malaria

Sooooooo good.

Here is another image of one at Wikimedia Commons: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hygieostatic_bat_roost_comfort... Dr. Charles A. R. Campbell from San Antonio, Texas was a proponent of building this to get rid of disease causing mosquitoes.

Fascinating. I wonder where it was located?

I wonder why there is a cross on top.

Some backstory: www.batcon.org/index.php/media-and-info/bats-archives.htm...

That's Charles Augustus Rosenheimer Campbell (1865–1931) posing on the tower.
Here's the Texas Historical Society's page on him:
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fca31
Here's his treatise on the subject:
www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030212campbell/camp...
And his 1910 patent on the bat roost from the Patent Office archive:
books.google.com/books?id=3nAbAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA1227&amp...

and here's a nicely retouched Shorpy version of this photo:
www.shorpy.com/node/1944?size=_original#caption

and Flickr user J.S. Clark's shot of a Campbell bat roost in Sugarloaf Key, FL:


Best of all, check out the giant bat on his tombstone:
www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=37711244

In Dr. Cambpell's own book, this picture is captioned "Municipal Bat Roost, erected by the City Council of the City of San Antonio, Texas, March 17th, 1916." However, that date does not fit in with the late summer timeframe of the photo's Bain newsstream position. Position in the newsstream is not an infallible source of dating, though the exceptions I've seen seem to be pictures from the 1920's that have been internumbered with the 1910-1915 shots.
In this case, it looks like Campbell made a mistake, as the photo appears in an issue of The Independent, dated October 4, 1915.
books.google.com/books?id=1rPPAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA17#v=onep...

...keep 'em alive & well ! ! uncle sam & ms. liberty - they sure do care about us ! ! mean it.