by the city in 1984, and purchased by Park Heights Baptist Church Feb. 14, 1987.
(That congregation, originally formed in 1906, had been located at the intersection of Washington Drive and Austin Street since 1945.)
The smokestack was finally pulled down in May of 1988 to clear the way for construction.
The church moved operations to 4512 Sherwood Way in December of 2000, rechristening the congregation as The Heights Church.
