In the summer of 1913, a photographer clambered through the streets of Matamoros, Mexico, stepping past shattered walls and fresh graves with a camera and a pocket full of glass plates. The man who made some of the best known images of the Mexican Revolution on the Texas border was not a native of the Rio Grande Valley. He was Robert Runyon, born on a small farm outside Catlettsburg in Boyd County, Kentucky, whose life carried Appalachian roots into one of the most contested landscapes in North America.
Today his photographs, plant specimens, and family papers reach from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to Austin, Kingsville, Washington, and beyond. For those of us who care about Appalachian history, Runyon is a reminder that the region’s stories do not stop at the Ohio River. They stretch all the way to the border.
From a Boyd County farm to the Gulf Coast
Archival guides for the Robert Runyon Collection and related family papers agree that he was born on July 28, 1881, on a farm near Catlettsburg in Boyd County, Kentucky, the son of Floyd and Elizabeth Lawson Runyon.
Like many farm children of his generation, Runyon seems to have had only limited formal schooling. The biographical sketch behind the University of Texas digital exhibit describes him as largely self educated, a man who made up for the lack of a diploma with steady self study and what one contemporary called “sheer natural intelligence.”
On 16 September 1901 he married Nora (often spelled Norah) Young in Ironton, Ohio, just across the river from northeastern Kentucky. Their only child, William Thornton Runyon, was born in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1904, while Robert was working there as an insurance salesman.
Nora died in Catlettsburg on 3 December 1908. The finding aid for his botanical library at Texas A&M University Kingsville notes that after her death Runyon left young William with Nora’s parents and headed south looking for work.
By early 1909 he had taken a job with the Gulf Coast News and Hotel Company as a “news butch,” selling sandwiches, fruit, and cigarettes on trains of the St Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway. Within months he was promoted to manage the company’s lunchroom and curio shop in the Brownsville depot, and by spring 1909 he had rented a room across the street and settled in for what would become nearly six decades in Brownsville.
In the summer of 1910, he came back to Kentucky one more time, returning to bring William from his grandparents’ home to live with him in Texas.
From a Boyd County hillside to a border rail depot, Runyon’s path looked like that of many Appalachian migrants in the early twentieth century: leave home after a family crisis, chase work in boom towns, and then build a new life very far from the mountains.
Camera work on a contested border
Sometime around 1910 Runyon opened a small photography studio near the Brownsville depot while still managing the curio business. Within a few years he left the railway job and devoted himself fully to commercial photography, working steadily from 1910 to 1926.
Early work from the Robert Runyon Photograph Collection at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History shows busy streets in Brownsville and Matamoros, trains, shop fronts, school classes, and family portraits. The Briscoe Center’s description of the collection notes that more than 8,000 items survive in formats ranging from glass plate negatives to postcards, forming a visual record of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in the first decades of the twentieth century.
The upheavals of the Mexican Revolution soon pulled this Kentucky born photographer into world events. On 4 June 1913, the day after Constitutionalist forces under Lucio Blanco captured the Federal garrison at Matamoros, Runyon crossed the border and photographed the aftermath: wounded soldiers, dead bodies, ruined buildings, and firing squads.
Later that summer he recorded Blanco’s land distribution ceremony at Los Borregos, where seized hacienda land was symbolically handed over to peasant farmers. With the help of his brother in law José C. Medrano, Runyon then traveled with revolutionary troops south toward Ciudad Victoria and on to Monterrey, documenting both the campaign and scenes of rural life along the way.
In 1915 Runyon turned his lens on violence that crossed into Texas itself. The Handbook of Texas notes that he was the only professional photographer to document two notorious raids: the attack on Norias Ranch and the train wreck near Olmito, both often linked to revolutionary unrest. His images of the dead at Norias and the wrecked train cars at Olmito circulated widely as postcards and in newspapers, helping fix a particular image of the border in the national imagination.
At the same time he produced a quieter but equally important body of work. Runyon photographed Fort Brown’s reactivated garrison in extraordinary depth, making more than 2,000 images of training grounds, encampments, polo tournaments, banquets, and new technologies like airplanes and armored cars.
He also kept up his regular studio and postcard work. The Brownsville Historical Association notes that the oldest part of its photograph collection consists of early twentieth century Runyon postcards of Brownsville and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, reminders of how deeply his images saturated local life.
