Macatee Hotel

13 June 1912: The two story building to the left of the Macatee Hotel contained a number of businesses and offices with Washington Street addresses (left to right): 1. 501: Allison & Rich saloon owned and operated by Jodie E. Allison and Abe C. Rich (1877-1918) and 2. 501½: a restaurant catering to Macatee and Brazos Hotel patrons and railroad travelers operated by George N. Seaback (1884-1965); 3. 503: the real estate offices of Alfred Hamilton Hayes Tolar (1841-1927), and the restaurant of Miss Hattie Ilseman (1880-1936; married Frank S. Tippy in 1913); 4. 507: the men’s furnishings store of Lithuanian immigrant Solomon London; 5. 509: the general engineering firm of Daniel J. Hayes (1858-1926), a dealer in rice, flour, corn mill elevators, transmission machinery, boilers, engines, pumps general engineering; 6. 51: Security Land Co., a real estate company owned by Jay Forbes Manning (1873-1940) and his father James H. Manning (b. 1843 in Saskatchewan, Canada), both of whom were lodging in Macatee Hotel.

The Macatee Hotel was an enterprise of George Petit Macatee (1863-1958), who in 1912 lived in his own hotel. He was the son of William Leonard MacAtee (1827-1918) and Henrietta Wilson (1838-1915). His brothers Leonard William MacAtee (1869-1948) and Joseph Ignatius MacAtee (1871-1956) were partners in the family business, W. L. Macatee & Sons , very successful dealers in cement, lime, sand, plaster, brick and other construction materials. As eldest son, George struck out on his own while his father and brothers stayed behind in Houston to build the family enterprise. Born in Houston, he tried his fates in New York City; Milwaukee, where he married Mary E. Denning (1868-1901) in 1892; Chicago where he married Mabel Louise Creighton (1877-1951) in 1903. A seasoned traveler, he provided “European-style” lodgings for other travelers. The hotel services included a barber, Oscar M. Henderson, and an in-house saloon run by Benjamin Myers, as well as the Texas Coast Land Company of Eugene Basil Eastburn (1887-1962) and the Houston Engineering Company operated by Edward E Parsons (1867-1952).

18 November 2019:
The Macatee Hotel was built in 1906 and operated for more than 50 years until it closed in 1960. Three years later it was demolished to provide parking for the new central Houston Post Office built on the site of the Grand Central Railroad Station (later rebuilt as the Santa Fe RR Station) in 1963.

1. 915 Franklin: Bayou Lofts (Southern Pacific Railroad Building), 9 floors, 1910; 2. 1201 Franklin: Harris County Criminal Justice Center (Annex #65), 21 floors, 1999; 3. 805 Franklin: Franklin Garage, 10 floors, 2017; 4. 201 Caroline, Harris County Civil Justice Center, 18 floors, 2003; 5. 201 Main: Franklin Lofts (First National Bank), 8 floors, 1904; 6. 1019 Congress: Congress Plaza (Harris County Annex #46), 17 floors, 1987; 7. 202 Travis: Houston Cotton Exchange Building (backside utility annex), 4 floors, 1885; 8. 204-212 Travis: Hermann Lofts, 8 floors, 1916; 9. 220 Main: Hotel Icon (Union National Bank), 12 floors, 1910; 10. 801 Congress: Henry Henke Building, 4 floors, 1948: 11. 1001 Preston, Harris County Administration Building (Annex #43), 10 floors, 1978; 12. 1423 Texas, Catalyst Apartments, 28 floors, 2017; 13. 405 Main: Scanlan Building, 12 floors, 1909; 14. 402 Main: Citizens National Bank Building, 9 floors, 1925; 15. 900 Preston: Aris at Market Square apartments, 32 floors, 2017; 16. 800 Preston: Market Square Garage, 12 floors, 1984; 17. 777 Preston: Market Square Tower, 40 floors, 2017, famous for its precipitous glass-bottom hanging pool 500 feet above the streets of Houston; 18. 609 Main: Hines North Tower (Block 69), 48 floors, 2017; 19. 800 Preston: One Market Square parking garage for The Texas Tower (under construction in 2019, completed 2021 which would by then fill this space obscuring Hines North Tower), 10 floors, 2018. 20. 401 Louisiana, Hogg Palace Condominiums, 8 floors, 1921;

Postmarked: 13 June 1912; Houston, Tex.
Stamp: 1c Green Ben Franklin #374

To: Miss Leona Juenger,
220 East Ave.
Cuervo, Texas.

