El Paso County occupies the westernmost 1,057-square-mile wedge of Texas and is the driest county in Texas, with only around 9 inches of rain yearly on average. The city of El Paso is 17 miles closer to San Diego, California, than to Houston. The city is located where the Rio Grande cuts through the Rocky Mountain–Sierra Madre Oriental cordillera. The area was traversed as early as 1581 by a small party of Franciscan missionaries and Spanish soldiers on their way upstream to the Tigua and Piro pueblos in present-day New Mexico, and they called it El Paso del Norte (the Pass of the North). The Pass of the North became the location of two future cities: El Paso in Texas and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. In 1598, an expedition led by Juan de Oñate stopped on the south bank of the Rio Grande and claimed all the land drained by the Rio Grande for Spain.
In 1680, nearly two thousand Spanish priests and soldiers who fled a Pueblo Indian uprising in New Mexico established two missions (EP60) southeast of the river. A change in the river’s course in 1829 put these missions on the northeast bank. In 1848, following the Mexican-American War, the Rio Grande was established as the border between the two countries, and the missions became part of Texas. An adobe church, completed in 1688, still stands on the Plaza de Armas in Ciudad Juárez, the oldest European structure along the Mexico-Texas border.
Early Euro-American settlement occurred along the Rio Grande southeast of the present site of El Paso, and in 1849, Major Jefferson Van Horne established a military post on the north bank of the Rio Grande across from Ciudad Juárez, in what is now downtown El Paso. The post (later named Fort Bliss) moved three times before reaching its current location (EP49). In 1850, the Texas legislature organized El Paso County, with San Elizario as its county seat. The flood plain of the Rio Grande, where crops were cultivated, was a veritable oasis in this high desert landscape. By 1860, the county had more than 30,000 irrigated acres in various crops (using the old mission acequia, Franklin Canal).
The city of El Paso began as the settlement of Franklin on land owned by William T. Smith, who in 1853 bought 599 acres from Benjamin Franklin Coons for $10,000. A group of land speculators, organized as the El Paso Company, purchased Smith’s settlement of Franklin in 1859 and contracted with surveyor Anson Mills (1834–1924) to plat a fifty-one-acre town site. Mills named it El Paso. In 1858, Mills had built the Butterfield Overland Mail Company’s El Paso station (not extant), the largest station on the 2,700-mile line between St. Louis and San Francisco.
El Paso County joined the rest of Texas in voting to secede from the Union in 1861 (only Anson Mills and his brother William W. voted against it). Fort Bliss was immediately occupied by Confederate forces, but federal troops regained control in the summer of 1862 and held it until the end of the war.
The region was transformed in the 1880s by the construction of railroads into El Paso. Reflecting the shifting balance of demographics and political power that rail connections prompted, El Paso replaced San Elizario as the county seat in 1883. As a transportation hub, and one that also linked the United States with Mexico, El Paso was transformed from a relatively prosperous but isolated agricultural community into a desert metropolis. Over the next several decades it expanded west around the Franklin Mountains to the border with New Mexico and southeast along the Rio Grande to absorb the older, lower valley communities of Ysleta, Socorro, and San Elizario. The flurry of building that took place between the 1880s and 1910s changed El Paso’s architecture from small adobe and frame structures to high-rise buildings of concrete and masonry.
El Paso’s rail connections to mineral-rich areas in Chihuahua, Sonora, Durango, New Mexico, and Arizona also made it a command center for mining and mineral processing operations. The first copper smelter in the county was built in 1887, and the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) was a major employer until the 1990s. In 1928 and 1929 three major oil refineries were built to take advantage of El Paso’s location between the oil fields of Texas and New Mexico, and textile industries developed in the 1940s. In the 1970s, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez became the center of the maquiladora “twin-plant” economic boom, in which U.S. manufacturers used plants in Mexico for assembling manufactured goods. El Paso, with numerous cultural and historic resources and, most of all, as a gateway to Ciudad Juárez, is also a major tourism center. In the twenty-first century, downtown revitalization blossomed, especially the rehabilitation of numerous Trost and Trost buildings by oil refiner Paul Foster, chairman of Western Refining, who purchased abandoned buildings. Other private investors, including Borderplex Community Trust and Lane Grady, have also repurposed derelict buildings for new uses.
For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the architecture of El Paso and the region was dominated by the firm of Trost and Trost. Henry Charles Trost (1860–1933), born in Toledo, Ohio, moved to El Paso in 1903, after working in several cities, including Chicago as an ornamental metal designer. Joined by his twin brothers, architect Gustavus Adolphus (1876–1957) and engineer Adolphus Gustavus (1876–1957), and nephew George Ernst (1885–1968), the Trost firm designed over 670 projects, of which more than 250 were in El Paso. The influence of the Chicago School and of Louis Sullivan’s ornament is pervasive in Henry Trost’s work, but, as was typical of the time, he was fluent in other styles. In 2016, the El Paso County Historical Commission reported that 27 Trost and Trost buildings survive in the downtown, 10 of which were restored between 2008 and 2018.
Pennsylvanians Edward Kneezell (1855–1926) and Samuel E. Patton (1850–1933) began their practices in El Paso in 1882 and the 1890s, respectively. English immigrant George E. King (1852–1912) came here in the 1890s. The Trost brothers, German-born William Gerhardt Wuehrmann (1885–1978), Otto H. Thorman (1887–1966), along with Percy McGhee (1889–1971) and Mabel C. Vanderburg Welch (1890–1981), were El Paso’s leading architects of the second quarter of the twentieth century. Thorman, like Gustavus Trost, worked for Mauran, Russell and Crowell of St. Louis before coming to the Southwest. Mabel C. Welch, the second woman in Texas to be licensed as an architect and the first to lead her own firm, was from the Mississippi Delta. She became an active proponent of urban design and civic improvement in El Paso during the 1930s and a champion of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, as was Wuehrmann. McGhee was a native of El Paso, as was Charles Ewing Waterhouse Jr. (1905–2000), who also was an artist and archaeologist of the indigenous cultures of the Southwest. Edwin W. Carroll (1912–2000) and his partner Louis Daeuble (1912–1992) were El Paso’s most prolific architects of the mid-twentieth century. Robert D. Garland Jr. (1926–2002), from Weatherford, and David E. Hilles Jr. (1926–1997), from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, began their practice in 1955.
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