Recent scholarship has cautioned against treating Runyon purely as a combat photographer. Annette Rodriguez’s essay “The Man Who Sold the Border” argues that he was first of all a commercial photographer who tailored his images to different markets: soldiers buying postcards, tourists seeking souvenirs, land developers advertising valley farms, and local families wanting portraits.
That commercial eye helps explain why his work could move from documenting revolutionary violence to selling scenic views of the Rio Grande without missing a beat.
Plants, palms, and politics
If Runyon had only left his photographs, he would still matter in Texas and Mexican border history. Instead, he reinvented himself again in the 1920s and 1930s, this time as a botanist and politician.
By the mid 1920s he closed his Brownsville studio and joined his brother in law in a Matamoros curio and souvenir store known as The Basket Place, later opening a similar shop in Brownsville.
Meanwhile the plants he had been photographing along the river pulled him deeper into scientific work. The South Texas Archives finding aid for the Robert Runyon Collection describes how he began sending plant photographs and specimens to botanists across the United States, corresponding with figures like Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell, Ladislaw Cutak of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Benjamin C. Tharp at the University of Texas, and John K. Small of the New York Botanical Garden.
Over four decades Runyon assembled one of the largest private herbaria in Texas. TSHA’s biography credits him with discovering several previously unknown plant species, including multiple cacti, a dune grass, and a tree that bears an orange like fruit.
Two published works anchored this botanical reputation. In 1930 he coauthored Texas Cacti: A Popular and Scientific Account of the Cacti Native of Texas with Ellen D. Schulz Quillin, combining photographs and descriptions of native cacti. In 1947 he brought out Vernacular Names of Plants Indigenous to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, a slim reference published by Brownsville News Publishing that captured local Spanish and English plant names alongside botanical Latin.
Runyon also threw himself into conservation campaigns. Long before “native plants” became a buzzword, he worried that the Sabal texana palm (often called the Texas sabal palm) was being cleared from the valley for agriculture. The TAMUK finding aid describes how he planted thousands of palm seeds and pushed for protection of remaining groves, work that helped shape the palm lined landscape travelers still see when they drive into deep South Texas.
Then he added another title: mayor. In 1937 Brownsville appointed him city manager, and in 1941 voters elected him mayor for a two year term. TSHA notes that he inherited a city budget in poor shape and left it in the black, earning him an appointment as aide de camp on Kentucky governor Earle C. Clements’s staff in 1949, with the honorary rank of colonel.
Through World War II Runyon served as Brownsville’s municipal defense coordinator, worked on the park board to preserve green space, and spent years in local Democratic politics and planning commissions.
For a boy from a Boyd County farm, it was an unlikely resume: news vender, postcard photographer, border war documentarian, cactus expert, palm crusader, and border city mayor.
Runyon’s own Appalachian genealogy
Despite his long Texas residence, Runyon never entirely left his Appalachian roots behind. One of his late life passions was genealogy, a field where he again blended self taught research and careful documentation.
The TAMUK collection summary notes that he produced at least three book length genealogies: Genealogy of the Descendants of Anthony Lawson of Northumberland, England (1952), Runyon Genealogy (1955, coauthored with Amos Runyon), and Supplement to Runyon Genealogy (1962).
These volumes trace Runyon families in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, and they have been widely mined by later researchers working on eastern Kentucky and Central Appalachian lines. Many modern online compilations for Boyd County and neighboring areas lean heavily on Robert’s own genealogical work and on documents now housed in the Runyon family papers.
Alongside these published books sit folders of genealogical correspondence, notes, and family photographs in the Robert Runyon Family Papers at the Briscoe Center, arranged into series on family papers, images, and research files.
For Appalachian historians, this is a reminder that Runyon did not just leave the region. He continued to write about it, map its families, and send copies of his work into the genealogical networks that stretch across the Ohio.
Why a Boyd County photographer belongs in Appalachian history
It would be easy to shelve Robert Runyon as a “border” figure and leave him to Texas historians. Yet his life fits familiar Appalachian patterns.
He grew up on a marginal farm and left after a personal catastrophe. He chased wage work, first in insurance and then in service jobs tied to the railroad. He carried his skills into rapidly changing boom regions and spent the rest of his life navigating the margins between powerful institutions: the U.S. Army and revolutionary armies, land companies and farmers, city hall and political factions.
