WINDCREST, Texas – At 94 years old, Frances Peace remembers the day she and her husband, Hugh, moved into the first home ever sold in Windcrest: Oct. 10, 1954.
The Peaces bought the home from Murray and Barbee Winn, the original developers of the neighborhood.
“There was a little ad about ‘this big’ in the newspaper,” Frances Peace said, remembering the size of the ad. “Hugh was just back from Korea, and we were looking for a place to buy.”
At the time, she said there was nothing but grass around them.
“No other houses,” Frances Peace said. “I liked country living.”
She served on the first-ever Windcrest City Council as the only female alderman.
In its infancy, the neighborhood’s location west of Randolph Air Force Base and northeast of Fort Sam Houston made it a natural place to live for military personnel.
The area soon earned the nickname “Fort Windcrest.”
“We were so far out of San Antonio that San Antonio Savings and Loan, who wrote most of the mortgages in San Antonio at the time, wouldn’t loan money this far out of town,” Tom Winn, son of Murray and Barbee Winn, said.
During the first few years, Barbee Winn made a plan to attract more people to live in the neighborhood.
“Mother came up with the idea of, ‘Why don’t we buy some Christmas lights and put them on? And I give them to each one of the homeowners, and they would light up,‘” Winn said. “And then we would advertise, ‘Come see the lights of Windcrest.’ This was in about 1956, ’57, ’58.”
All the while, San Antonio continued to grow. Windcrest residents were not interested in being swallowed up by the larger city.
In 1959, the Winns led the effort to make Windcrest its own city.
As both cities continued to expand, so did the Christmas light tradition in Windcrest.
Today, those lights attract thousands of visitors who drive up and down Windcrest streets to see them shining brighter than anyone back in the late 1950s could have imagined.
Anyone except, perhaps, Barbee Winn.
“She was kind of like, ‘I told you so,” Tom Winn laughed.
Barbee Winn died in 2017 at the age of 100.
She decorated herself — and her walker — as the “Energizer Bunny” on what was her final birthday celebration.
What keeps “going and going” now is the light-up legacy she created in Windcrest.
“It was something for her to see,” Tom Winn said.
Frances Peace remembers Barbee Winn passing out those humble strands of lights all those years ago.
She reflected on the lines of cars that come through the city at this time of the year.
“Well, you try to never leave home after dark!” she said.
Frances Peace, however, does leave home quite often.
The Windcrest United Methodist Church is her second home where she volunteers with various groups. Every Sunday, she sits in the fourth row from the back of the sanctuary.
She is one of the founding members who helped establish the church in 1964.
Now, six decades after its birth, she shared what the church means to her.
“Everything. Just that one word about sums it up,” Frances Peace said. “It’s like an extension of home.”
Just like Windcrest has always been.
Also in this edition of ‘Know My Neighborhood’: