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Builder/developer H.C. Thorman checks out one of his properties in progress in this undated photo. A hands-on boss, he liked to visit job sites and even drank beer with his workers on Saturday afternoon.

H.C. Thorman concentrated on residential development, building houses that helped extend the city’s reach to Highland Park on the South Side and Olmos Park to the north.

I live in Olmos Park Terrace in an H.C. Thorman home. As a builder, he was known for his signature on these rock houses by topping all the outside door frames and windows with a large five-sided stone in the center and smaller pentagons on each side — usually five across, seven if it’s a large window and three over a small one.

This house was built in 1938, and I’ve found a few other “signatures” as I’ve updated. The best one was when the original kitchen cabinets were pulled out about 15 years ago. On the floor under the sink cabinet I found (playing cards) — an ace, king and queen of hearts spread out fanlike as a player would hold them; a green marble and a 1938 nickel laid out for someone to find! Hmm, was it the cabinetmaker or maybe the plumber that left them? Unfortunately, the cards fell apart, and I wasn’t able to save them, but I will always treasure the nickel and the marble! I would love to know if this was done at some of the other houses in the neighborhood.

Last Sunday’s column looked at what seems to be a plumber’s byline (“...S. Zettner/1933”) carved in stone at the Huebner-Onion Homestead at 6613 Bandera Road in Leon Valley.

On ExpressNews.com: Carved stone marks period of change to one-time stage stop in Leon Valley

Builder Herman Charles “H.C.” Thorman (1884-1954, covered here July 26, 2015) already was the developer of several other parts of San Antonio, large and small, grand or modest, by the time he turned his attention to what’s now Olmos Park. After coming up in the construction trade in his native Ohio and California, he “entered home building in San Antonio in 1907,” says his entry in Southwest Texas, a business reference published in 1952. Thorman started out here as a bricklayer; thanks to a lucky oil investment, he soon progressed to building houses.

Within a few years of his arrival, he was already styling himself “H.C. Thorman, the Home Builder” with an office at 426 Navarro St. “Will build you a home anyway(,) anywhere,” he advertised in the San Antonio Light, Nov. 16, 1913, “and you pay for it as you can. Come in and talk it over; it won’t cost you anything.” He started out building small, white-frame spec homes, one at a time, and worked up to neighborhoods of a few streets each and eventually to whole subdivisions.

More from Paula Allen: Thorman house dignitary may have been newsman

According to an advertorial in the real estate section of the San Antonio Light, Aug. 18, 1940, it was 1903 when Thorman “built his first row of cottages on Devine Street just off South Presa,” followed by more houses on Cincinnati Avenue and Highland Park, where he built on Highland Boulevard and Kayton, Rigsby, Drexel and Peck avenues. He first moved north with his Country Club project on Pershing, Allensworth, Carnahan and Thorman Place and went even further upscale with his first true subdivision.

Thanks to the Olmos Dam, built 1925-1928 for flood control (and discussed here Dec. 8, 2011, and May 23, 2015), Thorman bought a “large piece of property just west of the dam … as soon as he learned (it) would be erected,” Char Miller and Heywood T. Sanders say in “Urban Texas: Politics and Development.” The new road built across the dam connected the existing suburbs of Alamo Heights and Laurel Heights, and would “make accessible (and profitable) land that had been previously undeveloped” for residential use.

More from Paula Allen: Scenic dam drive scrapped for security

First advertised as Park Hill Estates in 1926, the new Olmos Park Estates would form the nucleus of a new community (now part of the independent municipality of Olmos Park). It was designed to be an exclusive enclave, with large lots, masonry and ornamental-iron fence requirements, as set forth in a restrictive covenant that also barred non-Caucasians and set a minimum price of $7,500 for any house to be built there, though most cost much more.

Platted in 1927, Olmos Park Terrace is the more down-to-earth, affordable cousin of its hillier, perhaps chillier neighbor, with the Estates being home to the city’s “commercial elite,” according to Miller and Sanders. Building in the more popular-priced subdivision between McCullough and San Pedro avenues began in 1930, and the houses sold sluggishly until the creation in 1934 of the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, which offered federally insured loans that made homebuying more secure and accessible with lower down payments. Houses there — built at a rate of 20-30 per year through the 1930s — were “all built to FHA specifications (to meet required housing standards) and represent the newest in home design and construction,” Thorman told the Light, May 19, 1940, the year the neighborhood expanded with the El Monte addition and was annexed by the city of San Antonio.

More from Paula Allen: Olmos Park Terrace club’s visions of grandeur dashed by Depression, fire

A comparison of two ads for Thorman houses in the San Antonio Express, Aug. 11, 1935, highlights the two Olmos neighborhoods. At 125 Mandalay Drive (Estates), “a beautiful English fieldstone home,” buyers are offered four bedrooms, 2½ baths, a “glassed-in sleeping porch,” breakfast room and “servants’ quarters with bath.” At 257 W. Hermosa Drive (Terrace), a “new rock cottage,” it’s two bedrooms, one bath and a screened sleeping porch, for a total monthly payment of $42.50 a month “on FHA terms.” (If you have to ask the price on Mandalay Drive, you probably can’t afford it. Many of the Estates’ first residents were moving from equally high-altitude Monte Vista.)

Thorman’s Terrace houses were nice, too; they and the Estates differed more in quantity than quality. They tended to be single-story “bungalows” rather than the two-story “mansions” in the older neighborhood.

Now a historic district, the Terrace’s Thorman houses tend to be English-style cottages built of stone veneer over reinforced concrete, as described in the Office of Historic Preservation section of the city of San Antonio website.

It’s possible that Thorman would have been OK with workers leaving playful signs of their presence on his property.

Five of his six siblings moved to Texas with him, said his great-nephew Walter D. Thorman in an interview conducted Nov. 23, 2005, and three brothers worked for him — Bill as a carpenter and August and Walter (Sr.) as salesmen, so he literally fraternized with some of his workers. He also had long relationships with contractors, especially electrician Milton Uhr and plumber John Albert. He cycled through booms and busts — “he went broke several times during his career,” said the younger Walter, and once paid Uhr with a piece of property in lieu of cash.

Thorman’s style could be casual, even for an on-again, off-again tycoon. He drove used cars to relate better to the men who worked on the job sites he visited, and “on Saturday afternoon, H.C. would supply a keg of beer for his workers, and they would go to the park and drink,” his great-nephew said. (Thorman was married three times and divorced twice.) He seems like someone who might not be too bothered by a hidden hand of playing cards.

So were those tradesmen’s tokens a tradition or a quirky one-off? Readers who have made similar discoveries in other Olmos Terrace homes or other houses built by Thorman may write to this column to share their experiences of finding treasures from another time.

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Paula Allen writes about history for the Express-News.