Land genealogies

Thanks in no small part to the assistance of my cousin Richard Brotzman, my trip to South Texas for land research purposes was very productive. We were able to trace the deed records from my uncle Homer Brotzman's purchase of two 40-acre blocks of land in 1916 all the way back to the original grantee, Don Jose Salvador de la Garza, who received his land grant of 284,415.8 acres from Spain in 1781. This was known as the Espiritu Santo grant.

And here's one of the biggest grins of the day: a lawyer friend of Richard's just happened to be there that day, also doing land research. And Richard just happened to have recently found out this lawyer, Buddy Dossett, was a bit of an expert on the history of land transactions in South Texas, because of his work with irrigation companies in the region. Mr. Dossett was very generous in sharing not only his expertise in the use of the resources of the deed vault, but also in providing copies of his own research on land grants and subsequent ownership tracks, which helped to clarify some of what the deeds indicated.

How's that saying go? Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous. Gotta love it.

To abbreviate the history, most of the land grant stayed in family hands for the next hundred years, though -- according to Spanish custom -- split among surviving descendants. Land ownership continued to splinter through the inheritance process, until James G. Browne purchased several of the partitions, beginning in 1879, eventually accumulating 22,350 acres by purchasing land blocks from various heirs.

Browne's heirs sold about 20,000 acres in 1911 to Samuel Spears; Spears was apparently acting on behalf of the San Benito Irrigation Co. which had yet to be formed. When the SBIC was incorporated in 1912, with Spears as secretary of the company, he then conveyed the 20,000+ acres to the SBIC.

Because of various business failures, the SBIC went into foreclosure in 1916; the deeds then seem to indicate that some of that property was marketed by the O.L. Wilkins Development Co., with A. Wayne Wood acting as trustee. In 1916, Homer Brotzman bought two 40 acre blocks of land, sight unseen; one 40-acre block came from the O.L. Wilkins Development Co., and the other directly from the SBIC.

At this point, the tracks of the transactions are pretty clear, but I am still curious about some of the players, especially James G. Browne. I want to find out more about him and about the transactions whereby the lands of the original grant left the hands of the family owning it. I already know something about that timeframe; as Armando Alonzo describes in Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, between 1885 and 1900, South Texas land ownership by Tejanos went from 50 percent of the available land to 29 percent of the land in the region. (p. 180) Alonzo does a good job of explaining the reasons for this shift in ownership, some reasonable and some frankly nefarious. It's also important to place that critical 15-year period in context; 100 percent of the land in what is now the Rio Grande Valley had been under legal title by Spanish colonists as of the 1780s.

Why did the heirs of Jose de la Garza sell to Browne? What was the nature of those transactions? Stay tuned.