THIS WEEK IN TEXAS HISTORY
On Feb. 4, 1896, three days after her drunk of a husband threatened her with a butcher knife, Matilda Brown Sweeney moved back home to Ashton Villa where she spent the rest of her life.
The story of Texas’ famous first mansion begins with a New York runaway named James Moreau Brown. On his third or fourth escape attempt in the late 1830s, the adventuresome adolescent kept going, working his way across the Deep South until he landed at Galveston during the last days of the Texas Republic.
Brown, in his midtwenties by then, arrived with money in his pockets and property to his name. With a partner he soon decided was dead weight, he opened a hardware store on Market Street in 1847.
The next year Brown married 16-year-old Rebecca Ashton Rhodes, who was born in Philadelphia but grew up on the island. The couple wasted no time starting a family as the bride gave birth to the first of their five children in December 1848 six months after the April wedding.
By 1859 Brown was the father of two sons and a daughter and ranked among the wealthiest and most influential businessmen in Galveston. That was the year he launched two historic construction projects: the first bridge across Galveston Bay linking the island with the Texas mainland and the family residence that would be admired far and wide as “the first of the great palaces” of Galveston.
There was nothing like Ashton Villa in all of Texas, not even the Governor’s Mansion in Austin. Named for Mrs. Brown’s Revolutionary War ancestor, the three-story all-brick architectural masterpiece came complete with cast-iron galleries and floor-to-ceiling windows that helped to make the Gulf Coast summer a mite more bearable.
The upstairs bedrooms boasted two newfangled features Galvestonians never had seen -- custommade closets and indoor plumbing. Out back was a separate building, also composed entirely of brick and mortar, with the kitchen, laundry and living quarters for the Browns’ four slaves. A third structure provided a stable for their horses.
Ashton Villa cost the well-heeled owner a pretty penny, somewhere in the expensive vicinity of $18,000. It was finished in time for the Browns to set up housekeeping and to host a New Year’s Day party for the island’s elite on Jan. 1, 1860.
A year and a half later, the palatial home was practically deserted. Rebecca Brown took Bettie and her older brothers John and Moreau to Houston for the duration of the Civil War, while her husband stayed behind in Galveston to take care of business and, despite his northern roots, contribute to the Confederate cause.
In sharp contrast to most wealthy Texans, James Brown was not ruined by the war and the Yankee occupation that followed. He was, in fact, the first resident of Galveston to receive a pardon and have his citizenship restored. Five years after Appomattox, he was worth more than a quarter of a million dollars and the fifth richest person in Texas.
Brown had also fathered his last two offspring. Rebecca gave him a third son, Charles, in 1862 and a second daughter, Matilda, who went by Tillie, three years later.
To the dismay of her big sister Bettie, Tillie was married off to a man almost twice her age in 1884. After a dozen years of abuse, she divorced the alcoholic bully and never budged from Ashton Villa prior to her death in 1926.
Sherrie S. McLeRoy, in her book “Daughter of Fortune -- The Bettie Brown Story,” speculates on why the elder daughter never married. She cites the shortage of eligible men due to the high casualty rate in the Civil War and a possible fear of childbirth, which claimed so many women’s lives in the nineteenth century. But, as the author points out, Bettie Brown may have chosen to stay single simply because she had the resources to lead an independent life.
That did not mean, however, that she lounged around Ashton Villa eating bonbons. Bettie traveled the world and with much study and struggle became an accomplished painter. And, in her hometown’s hour of need, she more than rose to the occasion.
In her role as de facto head of the Brown family after her father’s death four years earlier, Bettie assumed responsibility for her relatives and friends during the storm of 1900. The survival of everyone near and dear to her was as much the result of the strong woman’s efforts as the brick exterior of Ashton Villa that withstood the hurricane winds.
A visiting poet from New York City paid tribute to the high-society heroine with these lines of verse: “When storm winds wrecked the city, blew hard about the town, the first to house the homeless was Miss Rebecca Brown. She and her gentle sister (Tillie) led all the queens of fashion through suffering and distress. They gave food and money, with their jeweled hands, they toiled and worked like heroes for sorrow-stricken bands.”
Ashton Villa still stands today nearly a century after the departure of Bettie Brown. Saved and restored by the Galveston Historical Foundation, Texas’ original mansion is open to the public.
“Unforgettable Texans” brings to life the once famous people no one remembers today. Or-der your copy for $24.00 by mailing a check to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 130011, Spring, TX 77393.
