AS UTILITY UPGRADE PROGRESSES DOWNTOWN, THE PAST EMERGES

By Juan Montoya

First it was wooden bricks from a paving district established in 1912 that turned up when the City of Brownsville started the $16 million, year-long capital improvement project for water and wastewater lines in the city's core downtown.

The company and the city gathered the creosote-soaked bricks and preserved them for future use. The reason they were there?

In the spring of 1911, the City Council had determined the necessity of issuing bonds to support the city’s portion of the expense of establishing a paving district 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.

And now, as they dig further down, they are coming across the remnants of old railroad tracks that ran along 10th Street roughly from Levee to Washington Street along 10th Street in front of Chef Ricardo's Restaurant and the Sportsman Bar.   

If one looks closely at the trench behind the backhoe, the split ends of the old railroad ties can be seen from the sides. The ties have been severed by the bucket, but are still visible in the cut. The iron rails, apparently, were removed, but the ties were left in the ground.

Intrigued, we asked local history maven Gene Fernandez who said that there were two rail operations along that route. One was part of the Grand Point Isabel Railroad that ran from the depot to the river in the 1880s. The other was one from the Brownsville Urban Line Streetcars that  existed on 10th Street between 1905 to 1912. The railroad ties most probably dated to those years at the turn of the 20th Century. However, another  mystery has unfolded regarding some rail ties that were removed unscathed. 

The contractor had removed two wooden ties that had not been torn apart and took them from the site for storage. We asked City Engineer Doro Garcia if he could determine what kind of wood they were made of and he returned word that they had determined that they were made out of white oak.

This mystified Fernandez, who said he had never heard of oak ties being used in Brownsville. However, he said that further analysis of those two ties was necessary to establish the kind of wood was used. He said that a wood analyst for the U.S. Forestry Service might be able to throw light on the ancient railroad ties.

"We used local ebony, mesquite and pine from east Texas," Fernandez said. "Local cypress gave out long before the railroads came (1880 and 1904)."

The history buried right under our feet continues to mystify us.