Browne-Wagner House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you're rolling through Brownsville and you happen to catch a glimpse of a grand old brick house with a molded cornice running along the roofline like a crown, well, you're looking at something that has a story worth slowing down for. This is the Browne-Wagner House, and it goes back to 1894.

That's when it was built, and it was built for a specific woman, Mary Josephine Glaevecke Browne. She was the widow of Cameron County Sheriff Matthew L. Browne, a man who apparently went by Theo.

Now the marker doesn't say much about Theo, but it says enough. A sheriff's widow commissioning a large brick residence in Brownsville in the late nineteenth century, that tells you something about standing, about presence, about not going quietly into the background of history. She hired herself an architect named Samuel W.

Brooks, born in 1829, died in 1903, a man who by all marker accounts had left his fingerprints on a good number of public and private buildings across this part of Texas. He gave the house that molded cornice, that sense of proportion and permanence you can still see today. The house stood, as houses built by serious architects for serious women tend to do.

Then in 1920, it passed into new hands. Martha Landrum Wagner, who the marker names as Mrs. Robert E.

Wagner and calls a descendant of not one but two pioneer families, she bought the place. Two pioneer lines meeting in one woman, and she chose this house. That's not nothing.

The Browne-Wagner House, a corner of Brownsville where a sheriff's widow, a master architect, and a daughter of pioneers all left something of themselves in brick and mortar, and it's still standing there to prove it.

What the marker says

This structure, with its molded cornice, is a good example of the large brick residences erected in Brownsville in the late 19th Century. It was built in 1894 for Mary Josephine Glaevecke Browne, widow of Cameron County Sheriff Matthew L. ("Theo") Browne. The architect was Samuel W. Brooks (1829-1903), who designed many public and private buildings in this area. Martha Landrum (Mrs. Robert E.) Wagner, descendant of two pioneer families, bought the house in 1920.