Browne-Wagner House
Brownsville, Cameron County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This structure, with its molded cornice, is a good example of the large brick residences erected in Brownsville in the late 19th Century. It was built in 1894 for Mary Josephine Glaevecke Browne, widow of Cameron County Sheriff Matthew L. ("Theo") Browne. The architect was Samuel W. Brooks (1829-1903), who designed many public and private buildings in this area. Martha Landrum (Mrs. Robert E.) Wagner, descendant of two pioneer families, bought the house in 1920.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1894 for Mary Josephine Glaevecke Browne, widow of Cameron County sheriff Matthew L. Browne, this molded-cornice brick residence typifies the substantial homes rising in prosperous Gilded Age Brownsville. It was designed by architect Samuel W. Brooks, whose work shaped many of the area's public and private buildings. In 1920 it passed to Martha Landrum Wagner, a descendant of two of the region's pioneer families.
Why it matters
The house records the wealth and civic ambition of a Rio Grande border town in the late 1800s, and the women who owned and preserved it across generations.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Mary Josephine Glaevecke Browne
- · Samuel W. Brooks
- · Martha Landrum Wagner
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Augustine Celaya House
Brownsville, TX
Built in 1904 in Brownsville, this Late Victorian home blends Italianate and Queen Anne flourishes—polygonal bays, a curved two-story porch, and decorative hood mouldings—into a showplace of the border city's social and civic life. Augustine and Laura Celaya designed it themselves and kept it in the family for generations. It reflects the prosperity and taste of a leading Rio Grande Valley family at the turn of the twentieth century.
Convent of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament
Brownsville, TX
In 1853 a colony of the cloistered Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament—the order's first in America—arrived in frontier Brownsville from Lyons, France, and opened a school in a bare warehouse, hand-printing their own bilingual textbooks. Through Indian raids, yellow fever, storms, and the Civil War the nuns taught without pause; after a hurricane destroyed their first convent in 1867 they rebuilt a distinctive New Orleans French–style structure that served as a girls' school for generations.
Cavazos House
Brownsville, TX
Fannie Seward Cavazos left Ohio during the Civil War, living briefly in Bagdad, Mexico, before settling in Brownsville in 1870 with her husband Wenceslao. Widowed in 1882, she built a successful business in Mexican-style drawnwork lace and helped establish the town's Mexican Presbyterian Church. In 1905 her daughters built her this Late Victorian cottage, notable for its decorative woodwork.
Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes
Brownsville, TX
On the grounds of a cloistered convent in Brownsville, the Sisters of the Congregation of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament raised a brick-and-stone grotto around 1869-70, a replica of the famous Lourdes shrine in France. Sister Theresa Solis oversaw its construction, and it was studded with petrified wood from Roma and stones carried from grottos across Europe. Opened to the public in 1926, it outlived the convent itself, which was demolished in 1969, and was carefully relocated to survive.