Along the way he built a record that lets us see how an Appalachian migrant interpreted his new world. His photographs of Matamoros plazas and Brownsville streets, his postcard of a Padre Island quarantine station, and his fern and cactus specimens all came from the eye and hand of a man who had once walked hillside fields above the Ohio.
His genealogical books loop the story back to the region, preserving lines of Runyon and Lawson families in Kentucky and neighboring states. His later recognition by the governor of Kentucky as an honorary colonel for his civic work in Brownsville hints at how the state itself claimed him as one of its own, even after decades in Texas.
For AppalachianHistorian.org, Runyon’s story offers a different way to think about the “coal wars” era. While miners in Harlan, Bell, and Letcher Counties fought their own battles over land and labor, a Catlettsburg native stood on a distant border photographing other conflicts over land, labor, and power. The images we still use to picture the early twentieth century Rio Grande Valley came, at least in part, from an Appalachian lens.
Sources and further reading
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, The South Texas Border, 1900–1920: Photographs from the Robert Runyon Collection (digital exhibit and database). Briscoe Center Digital Collections+1
“Robert Runyon: Border Photographer,” essay in The South Texas Border, 1900–1920 digital exhibit, Briscoe Center / UT Libraries. Briscoe Center Digital Collections
Robert Runyon Photograph Collection of the South Texas Border Area, physical collection at the Briscoe Center, Austin. Briscoe Center Digital Collections+1
Robert Runyon Collection, South Texas Archives, James C. Jernigan Library, Texas A&M University Kingsville (botanical library and documents). Texas A&M University-Kingsville Archives
Robert Runyon Family Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (finding aid via TARO). Texas Archival Resources+1
Runyon Herbarium specimens, Plant Resources Center, University of Texas at Austin (herbarium donation noted in TSHA biography). Texas State Historical Association
Brownsville Historical Association Photograph Collection, especially its early twentieth century Runyon postcards. Brownsville Historical Association
Texas Healthcare Facilities Postcard Collection, McGovern Historical Center, Texas Medical Center Library, particularly “IC091: Quarantine Station, Padre Island, TX (Front)” by Robert Runyon. DigitalCommons+1
Ellen D. Schulz Quillin and Robert Runyon, Texas Cacti: A Popular and Scientific Account of the Cacti Native of Texas (1930). Texas State Historical Association+1
Robert Runyon, Vernacular Names of Plants Indigenous to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas (Brownsville News Publishing Co., 1947). Texas A&M University-Kingsville Archives
Robert Runyon, Genealogy of the Descendants of Anthony Lawson of Northumberland, England (1952). Texas A&M University-Kingsville Archives
Robert Runyon and Amos Runyon, Runyon Genealogy (1955) and Supplement to Runyon Genealogy (1962). Texas A&M University-Kingsville Archives+1
Joe Ideker and Kendall Curlee, “Runyon, Robert,” Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association. Texas State Historical Association
Frank N. Samponaro and Paul J. Vanderwood, War Scare on the Rio Grande: Robert Runyon’s Photographs of the Border Conflict, 1913–1916 (Texas State Historical Association, 1992). Briscoe Center for History+1
“South Texas Border, 1900–1920: Photographs from the Robert Runyon Collection,” World History Commons teaching resource. worldhistorycommons.org+1
Annette M. Rodriguez, “The Man Who Sold the Border: The Mercantile Imagination of Robert Runyon,” Not Even Past (UT Austin Department of History). Not Even Past
“Robert Runyon: Border Photographer,” in The Chachalaca newsletter, Rio Grande Valley Chapter, Texas Master Naturalists, 30 September 2016. rgvctmn.org
“Robert Runyon Collection” finding aid (TAMUK) and related Runyon genealogy websites that rely on his published genealogical works and on materials in the Robert Runyon Family Papers. Texas A&M University-Kingsville Archives+2Runyon Genealogy+2
Boyd County, Kentucky cemetery surveys and online memorials for Nora Young Runyon and other Runyon family members in Catlettsburg and Ashland, which align with the dates reported in the TAMUK and Briscoe Center biographies. Texas A&M University-Kingsville Archives+1