LAYER BY LAYER, CITY'S HISTORY SEES DAYLIGHT AGAIN

By Juan Montoya

Meticulously, peeling each layer back like an onion, craftsmen restoring an old store dating back to the 1890s are uncovering the city's history.

In this case, it is the building at the corner of Adams and 9th streets cater corner (kitty corner) or “diagonally opposite,” from Putegnat Elementary, popularly known in its day as the Bouis El Alamo Grocery and Meat Store.

And that's not the only building that's coming back to life again in the city.

The old brick and facade of the old Zarate pharmacy at the corner of 11th and Washington streets is also seeing the light of day again after being covered by the mask of paint and stucco for over a century.

But according to local historians, the Alamo Grocery and Meat grocery belonged to the Bouis family, originally from Point Isabel. It was, in its day, the Circle K of stores in Brownsville.

Yesterday, as passersby looked on, a worker was working on doors to replace the old plain wooden ones for the outside, but said said that the contractor – Pedro Rocha – was doing the work for restorer Fernando Balli and that they would keep the original plain wooden slat doors and restore them over time.

He pointed to some of the original features in the store such as the handmade nails on the high ceiling rafters that were used to hang the cuts of meat, the arched doorways and walls used to pass the meats to customers, and the front of the sore that still bore the "El Alamo" store sign once the layers of paint were scraped away.

"The people who had the store after Bouis chipped at the brick to make it easier to apply the stucco on the outside wall," he said. "We removed the stucco but don't want to harm the old bricks by planing them even."

The Bouis family tomb, in the city's Old Cemetery, also stands out as an impressive structure among the rest. That, according to Brownsville Historical Association researcher Gene Fernandez, is because it was built by Heinrich Portscheller, the same man who built the Romanesque-style buildings that give Roma, Texas its unique look.

In "Master Builder of the Lower Rio Grande: Heinrich Portscheller," Eugene George, he says that Portscheller, a descendant of a well-known family of masons and master builders, emigrated to Mexico from his native Germany in 1865.

He had the misfortune to disembark at Veracruz during the Franco-Mexican War and was impressed into the imperialist forces and sent to northern Mexico. Sometime in 1866, Portscheller deserted the army and eventually made a place for himself in Roma, in Starr County.

Over the next decades, Portscheller acquired a reputation as a master builder and architect. He brought to the Lower Rio Grande Valley his long heritage of Old World building knowledge and skills and integrated them with the practices of local Mexican construction and vernacular architecture.

At the El Alamo Grocery and Meat Store, the workers are meticulously recovering and keeping the sand bricks that were used at the time for use in later improvements and patch ups. Fernandez says the bricks were manufactured in a small burg named Santa Rosalia that has since disappeared. An old cemetery south of the Southmost area across the river levee is all that remains of the town.