Question: What former mayor of Brownsville is known for his botany collection and his photography of the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s?
Answer: Robert Runyon. Born in Kentucky in 1881, he moved to Brownsville in 1909, where he opened a photography studio. During the Mexican Revolution, he was the only professional photographer to record two 1915 raids across the U.S. border. He also took more than 2,000 pictures of the U.S. military’s troop buildup at Fort Brown prior to the nation’s entry into World War I.
In the 1920s, he developed an interest in botany, discovering several plant species and compiling a large herbarium that was donated to the University of Texas at Austin. He was the mayor of Brownsville from 1941 to 1943. Following his death in 1968, Runyon’s family donated his collection of 14,000 photographs to UT’s Barker Texas History Center.
