Cameron County, TX Photo - The Rabb Plantation Home, Southeast of Brownsville, Texas, Along The Twisting Rio Grande River

The Rabb Plantation Home, southeast of Brownsville, Texas, along the twisting Rio Grande River. The house, in Queen Anne style, was built in 1892, during the waning years of the steamboat era, by land and cattle baron Frank Rabb and his wife Lillian. Because South Texas was sparsely developed at the time, the region's mode of transportation to other cities was the boats that traversed the Rio Grande. Overland travel was difficult, so Brownsville's riverboats also connected the region to other port cities like Corpus Christi, Galveston and New Orleans, which heavily influenced the architecture of the time. The home rests in a sabal-palm and birding sanctuary, and palms, harvested for their edible hearts, were one of the crops grown on the Robb Plantation and shipped to ports along the Gulf Coast.

Carol M. Highsmith (born 1946) is a photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed all 50 of the United States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico for 30 years. She specializes in documenting architecture, ranging from the monumental to the everyday and whimsical. Highsmith is donating her life ’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which established a rare one-person archive. Out of 14 million images, the Carol M. Highsmith collection is featured in the top six alongside of Mathew Brady and Dorethea Lange. Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Credit line: The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.