What’s in a name? In Brownsville, it could be a history that leads back to the city’s founding.
The Historic Brownsville Museum will hold its “Brownsville’s Pioneering Families” exhibit through June 30. It showcases artifacts, documents and photos from dozens of men and women who were part of the city’s early development.
“There’s more in these names than you can imagine,” museum manager Gene Fernandez said. “They really contributed to the makeup of the small colony that was Brownsville. What you have here is the vanguard of superpeople who came here and carved it out of the wilderness.”
There’s an 1899 letter to Theresa Clearwater signed by then-Gov. Theodore Roosevelt, who responded to her petition for her husband’s pension. The original journal and bible of William Kelly, who captained the last steamboat on the Rio Grande, is on display alongside a photo of Steamboat Bessie’s final voyage. Fernandez included an original portrait of rancher and philanthropist Petra Vela de Vidal Kenedy that had gone unidentified in the museum’s archives.
Many of the families’ patriarchs first came to the area with Gen. Zachary Taylor in 1846, he said. The people behind names like Powers, King and Rabb were so industrious, Fernandez said, imagining they would have had no problem repeating their success even on a desert island.
“Two dozen of them would turn that island into a world power within 10 years,” he said. “They’re that good.”
Fernandez was particularly well-suited to organize the exhibit. He can trace back his own family’s local lineage to Count Jose San Roman, a wealthy businessman who helped cotton producers circumvent the Union blockade during the Civil War, and Jose Fernandez, who owned a coffee plantation in Mexico and wagon freight business in Brownsville.
Among the women depicted in the exhibit are Clearwater, the first teacher in Cameron County, and Mother Theresa Solis, the first woman from the New World and first Hispanic postulant to the Monastery of the Incarnate Word in 1859.
In celebration of National Preservation Month in May, the museum today will open “Brownsville: This Place Matters.” The exhibit will feature architectural photos from the Brownsville Historical Association’s collection.
For more information, call the museum at (956) 548-1313.
