PHIL T. COWEN: MY FAMILY INVENTED THE INTERNET...

By Juan Montoya
When Zachary Taylor arrived in the area around Brownsville on March 1846, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, his commandant of the U.S. Army garrison at Corpus Christi, Texas, he describes the place as a desolate sparsely cultivated land of mesquite, thorns and chaparral.

The only houses the soldiers saw as they marched across the llano were a handful of humble jacales where campesinos eked out a living working the land. The land directly across from Matamoros was communal lands, or "ejidos."

Nowhere did they see a Southern Colonial-style house where English immigrant William Neale and his family supposedly lived. In fact, the largest ranch owners lived in a handful of ranchos on the immense land-grant tracts of the Espiritu Santo land grant.

Yet, local attorney and Brownsville Independent School District trustee Phil T. Cowen is quoted by reporter Gary Long in Monday's newspaper saying that his ancestor (great-great grandfather) Neale "who from 1835 to 1838 built the (house)" which now sits abandoned and deteriorating on the corner of the Southmost College campus right next to the U.S. Mexico border fence. The house originally stood at East 14th and Washington streets."

It's actually not right next to the border. There is a levee and a golf course between the house and the river, but hey who's nitpicking?

However, the mention of the house being built between 1835 and 1838 raised some eyebrows in the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley History Dept. If you think about it, Texas didn't come into existence as a republic until 1836 and was annexed into the United States in 1845.

It's difficult to How Neale could have taken possession of the land to build it in those years, and even more questionable, how it could have been built originally at the corner of Washington and 14th streets is even more problematic.

You see, the original Brownsville town site was not incorporated until 1850, but the city itself was laid out in December 1848. Before that there was no Washington or 14th streets. Unless the Cowens were seers and could see into the future that the spot on the town site where the Spanish Colonial style pad would be 15 or 17 years later, there's no historical basis for that claim.

And if it is true that the house was built between 1835 to 1838, maybe he should convey that fact to the Texas Historical Commission who approved the placement of a plaque (graphic above) saying that the Neale House circa 1850...

But, hey, what does William Neal say about the town in Century of Conflict: "Except for a lumber building erected on the corner of what is Levee and 11th Street, owned by Slinger and the store, Bandarita, balance of the ridge was covered with willow and mesquite trees with undergrowth of prickly pear and brush. With the exception of a small cow pem situated near where the F. Yturria home now stands, the rest is occupied only by snakes, centipedes, lizards and horned frogs."

Cowen also lauds another of his ancestors, his other great great grandfather John Rip Ford, for starting the Texas Rangers, thrashing the yankees at Palmito Hill in what is hailed as the last battle of the Civil War even though the Rebel surrender had happened more than a month earlier.

Cowen, however, credits his ancestor with signing a truce six months later with two Union generals "that finally ended the war...."

So how many times can a war end?

And even though historians say that over time Ford came to admire Juan Cortina, the original heir to the Espiritu Santo Grant who rose in rebellion against the abusive, land-hungry newcomers, he says that after the Civil War he was commissioned a general by the Mexican government so that he could hunt and kill Cortina.

This was after 1865 and Ford apparently was not such a successful general/bounty hunter because Cortina died in his sleep in Mexico City in 1894 almost 30 years later.

However, Cowen is proud of his family's intellectual bent. He told Long that:

"All of them gave this personal energy and industry to accomplish things. All of them are lifelong learners , they just grow without limit intellectually," crediting the trait, perhaps, to the 19th Century generations."

Well, Phil, there's always room for improvement isn't there?