BY NORMAN ROZEFF
One of the most important developments of the Valley occurred due to the above connection. It was the creation of the San Benito Land and Water Company and the subsequent founding of the city of San Benito.
Just who were Powers and Landrum?
Powers was Stephen Powers, who over the course of his life would be a young lawyer and diplomat and later a Valley attorney, judge, politician, and landowner.
He was born on June 1, 1814, in Damariscotta, Maine. Indicative of his intelligence was the fact that he taught school in Buffalo, NY, at age 15 and was admitted to the bar and began practicing law at age 21. Because of his acquaintance with President Martin Van Buren he was appointed consul in Switzerland where he also served as chargé d’affaires for several small German states close to the Swiss border.
Powers’ introduction to South Texas came about when President James Polk commissioned him a first lieutenant in the Tenth United States Infantry and assigned him to duty with Gen. Zachary Taylor in Matamoros as a member of the United States Military Commission for the Government of Occupied Territory.
He served in this capacity until the summer of 1848 when he resigned and returned to New York. A feather in his cap was that in December 1848 Powers was admitted to practice law before the United States Supreme Court.
For reasons that we may never know, he returned to the Valley in early 1849 as Brownsville was being founded. Here Powers became a major force in the bar and the political arena. Three of his early clients were Charles Stillman, Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, who were in business together.
In his civic endeavors Powers would serve as postmaster at Brownsville (a city that he helped incorporate in 1850) from April 1849 to August 1851, and he was commissioned collector of customs for the District of Brazos Santiago in 1853 by President Franklin Pierce.
He was elected chief justice (county judge) of Cameron County in 1858 and reelected in 1860. He also served as mayor of Brownsville during the late 1850s. He received an appointment to the Democratic state central committee in 1856.
Powers married Pauline Victoire Impey, the widowed daughter of John R. Butler of Port Isabel, in February 1855. John Roach Butler, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1795, was one of the first American settlers to move into Cameron County. He had married Pauline Victorie Leuba, a native of France, and the couple had nine children before coming to the Valley.
In 1850, Butler, who then had with him four children, was a successful merchant and minor politician at Point Isabel. His oldest daughter, Pauline Victorie, married one Frederick Impey and lived for a time in Louisiana, but in 1855, she was in Brownsville.
Although Northern-born and a friend of many Unionists, Powers supported the Confederate cause in 1861 when Texas seceded from the Union. He was elected judge of the Twelfth Judicial District of Texas in August of that year and resigned as chief justice of Cameron County. He served as a district judge throughout the Civil War. At the end of the war he returned to his law practice but was again elected judge of the Twelfth District in June 1866. He resigned in January 1867 and spent the rest of his life engaged in his law practice and Democrat politics.
He was appointed to the Democratic state central committee in 1868 and served as a delegate to the national convention that year. It was in February 1878 that an event occurred that would greatly impact later Valley politics. Power’s law partner, Nestor Maxan, engaged in a duel in Matamoros and was killed. Powers now needed a young, intelligent associate and found him in James B. Wells, who had been practicing in Corpus Christi.
Wells, of course, would go on to become a powerful political figure, not only in South Texas, but statewide and even nationally. The law firm of Powers and Wells wold go on to play “a key role in merging civil and common law in the establishment of land titles in the disputed area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande.”
The daughters of Stephen and Pauline Victorie Powers married Benjamin O. Hicks, Dr. F. J. Combe, James L. Landrum, and James A. Browne, all of whom became political and business associates of James B. Wells. Here we glean the beginnings of the Powers-Landrum connection.
