Charles Stillman and the Founding of Brownsville
Near Brownsville, Texas
Charles Stillman arrived on the Rio Grande in the late eighteen twenties as a merchant running goods between American trading posts and the Mexican interior. By the time the Mexican-American War ended in eighteen forty-eight he had surveyed a new American city on land he had purchased, or perhaps seized, from the Cavazos family, who held a colonial-era land grant north of Matamoros. The land title question was complicated from the start.
Jose Narciso Cavazos had remarried after acquiring the grant, and the heirs of his second wife held legal title to portions of the property. The eldest son of that second wife, Estefana, was Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who would become one of the most consequential figures in the history of the Rio Grande valley, in part because he believed Stillman had taken what was rightfully his family's land. Stillman laid out streets, sold lots, and named the town Brownsville in honor of Major Jacob Brown, the officer killed during the siege of Fort Texas.
He moved into a modest Greek Revival house on East Washington Street, built around eighteen fifty. The house still stands. After Stillman moved permanently to New York in eighteen sixty-six, the property passed to the Trevino family and then to the city.
Opened as a museum in nineteen sixty, it is among the oldest surviving structures in Brownsville, a small house that contains the entire founding logic of a borderland city: commerce, land, military power, and contested ownership.
