AS DOWNTOWN IMPROVEMENTS PROGRESS, HISTORY IS UNEARTHED

 By Juan Montoya

In 1912, the City of Brownsville finished paving two square miles of the core of downtown using wooden bricks coated with creosote instead of caliche and asphalt or gravel.

Yesterday, 112 years later – as the city proceeds with with its $16 million, year-long capital improvement project for drainage and new water lines downtown – some of the wooden blocks are seeing the light of day after more than a century of lying under the surface of the downtown area.

As crews dug the overlaying surface of the alley crossing 10th Street between Elizabeth and Levee, they ran into a layer of creosote-coated wooden (pine) bricks and piled them up on the sidewalk.

Incredibly, the wooden bricks – once the sand and dirt were scraped away – still emit a strong smell of tar and asphalt. The crew gave away a few of them to curious bystanders and said that the rest belonged to "el jefe" and that they would deliver them to him at the end of the day.

And just like that, unique historical mementoes harking back to the city's early 1900s era are disappearing.

Using wooden bricks to pave streets was an idea that first gathered steam in San Antonio, Houston, and across the country as automobile ownership rose in the late l800s and motorists demanded that roads – scarce everywhere, especially here – be paved to prevent them from getting stuck when it rained.

San Antonio used creosoted mesquite blocks to pave its downtown area as early as 1880 and the idea spread south. In February 6, 1911, the Brownsville city commission voted to create three paving districts in the downtown area and assess the property owners a fee per foot facing their properties.

This decidedly "South Texas" improvement to San Antonio in the mid- and late 1880s resulted in the laying of hexagonal mesquite blocks on Alamo Plaza. Mesquite was not only abundant, it was inexpensive. In fact it was considered essentially useless for much of anything else.

The gnarled wood is fairly durable and resistant to rot, a quality enhanced with the application of creosote. This, however,  did not fully discourage swelling following heavy rain, which frequently led to an uneven road surface.

In Brownsville, voters supported the funding of street paving by assessing fees from those private owners, street car companies, and railroad companies whose property abutted areas to be paved.

In the spring of 1911, the City Council determined the necessity of issuing bonds to support the city’s portion of the expense of paving efforts and ordered a bond election, which passed on March 14, 1911.

According to state law, the city was empowered to collect three-quarters of the cost of paving from abutting property owners, street car companies and railroad companies.

In August, the city contracted with the Creosoted Wood Block Paving Company of New Orleans to construct 23,650 yards (two miles) of paving and subsequently created paving districts in which to do the work.  Paving District No. 1 included East Washington, East Elizabeth, and East Levee Streets, as well as East 10th through East 13th Streets. The paving was complete by December 1912.

According to the late Bruce Aiken, former Historic Brownsville Museum director, the treated wood was considered better than brick in the early twentieth century, but the fire department was called out to extinguish fires on the road caused by gas leaks common to early automobiles.

"The treated wood was better than brick but a lot of the early cars had gas leaks," Aiken said. "One time, a parked car was leaking gas and somehow, something caused it to catch fire.

"I think this is the only city in the United States where the fire department was called out because the street had caught fire," Aiken added.

 The bricks would also buckle after heavy rains and eventually had to be completely removed. It wasn't until the late 1920s that we saw any paved roads in Brownsville. However, even into the the 1970s, when city crews dug below streets downtown, they would often encounter layers of the old bricks under the asphalt.

In the photos at right, one can see that the bricks were made out of different kinds of wood. They could be  made out of mesquite, cedar and pine.
The regular growth rings on the specimen at right indicate it was pine. Mesquite is more gnarled. The bottom shot shows that asphalt still on top of the wood block. This specimen came from the old Brownsville Public Works yard where they were stacked for anyone to take. Eventually, they were dumped into the trash. 

There is also a Brownsville angle to the wood blocks used to pave streets in the early days.

Samuel W. Brooks, an architect, engineer, and builder who was born in Pennsylvania in 1829 and later lived in Ohio, New Orleans, eventually in 1863 moved to Matamoros, Tamaulipas where he remained until 1878 when he crossed the Rio Grande and came to Brownsville, played a role in this story.

Brooks eventually married into a local Mexican family, but in 1871 – while still living in Matamoros – obtained a patent to improve machines for making paving-wood blocks, the same wood blocks that were used to pave Brownsville streets.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, he was the foremost architect, engineer, and builder in the Brownsville area. He served eight terms as city engineer of Brownsville, was superintending architect for the United States Courthouse, Custom House, and Post Office (1892, demolished), and built levees along the Rio Grande at Fort Brown in Brownsville and at Hidalgo.

Brooks married twice. After the death of his first wife, he married a local widow, Inez Falgout.  He died in Brownsville on February 15, 1903. His home, which he designed, was moved from its original location on the corner of 13th and Jefferson streets in 1878 to its present location at the corner of 13th and Jackson streets.

The crews digging up the alleys and streets of the city's core will move toward 11th, 12th, and 13th streets and inevitably will come across more of these historically unique mementoes. Will they disappear like the wooden bricks that used to be piled up at Public Works to be lost to our history? Or will someone step in and gather them to remind residents and visitors of early 20th Century Brownsville?