Main at Texas - North

1908:

20 June 2004:

1908: [Left] The Rice Hotel was a businessman's overnight stay, a good hotel, but not the best in town. On the right, the Binz Building, perhaps the most desired commercial building in Houston of the era.

2013: [Left] The old Rice Hotel was torn down by Jesse Jones in [1912] and replaced by a new hotel bearing the same name, but a far grander structure, the best hotel in town, now converted to condos. [Right] The Binz Building also replaced by a newer structure, still named the Binz Building, but again, a modern edifice.

Postmarked Houston, Tex. Mar 13 1908 8-- PM
Stamp removed

To: Harrold Bown
3810 E. 26th St.
Kansas City
Mo.
​
Message on front: "Bldg. on left is Rice Hotel
Bldg. or [sic] right is Binz bldg, where Tozier is engineer.
Bown"

William Forest Bown writes his younger brother Harrold Truman Bown back in Kansas City, sons of William Trueman and Grace May Bown. William, Sr. was born in Kansas City, but had resettled in Houston where he was a stationary engineer for the Brazos Hotel, with a residence at 1341 Yale in Houston Heights. Kansas City was a much larger metropolis at the time with 250,000 inhabitants to Houston’s 75,000, but Houston was still a magnet for those looking for work.

“Tozier” was Benjamin Franklin Tozier, an engineer, machinist, and electrician with an office in the Binz Building. He, too, had come from Kansas City a few years before, so they probably met then.

Their stay was to be brief in Houston. By the time of World War I, William Sr.,and Jr. were back in Kansas City living at 2619 E. 25th where both worked for Kansas City Terminal Railroad, one of several railway links joining Houston and Kansas City. Harrold claimed the same address while he worked in Oklahoma, there leaving behind the grave of an infant son by the same name in 1923. By the 1940’s all three would be living as close neighbors across the Kansas-Missouri state line in the suburban community of Southridge, Johnson County, KS. William, father and son still worked for the railroad, Harrold owned a grocery store. Grace Bown died in 1952, William, Sr. died in 1969, and William, Jr. in 1976.
​
Tozier would return to his family resettled in Los Angeles and his career as an engineer, living in a series of beach communities, Venice Beach, Long Beach, and Porterville near Fresno in Tulare County. He died in 1942 and is buried in Glendale.