Casimiro Tamayo Building

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Casimiro Tamayo Building, down in Cameron County. Now, if you want to understand a place, sometimes you start with what it's made of. The Tamayo Building was put together using locally made brick, fired in mesquite.

Not imported, not hauled in from somewhere fancy. Mesquite-fired brick, born right out of the borderland soil. That tells you something before you've heard a single name.

The man at the center of this story is Casimiro Tamayo, born in 1837, died in 1910. He was a merchant and a stockraiser, and in the 1890s the people of Cameron County trusted him enough to elect him Inspector of hides and animals. That is a real job, and on the Texas border, it was a consequential one.

Tamayo acquired this property between 1877 and 1879, and the person he acquired it from was his sister-in-law, María del Carmen Levrier. She was the widow of a French immigrant by the name of Louis Renaud. So right there at the transfer of a deed, you've got a borderland, a French surname, a family connection, and a man with plans.

For decades after that, the building served as both a dwelling and a grocery store. A residential and commercial compound, the marker calls it. Home and livelihood sharing the same walls, which is about as practical as it gets.

And those walls are worth a second look. On the east elevation, the openings are spanned by flat structural arches of gauged brick, and hanging in those openings are French doors. The marker calls it a unique blending of architectural elements and practices, and that phrase is doing real work.

Nineteenth-century border brick architecture, with a French door swinging open onto a Texas morning. That's not an accident. That's a place where more than one world showed up and decided to stay.

The Tamayo Building is a building that tells you where it came from, every time the light hits that mesquite-fired brick.

What the marker says

An example of nineteenth-century border brick architecture, the Tamayo Building served as a residential and commercial compound. Casimiro Tamayo (1837-1910) acquired the property between 1877 and 1879 from his sister-in-law, María del Carmen Levrier, widow of French immigrant Louis Renaud. Tamayo was a merchant and stockraiser who held elected office as Cameron County's Inspector of hides and animals in the 1890s. For decades, the building served as a dwelling and grocery store. It is constructed of locally made mesquite-fired brick. The openings on the east elevation are spanned by flat structural arches of gauged brick with French doors, a unique blending of architectural elements and practices. RECORDED TEXAS HISTORIC LANDMARK - 2020