It’s not uncommon for people born in small towns to find success far from home. But for those born in a place as small as New Glarus, Wisconsin—where the population in the 1850s barely reached 300—the odds are even slimmer. Yet one man, born just a few years after the town’s founding, would go on to shape an entire region more than a thousand miles away. His name was John Closner, and he is remembered today as the “Father of Hidalgo County, Texas.”

Hidalgo County sits at the southern tip of Texas, along the Rio Grande River, directly across from Mexico. Today it’s part of a fast-growing region that includes McAllen, Edinburg, and Mission—and it’s only a short drive from Starbase, where SpaceX now launches its Starship rockets. In Closner’s time, however, it was a sparsely settled frontier of brush and open range, a place where visionaries and risk-takers shaped the future from scratch.