Message: Dear chum, Nita, -
(6/13/12.)
How is Elda getting along. Have you been working all of the time that she has been sick? I read that Mary Stokes had that case also. I hope that Eld will recover soon. How is the rest of the family getting along & Josephine, & Rosalie. Give my regards to them all – With love Capitolia C. Nau.

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Capitolia [What a wonderful name!] was nearly 14 years old when she wrote this postcard to her chums back in Cuero where she grew up with them. She had only recently moved to Houston, and was longing for the easy friendships of her childhood. Leona Juenger was 15½, her sister Elda Juenger 14½, Mary Stokes 17½, Josephine Glauberg 15, and Rosalie Gertrude Casal 15, and they all lived within blocks of each other in the small town of Cuero, population 3,109 [in 1910].

Capitolia Cecelia Nau was the daughter of John Nau and Annie May Wittenhart, sister to younger brothers John Travis (1902-1981) and Forest (1905-1984). The family had moved to Houston just months before her postcard, where her father moved to the city to find work there as a traveling salesman for Charles Heim, a dealer in a wide variety of products from confectionary to fireworks and cigars and her mother became a skilled operator of sewing machinery for Cyrus Scott, manufacturers of overalls, jumpers, and pants.

Capitolia’s next-door neighbor in Cuero had been Leona Emma Juenger (1896-1986), daughter of Austrian-born Charles Edmund Juenger (1867-1938), a lumber salesman, and German-born Theresa Dorthy Buchhorn (1870-1928). Leona grew up in a large family of 8 children: Agnes (born 1890), Hedwig Rose (1893), Sophia (1895), Herbert (1895), Elda Mary (1898), Ernest (1900), and Walter Herman (1903). Josephine Glauberg was the daughter of Dutch immigrant and railroad engineer George Glauberg (1851-1915) and Alfreda; Josephine was sister to Bessie (1879), Henry (1887), George (1890), Oscar William (1892), Amelia (1898), and Agnes (1905). Rosalee (1897) Casal was the daughter of Spanish immigrant Joaquin Casal (1839-1913) and Rosaline Hill (1859-1939). Mary Stokes (1894-1924) was the daughter of Allen W. Stokes (1852-1912), a justice of the peace for Dewitt County, and Henrietta Barnett (1854-1936), with siblings Charles (1877), Katie (1881), and Lucy B. (1898).

​Galveston Capitolia was an eager worker and industrious student. In her early 20’s she worked as secretary for Magnolia Gas Products Company, an early South Texas oil company founded by the Sealy Family of Galveston. She attended Rice University as a freshman 1917, completing 3 years of college. She was religious in outlook and ultimately found her calling before 1930 as a nun in Ursuline Academy in Galveston where she would spend the rest of her life as a teacher. She died in 1951 and became one of only 92 internments in Ursuline Cemetery in Galveston, her simple marker reading “Mother M. [Mary] Joseph Nau, O.S.U. 1898-1951. R.I.P.”

Mary Stokes (1894-1924) married Major Vaiden Cosby Martin in 1918, a WWI veteran, and she would be the first of this cohort to die, at the very young age of 29. She died while an inmate at the Southwestern Insane Asylum in San Antonio, her cause of death was Pellagra (a serious deficiency of the essential vitamin B3, a metabolic analog of the amino acid Tryptophan) and Lues. Congenital Syphilis was a not uncommon cause of death before the discovery of Penicillin, as it could be asymptomatic for decades before emerging as tertiary Syphilis, a disease marked by an inflammation of the brain and symptoms of insanity. Josephine Glauberg’s father, George Glauberg, also suffered from the condition, and died in 1915 at the same Southwest Insane Asylum in San Antonio, a vast facility with 1500 patients.

Leonita Juenger married Peter J. Olenick (1887-1977) and they ran a retail grocery and farm supply store in Cuero; she died in 1986 and was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Cuero. Her sister Elda Juenger moved to Houston to stay with her fiancé, John Christian Kleinfelder in his widowed mother’s house at 1903 Hadley, and acquired a Registered Nurse Certificate there. Her husband died in 1963 and was buried in Washington Cemetery in Houston; she died in 1976 in Cuero, and was buried in Cuero at Hillside Cemetery. Rosalie Casal married 1) Fred Karrow in 1913 and 2) Charles Frobese in 1924. They ran a dairy farm in Cuero; she died in 1963 and was buried in Hillside Cemetery beside her husband who had died in 1950. Josephine Glauberg married John Landrigen (1892-1987) and moved with him to Troy, NY where they spent many years before returning to San Antonio where she died in 1984.