History of San Antonio

include it as a state in the Union. This led to the Mexican-American War. Though the U.S. ultimately won, the war was devastating to San Antonio. By its end, the population of the city had been reduced by almost two-thirds, to 800 inhabitants. Bolstered by migrants and immigrants, by 1860 at the start of the Civil War, San Antonio had grown to a city of 15,000 people.

Post-Civil War to present

Following the Civil War, San Antonio prospered as a center of the cattle industry. During this period, it remained a frontier city, but its mixture of cultures also gave it a reputation as being exotic. Frederick Law Olmstead, the architect who designed Central Park in New York City, travelled throughout the South and Southwest. In his book about Texas, he described San Antonio as having a "jumble of races, costumes, languages, and buildings," which gave it a quality that only New Orleans could rival in what he described as "odd and antiquated foreignness."

In 1877, the first railroad was constructed to San Antonio. This meant that the city was no longer on the frontier, and was connected to the mainstream of American society. In Texas, the railroads supported a markedly different pattern of development of major interior cities, such as San Antonio, Dallas and Fort Worth, compared to the historical development of coastal port cities in the established eastern states. At the beginning of the 20th century, the streets of the city's downtown were widened to accommodate street cars and modern traffic. The city lost many of its historic buildings in the process of this modernization.

Like many municipalities in the American Southwest, since the late twentieth century, San Antonio has had steady