(Ed.'s Note: I ran into a recent arrival to our city who is a biology major and he asked me about some of the unique aspects of local history and botany. I recalled that one of our former mayors was also a botanist and photographer. He was Robert Runyon and we publish this post to enlighten visitors to our city on the unique history to be found here.)
By Juan Montoya
In one of my former lifetimes when I was a newspaper reporter for the
Brownsville Herald we used to have something called a "Lifestyle" page assignment.
The Lifestyle page was basically a long feature with a handful of photos by one of our photographers and could run the gamut of topics as it pleased the writer or photographer.
This was in the 1980s, before newspapers started cutting back on such frivolities. Now we don't have a daily and the
Herald publishes only twice a week.
It was then that I ran into Delbert Runyon and did a Lifestyle feature on his dad, Robert Runyon, the photographer, botanist and former mayor of the City of Brownsville. I was reminded of him when I saw Delbert's obituary in the local daily.
When I visited the old homestead at 808 E. St. Charles, glass photographic plates were strewn about the dirt floor in a wooden utility shed that had seen its better days. Some of the plates and post cards lying around the ramshackle building showed some damage from leaks in the rotting shingle roof.
On the alley side of the house, a tall tree stood behind the house. Delbert Runyon said it was a tree that his dad had been given credit for discovering as a new species of the citrus family.
Time has since past and now we know that the Runyon family donated the entire collection now called the Robert Runyon Photograph Collection of the South Texas Border Area and made up of the a collection of over 8,000 items.
It is designated as "a unique visual resource documenting the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the early 1900s"
The Runyons donated the collection to the Center for American History in 1986 and it includes glass negatives, lantern slides, nitrate negatives, prints, and postcards, representing Robert Runyon's life's work.
The photographs document the history and development of South Texas and the border, including the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. military presence at Fort Brown and along the border prior to and during World War I, and the growth and development of the Rio Grande Valley.
The UT-Austin page says that some 350 unique images in the Runyon Collection document one chapter of the revolution which Runyon witnessed in Matamoros, Monterrey, Ciudad Victoria, and the Texas border area and surrounding area.
"As various political and social factions within Mexico fought to topple a 30-year dictatorship to establish a constitutional republic, the struggle quickly spread to the northern border with the United States," the narrative continues. "In the north, rebel leaders such as Pancho Villa mobilized armies and began to raid the Federal government garrisons of then dictator Porfirio Díaz to aid in the cause of the 'constitutionalists'. Nervous U.S. officials along the border stood by and watched the conflict take shape."
In Matamoros, Runyon photographed the Constitutionalist armies as well as the major military figures of the campaign.
On June 4, 1913, the day after General Lucio Blanco and his rebel forces captured the Federal garrison at Matamoros, Runyon moved throughout the city photographing the victorious soldiers, Federal casualties, and political executions.
Later reports indicate that the Runyon Collection at the Center for American History at the University of Texas was selected by the Library of Congress as one of 10 collections in the United States to become a part of the American Memory project. This means that it will be digitized, and is available on the Internet.
Runyon was also known as an avid botanist, and some of his work has preserved the knowledge of Lower Rio Grande Valley flora.
He is credited with discovering several cacti, but the crowning achievement would have to be the plant named Esenbeckia runyonii, a species of flowering tree in the citrus family, the same that is growing by the alley on St Charles.
The plant is native to northeastern Mexico, with a small, distinct population in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in the United States. Common names include Limoncillo and Runyon's Esenbeckia.
The specific epithet honors Runyon who collected the type specimen from a stand of four trees discovered by Harvey Stiles on the banks of the Resaca del Rancho Viejo, Texas, in 1929.
Conrad Vernon Morton of the Smithsonian Institution received the plant material and formally described the species in 1930.
An entry under the name in Wikipedia states that "the fruit is a thick-skinned, woody capsule roughly 1 in (2.5 cm) in length that has five carpels. When mature, carpels dehisce (break apart) to eject black, up to 1⁄3 in (0.85 cm) long seeds. Green capsules are distinctively orange scented, while leaves smell like lemons."
In 1994, a
Brownsville Herald report stated that "fewer than 10 of the trees survive in the wild in Texas, all along a resaca bank near Los Fresnos. Others were planted by Runyon in Brownsville."
(We went to look for the tree in preparing this post, but we could no longer find it. Does anyone know whether it was cut down?)
After Alton Gloor and other developers razed the vegetation along the resacas to build subdivisions, that part of our culture no longer exists. Runyon's work is about the only thing that can take us back to the days when the region was still "green" and the convulsions in northern Mexico – as they are now again – spilled over to the U.S. side.
Alas, there is now nothing locally that can give our local students and visitors a hands-on example of that glorious past.
In fact, his entire collection of botany pamphlets, books and specimen samples was also donated to the Runyon Botany Collection gift to Jernigan Library Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, in Austin.
Ever since I wrote the feature for the Herald in the early 1980s, I've wondered why a home in Brownsville couldn't be found for the two collections, even if they could be reproductions of the stuff the have in Austin.
They are, after all, crucial records of our area's historical and botanical story. And now that the UT System is voicing its commitment to the area's education, could it be possible that they could bring some of Runyon's work back home where it belongs?
