Fort Sam Houston
United States Army installation in San Antonio, Texas. One of the oldest and largest U.S. military bases; designated a National Historic Landmark (1975). For H&H, Fort Sam Houston represents the firm’s largest documented single institutional customer and a repeating thread across H&H’s pre-WWI and wartime commercial history.
H&H connections
1914 — Largest SA coffee order to date. The trade press documented “the largest San Antonio coffee order to date” as a carload in bulk from Morrison Coffee Company (later acquired by H&H) delivered to Fort Sam Houston. See event: Large Fort Sam Houston coffee order (Morrison).
1917 — $20,000 order. The April 1917 San Antonio Express-News feature “That Morning’s Cup of Coffee” reports: “The company recently placed a $20,000 order with Uncle Sam at Fort Sam Houston” — referring to Hoffmann-Hayman by that point. This is the same article that names the firm’s founding date (February 1912), capital ($100,000), and annual gross ($120,000) — making the Fort Sam Houston contract roughly one-sixth of annual revenue. Source: HH-CLIP-1917-0009.
1898 — Spanish-American War staging. Fort Sam Houston served as a national military staging base for the Spanish-American War, cementing San Antonio’s strategic military importance. This is the historical root of Fort Sam’s outsized role in the city’s commercial economy — documented in the context event 1898-spanish-american-war-fort-sam-houston-staging.md.
WWII. Fort Sam Houston’s wartime expansion drove coffee rationing pressures that H&H navigated with its Flav-O-Tainer paper bag (December 1942 – July 1943). The installation’s wartime throughput was a major factor in the San Antonio commercial economy of the 1940s.
What “Army coffee” meant, procurement-wise. Per a Fort Sam Houston-published U.S. Army Medical Department history (Marble 2015), coffee entered the standard Army field ration in 1832 (the same reform that dropped the rum allowance) and stayed there continuously. By the WWI era — the same period as H&H’s 1917 $20,000 Fort Sam Houston order — the Army’s field “reserve ration” (also called the iron ration, or Armour ration after the meat-packer) was hard bread, corned beef, coffee with sugar, and chocolate; ground coffee itself had replaced an earlier failed Civil War-era “essence of coffee” concentrate that soldiers likened to axle grease. This gives the WWI order concrete procurement context: bulk ground coffee for a standing ration formula, not a one-off commissary purchase. No H&H mention in the source article.
Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. H&H-adjacent figure Kearney Joseph Kivlin was buried here with military honors (see people/kearney-joseph-kivlin.md).
Strategic significance for H&H research
The Fort Sam Houston contract appears in at least three separate H&H source documents (1914 Morrison order, 1917 H&H order, multiple WWII-era references), making the military market one of the most consistently documented revenue streams in the pre-1962 record. Any institutional archive for Fort Sam Houston’s commissary procurement records in the 1910s–1940s could independently document H&H’s commercial relationship.
Open questions
- Whether H&H held a standing contract for Fort Sam Houston, or bid per order
- Whether the commissary procurement records for 1910–1945 survive in Fort Sam Houston’s historical archives
- What brands H&H supplied to Fort Sam (the 1917 article names H&H, Wesco, Misa, Texco as the company’s four main marks at that time)
See also
- Large Fort Sam Houston coffee order — 1914 Morrison-era carload
- Morrison Coffee Company — predecessor firm that held the Fort Sam account
- Hoffmann-Hayman Company
- 1017 U.S. enters World War I — context for the 1917 order
- H&H and the Tejano Market
- San Antonio Historical Association
- Spanish-American War — Fort Sam Houston as national military staging base