Atlee B. Ayres was one of the most prominent Texas architects of the early twentieth century. In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ayres was involved in more than five hundred architectural projects, principally in San Antonio and South Texas, but also in Kansas, Oklahoma, and New York. His architectural successes include distinguished public buildings such as San Antonio's first skyscraper, the Smith Young Tower, as well as private homes, businesses, churches, and five buildings on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.
However, it was in the houses he designed that...

Mexican settlers first came to the valley of the Rio Grande to establish their ranchos in the 1750s. Two centuries later the Great River, dammed in an international effort by the U.S. and Mexican governments to provide flood control and a more dependable water supply, inundated twelve settlements that had been built there. Under the waters of the new Falcon Reservoir lay homes, businesses, churches, and cemeteries abandoned by residents on both sides of the river when the floods of 1953 filled the 115,000-acre area two years ahead of schedule.

The Smithsonian Institution, the National...

In 1865, Heinrich Portscheller emigrated to Mexico from his native Germany, perhaps motivated by a desire to avoid compulsory military service in the Austro-Prussian War. The scion of a well-known family of masons and master builders, he had the misfortune to disembark at Veracruz during the Franco-Mexican War. Portscheller and his traveling companion were impressed into the imperialist forces and sent to northern Mexico. Sometime following the Battle of Santa Gertrudis in1866, Portscheller deserted the army and eventually made a place for himself in Roma, a small town in Starr County, Texas....