Ruth Young McGonigle, a Houstonian and a graduate of Rice who moved to the border in 1925 as the bride of George McGonigle, a Brownsville farmer, practiced for over fifty years.

When the State of Texas instituted the licensing of architects in 1937, Ruth McGonigle did not seek to be registered and she never called herself an architect. In the 1960s, Ruth McGonigle designed the first of a series of houses in Brownsville, the J. Kendall Hert House in Río Viejo of 1964, that drew explicitly on the Border Brick style of the 19th-century.