Shary Building

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Shary Building in Mission, Hidalgo County. Now, there are buildings, and then there are buildings that carry the weight of a whole industry on their brick-and-white-stone shoulders. The Shary Building is the second kind.

The story starts with a name you'd better remember: John H. Shary. History handed him a title — "The Father of the Texas Citrus Industry" — and the man apparently decided that a title like that required an office worthy of it.

So he commissioned San Antonio architect Harvey P. Smith to design something with some presence, something that would stand on the very site where Mission's own founder, John Conway, had run his business offices. You start on hallowed ground, you might as well build accordingly.

Smith delivered a Spanish Colonial Revival design — two stories of brick wrapped in native brick painted white, trimmed in white stone, wearing an exposed tile roof with clipped eaves that nod straight to the thatched roofs of Mexican domestic architecture. And those first-story windows? Their concrete tiers were built to evoke the wrought iron brackets of Mexican balconies from the nineteenth century.

This was not a building that wandered accidentally into its style. Every detail was a deliberate choice, a conversation between Texas and Mexico carried on in mortar and tile. Now here's where the story gets a little theatrical all on its own, because somebody set a clock on this project.

The Shary Building was completed in exactly one hundred and fifty days — one hundred and fifty — finished by June of 1939, at an original cost of forty thousand dollars. That is a building that came in on time and on budget, which, I'll just say, is its own kind of Texas legend. The structure was intended to house the multi-firm organization of John H.

Shary, and right from the start it was bigger than just one man's ambitions. In 1939, the same year it was completed, the building was dedicated to the community of Mission. That's the kind of gesture that echoes.

For years, that white-painted native brick did quiet, steady work — insulating the building against Mission's humid climate, keeping things tolerable inside in a way that stayed practical right up through the late nineteen forties, when central air finally came along and took over that job. Then came 1960, and a transaction that carries its own gravitational pull. Shary's daughter and her husband — and her husband happened to be former Texas Governor Allan Shivers — sold the building to the City of Mission.

Just like that, a structure dedicated to the community in 1939 became, in the most official sense possible, the community's own. The building kept evolving. In 1979, a one-story wing was added — a City Hall Room — set deliberately back from the main elevation so it wouldn't crowd the original L-shape.

Somebody cared enough about what had been built to make sure the new piece knew its place. Harvey P. Smith designed something meant to last.

John H. Shary gave it a purpose. A governor's family handed it to a city.

And the building, for its part, just kept standing there in its Spanish Colonial Revival dignity, clipped eaves and all, doing exactly what it was built to do.

What the marker says

Designed by San Antonio architect Harvey P. Smith, this two-story edifice was constructed of brick with white stone trimming and erected on the site of Mission founder John Conway's business offices. Intended to house the multi-firm organization of John H. Shary, known as "The Father of the Texas Citrus Industry," the structure was completed in 150 days by June 1939 and originally cost $40,000. A distinctive Spanish Colonial Revival design, the building contains many features of the Mexican Colonial style, such as its exposed tile roof with clipped eaves, similar to thatched roofs of Mexican domestic architecture. The concrete tiers of its first-story windows evoke the wrought iron brackets of Mexican balconies of the 19th century. Wrapped in native brick painted white, the building would insulate itself in Mission's humid climate until the late 1940s, when central air became practical. The 1979 addition of a "City Hall Room" was a one-story wing set back from the main elevation to blend with the original "L" shape. Dedicated to the community in 1939, the building became the offices of the City of Mission upon its sale by Shary's daughter and her husband, former Texas Governor Allan Shivers, in 1960. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1997