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Photograph courtesy of the
Brownsville Historical Association.
Called
Building 23, Post Records and early TSC maps indicate the
structure is really Building 51.
Originally built in 1919, at a time appropriations for building
resulted in many permanent officer’s quarters being built
between the Fort Brown Resaca and the Rio Grande. Building 51
and others like it were destroyed by the 1933 hurricane.
Reconstruction of the buildings one the same spot they had stood
was completed on June 30, 1934 and “made hurricane proof”.
Built as a (married) Officer’s Quarters with family, it is a
small wood frame/stucco structure that had three bedrooms and
baths. The entire front and half of one side had a screened
porch. The side porch area was designated as a “sleeping
porch.” It is the last of several officer residences like it
that were removed throughout the years since BISD and TSC began
dividing the former Fort Brown reservation.
Maps show there were eighteen single-story buildings facing
Gorgas Drive and Taylor Street that stretched from May Street to
Porter Drive. Some of these single story homes were added in
1919 with additional ones built along Porter Drive between
Horseshoe Lake and the Rio Grande. Wainwright’s seven field
officer’s quarters which faced the former Parade Grounds from
Taylor Avenue “were altered from multiple to single family
dwellings.” Twenty-five buildings and a twelve-car garage
filled this block. Elizabeth Street would later cut
through this residential block and be bridged to the island.
It
was also once used by housekeeping services and campus police
and neighbored by three similar buildings used as dormitories
for Scorpion athletes until the poor condition of these
buildings made it necessary to house athletes in the Fort Brown
Hotel [now the “Village at Fort Brown” student housing] in 1993.
These houses, and others like them -- which were used by the
college at one time or other as faculty residences, a (UT-PAB)
library support offices and educational resource lab, a music
annex building, and criminal justice faculty offices -- are now
all gone.
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