Fort Brown: A Century on the Rio Grande
Near Brownsville, Texas
Stand at the center of the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus in Brownsville and you are standing on Fort Brown. The earthworks are mostly gone now, smoothed over by more than a century of construction, but what started here in March of eighteen forty-six as a star-shaped dirt fortification built in six days by twenty-three hundred American soldiers would grow into one of the longest-serving military posts on the southern border. Captain Joseph Mansfield designed the original works and aimed the guns across the Rio Grande toward Matamoros.
When Mexican artillery opened up on the fort in May of eighteen forty-six, Major Jacob Brown commanded the garrison. He was killed by shellfire during the siege. General Taylor honored him by renaming the post Fort Brown.
During the Civil War the fort changed hands repeatedly. Confederate forces held it first, using it to anchor the cotton trade through Matamoros. Union troops seized it in November eighteen sixty-three.
Confederate Colonel Rip Ford retook it in eighteen sixty-four. The last land battle of the Civil War, at Palmito Ranch, was fought to protect what remained of Confederate authority around this post. After the war, Fort Brown became a permanent garrison.
The Twenty-Fifth Infantry, the Buffalo Soldiers, were stationed here in the early nineteen hundreds. The post closed for good in nineteen forty-six, exactly one hundred years after the first earthworks went up. The city and Texas Southmost College acquired the grounds two years later.
Several original brick buildings survive on campus. The medical building from eighteen forty-eight is among the oldest standing structures in South Texas.
