I have always been interested in promoting the preservation of our memory and I believe that the history of Brazil consists in recovering the events that occurred in each of its municipalities. When I was invited to organize the collection for the book “Portraits of Engenheiro Coelho”, although it is an iconographic work, I considered including a brief historical account which, in my modest opinion, would inform the reader about the beginnings of the settlement.

After researching numerous archives, museums, and libraries, I had the pleasure of finding an interesting piece of information that undoubtedly justified the time spent on the studies. In the museums of Sorocaba and São Paulo, located in the cities of Sorocaba and Jundiaí respectively, incomplete collections of the railway culture monograph “Nossa Estrada” are archived. In issue no. 189, dated March 1954, in the section “Meanings and Origins of the Names of Stations of the Sorocabana Railway”, an article about the Engenheiro Coelho station was published.

The author, Mr. Aureliano de Souza, former inspector and accountant of the company, stated that the name of the honored engineer who gave his name to the station was Dr. Antônio Constantino Coelho, a native of Paraná who, for many years, served as an officer of the Santos–Jundiaí Railway. He was married to Mrs. Benivinda de Carvalho, from the same family that gave its name to the station located at Km 248.563 of the Júlio Prestes line, inaugurated on 02/10/1912 under the name Guai-

Due to the work rendered by Dr. Coelho in favor of the former Funilense line, the station was later renamed Engenheiro Coelho. The lands that hosted the settlement which gave rise to the city that adopted the honoree’s name later became part of the municipality of Mogi Mirim, recently created at that time.

Like most Brazilian communities, this rich documentary heritage is disorganized, poorly preserved, and difficult to access. Considering that the settlement belonged to the district and later to the city of Artur Nogueira, I also consulted the archives and library of that municipality.

During the weeks following these visits, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Edison Fávero, a renowned professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urbanism at UNICAMP, who, besides being a native of Engenheiro Coelho and loving this community, had for some years dedicated himself to studying its origins and development.

In 1976, in his final graduation work at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, he recovered part of the history of his hometown. After analyzing this meticulous research, and considering that we both shared the desire to carry out this task more deeply, I sought his guidance and collaboration.

With his willingness to assist me in organizing and cataloguing significant documents, we decided to contribute to this printed image collection, enriching it with a portion of the early history of the settlement.