Taylor-Rivers House
Del Rio, Val Verde County, Texas
Marker Inscription
James H. Taylor (d. 1876), one of the five founders of Del Rio, and his wife Paula (Losoya) (d.1902), a native of Mexico, moved here from Uvalde about 1870 and built this one-story adobe residence. A prominent landowner and merchant, Taylor also owned a local gristmill. After his death, Paula married Charles Rivers (d. 1879) and later operated the home as a boarding house. She also became benefactress for the city's Mexican community, contributing land for a school and cemetery. The Taylor-Rivers house remained in her family until 1939. (1982)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Around 1870, James H. Taylor—one of the five founders of Del Rio—and his Mexican-born wife Paula moved from Uvalde and built this one-story adobe home. Taylor prospered as a landowner, merchant, and gristmill operator until his death in 1876. Paula later remarried, ran the house as a boarding home, and became a benefactress to the city's Mexican community, giving land for a school and a cemetery; the house stayed in her family until 1939.
Why it matters
The Taylor-Rivers house embodies the blended Anglo and Mexican heritage at the heart of Texas border towns, and honors a woman whose generosity shaped her community.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Del Rio sits on the Rio Grande at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, a hard, dry country where water decides everything. The town grew up around the abundant San Felipe Springs, which let settlers irrigate fields and run mills in land that could otherwise barely support farming. The community was long known as San Felipe del Rio before the shorter name took hold.
In the years after the Civil War, this stretch of the border was still a frontier in every sense. Anglo settlers arriving from places like Uvalde met a Mexican and Tejano population whose roots in the region went back generations. Commerce, family ties and daily life crossed the river easily. Border towns grew up as genuinely mixed communities.
Adobe was the natural way to build here. Sun-dried earth bricks kept interiors cool in the fierce heat and warm on cold desert nights. The technique came out of long Spanish, Mexican and Indigenous building traditions, and newcomers to the border quickly adopted it.
People & events
James H. Taylor was one of the five founders of Del Rio. Around 1870 he and his wife, Paula Losoya Taylor, moved from Uvalde and built this one-story adobe house. Taylor did well in the young town as a landowner and merchant, and he also owned a local gristmill. In a farming community, a gristmill mattered: it turned the harvest into flour and meal. James Taylor died in 1876, only a few years after the house was built.
Paula Losoya was born in Mexico, and hers is the story the house carries furthest. After Taylor's death she married Charles Rivers, who died in 1879. Widowed twice within a few years, she kept going. She ran the house as a boarding house, a respectable way for a woman of her time to support herself while keeping her property.
She also became a benefactor of Del Rio's Mexican community, giving land for a school and a cemetery. Those were lasting gifts: a place to educate children and a place to bury the dead with dignity. Paula died in 1902, and the house stayed in her family until 1939.
Its place in the American story
The Taylor-Rivers House is a reminder that the American Southwest was never built by one people alone. Along the border, Anglo and Mexican families married, did business and built towns together, and the result was a culture that is still distinctive to the region. The marriage of James Taylor and Paula Losoya is one small example of that blending.
It is also a women's history site. Women like Paula often fall out of the frontier record, which usually celebrates founders, soldiers and cattlemen. But widows who ran businesses, held property and gave land to their communities shaped towns just as much. Her gifts of land for a school and a cemetery for Mexican residents met real needs in a community that was not always well served by the institutions around it.
The house itself belongs to a long southwestern building tradition. Adobe connects this Texas home to Spanish missions, Mexican haciendas and Pueblo villages across the region, and it shows how newcomers adapted to the land by learning from the people already living on it.
If you visit
Look closely at the house itself. It is a modest one-story adobe, and it shows how people built comfortably in border country before air conditioning. Thick earthen walls are the key feature. Picture the house as a family home, and later as a boarding house full of travelers and working people passing through a growing town.
The house may be privately owned, so enjoy it from the street and respect any posted signs. Around Del Rio, keep the springs in mind. The water that drew settlers here is still central to the town's identity, and it explains why a thriving community grew up in such a dry landscape.
Del Rio makes a rewarding stop on a trip along the Rio Grande or through the far southwest of Texas. The mix of cultures that Paula Losoya's life represents is still visible in the town's food, language and architecture.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · James H. Taylor
- · Paula Losoya Taylor Rivers
- · Charles Rivers
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mason-Foster House
Del Rio, TX
New York transplant James H. Mason built a modest four-room frame house on this Del Rio site soon after buying it in 1887, later developing a spring on the property for mineral baths and a medicinal drink. In 1905 attorney and civic leader John J. Foster bought the place and greatly enlarged it, and his wife Mary added artwork to its interior detailing. The home stayed in the Foster family until 1962.
Roy Bean C. S. A.
Del Rio, TX
Kentucky-born Roy Bean was mining in New Mexico when the Civil War broke out, and he joined Confederate forces under Gen. John R. Baylor as a spy and scout, later hauling cotton and smuggled war goods as a Confederate freighter. Decades afterward he followed railroad crews to the Rio Grande, set up a tent saloon, and had himself made justice of the peace—'Law West of the Pecos'—dispensing famously eccentric verdicts from Langtry. His obsession with British actress Lily Langtry, whom he never met, and his 1896 riverbank prizefight cemented his frontier legend.
Old Perry Building
Del Rio, TX
John Perry raised this sturdy building in 1871, before Del Rio itself was even founded, to serve as a general store — reputedly the largest between San Antonio and El Paso. On the thinly settled border it doubled as courthouse, church, Masonic lodge, and post office, the kind of all-purpose hub that frontier towns grew up around. Perry's descendants gave it to the city and county in 1965.
Brown Plaza
Del Rio, TX
Del Rio rose on a site where spring water had drawn people for centuries — a Pre-Columbian village, early Spanish explorers, and finally the permanent community of San Felipe Del Rio in the 1860s. As irrigation companies and the railroad spurred growth, George Washington Brown, a long-serving county official, donated land for the town's first plaza. Dedicated on Cinco de Mayo in 1908, Brown Plaza became the heart of community life, with a hand-built kiosko, concerts, promenades, and political gatherings.