CITY SETS ASIDE $190,000 FOR WILLIAM NEALE HOUSE, EX-MAYOR, REBEL OFFICER, AND RUNAWAY SLAVE HUNTER

By Juan Montoya

First, the city signed a "Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Transporting Charles Stillman House" through then-City Manager Charlie Cabler and Brownsville Historical Association Director Priscilla Ann Rodriguez in Nov. 9, 2012 that stated that "the city has been given a house once occupied by Charles Stillman known as Los Laureles Ranch House..."

Under the terms of the MOU, the city estimated that the cost of moving the house from Corpus Christi would be about $65,000.

"Because of the historical, educational, and general public importance of having the home of the founder of Brownsville in the city he founded, City is willing to contribute $25,000 to the BHA to (solely and exclusively) assist in relocating the house to Brownsville," the MOU stated.

About three months later, during a presentation by then-Assistant City

Manager for Finance Pete Gonzalez he disclosed that the city had already spent $39,000 without bothering to go to the city commissioner for approval of the funds although it had gone over the $35,000 discretionary limit. 

That money was part of the $3 million awarded to the city from its share of a settlement with American Electric Power Texas Central Co. And – perhaps more importantly – there had been no  item on a city agenda asking the commissioners to approve the outlay from those funds.

Well, the city is up to its bad habit of spending money on dilapidated homes of the former city "founder," who used legal chicanery with his lawyer friend Samuel Belden to steal the land from its land-grant holders, and now intends to use $190,000 to move a house and restore it for William Neale, a former mayor who was an officer in the confederacy who supported slavery and gained a reputation for being a good hunter of runaway slaves who escaped into Mexico.

William Neale arrived in Matamoros in 1834 and began a stage route from the landing at Puerto Bagdad, Tamaulipas, where ocean-going ships had to unload freight and passengers, to the river port of Matamoros. 

When Zachary Taylor defeated the Mexican army under Gen. Pedro Ampudia in May 1846 , his stages or "hacks" were used to remove the Mexican wounded after the Battle of Palo Alto. 

Neale and his family were part of the frantic congestion of civilians and fleeing Mexican soldiers trying to cross the Rio Grande after the defeat of Mexican troops at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. In other words, he had allegiance to Mexico. He switched allegiences as often as a working girl her skivvies.

During his years on the Mexican border Neale made money locating runaway slaves (referred to as "property") from upstate Texas and the confederate states, and when steamboats began going directly to Matamoros, Neale discontinued his Bagdad stage line and established a mercantile business at a steamboat landing twenty-five miles upriver from Brownsville at Nealeville (also called Santa Maria).

In "The Twin Cities of the Border," Lt. W. H. Charfield wrote in 1893 that Neale discussed his slave catching with some pride and said that Neale sought them in their "lairs" like beasts and fancied that the recaptured slaves were somehow grateful to Neale for returning them to their master and to bondage in their "Old Cabin Home." 

(Stillman, by the way, is listed as one of only seven slave owners in the Cameron County 1850 Census. Click on graphic to enlarge.)

When the federal troops occupied Brownsville – Neale, a second lieutenant in the Third Texas Infantry Regiment for the Confederacy in 1863 – returned to Matamoros to live. He finally settled in Brownsville in 1865 after the Union prevailed, took an oath to the USA, (another change of undies) and then went on to serve as mayor from 1858–59, and then again from 1866 to 1869. 

He died in Brownsville on April 6, 1896, and his home was given to the Brownsville Art League in 1950 and was moved to a location south of the United States Customs House. 

The Cowens have ridden that tired historical nag into the ground and embellished the settler narrative  even more. In a Brownsville Herald article some years ago, Philip Cowen, a former Brownsville Independent School District board member, also claims to be a direct descendant to John "Rip" Ford, one of the confederacy's "heroes" and champions of slavery. He credits his ancestor as the founder of the murderous Texas Rangers, whose indiscriminate genocide of Mexicans and Mexican-American citizens in South Texas has long been covered up in Texas history.

"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 to "end the war." 

Wasn't some guy named Ulysses S. Grant and some other guy named Robert E. Lee involved in signing some kind of document at a place called the Appomattox Court House, in Virginia that ended the Civil War?

Now we we learn from a post by District 1 commissioner Nurith Galonsky that the city will use taxpayers' money to move the Neale House to the linear park alongside slave-owning buddy Stillman's Laureles Ranch Love Shack and restore it. 

If the city stays true to form in its history of  moving and restoration of historical buildings, the house will probably be converted to some fantasized version that is nothing like the original structure. The Neale House  was given to the Brownsville Art League in 1950 and at one time the building served as the canteen for the American Legion where vets told lies and drank the night away.

The Cowens' continued efforts to keep the glorious memories of the "Lost Cause" alive stretch across the centuries. One of the descendants – city commissioner John Ford Cowen – bears the confederate officer's name. Now, did Cowen vote to award the $190,000 in public money to restore the home of one of his family's ancestors? 

Look at how the city got the Stillman shack and – after pouring thousands into the restoration – how it looks now. The same will probably happen to the Neal structure, which is literally rotting where it stands.

Polyester tarpaulins have been draped over the holes on the roof and the patio overhead has caved in, requiring a complete restoration at a considerable cost to the local taxpayer who have no ties whatsoever to this obscure racist. 

This latest effort to glorify the concepts of treason, white supremacy, robber barons, the confederacy, and slavery, has no place in the spending of public funds.

We have glorified the men who stole the land from their rightful owners (Stillman and Belden) by naming one a 
founder and restoring his ranch whore house, the other by naming a bike and hike trail  after him. 

This, ironically, on the very land they stole and where descendants of their dispossessed victims still live.

And now we are spending $190,000 to praise the memory of a traitor to his country, a man who profited by denying human beings their freedom for money, and making him out to be a spiritual and historical pillar of our community.

Let the rotting structure, treason, white supremacy, slavery, and the confederacy and robber barons stay where they belong: in the dust bin of history.