Historic Austin

HISTORIC AUSTIN 

An Illustrated History 

By Mike Cox 

A publication of the Heritage Society of Austin

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An Illustrated History 

By Mike Cox 

Published for the Heritage Society of Austin 

Historical Publishing Network 

A division of Lammert Publications, Inc. 

San Antonio, Texas

First Edition 

Copyright © 1998 by Historical Publishing Network 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including 

photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Historical Publishing Network, 

8491 Leslie Road, San Antonio, Texas 78254. Phone (210) 688-9008 

ISBN: 0-9654999-8-7 

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-075242 

Historic Austin: An Illustrated History 

author: Mike Cox 

editorial assistants: Linda Cox, Betty Wilke Cox 

cover artist: A. N. Rumsey 

contributing writers for “Sharing the Heritage”: Sean McNulty, Karl Pallmeyer, Alice Wightman 

Historical Publishing Network 

president: Ron Lammert 

vice president: Barry Black 

project managers: Rod Ethridge 

Joe Neely 

director of operations: Charles A. Newton, III 

production: Colin Hart 

Debbie Wright Swisher 

administration: Donna Mata 

Dee Steidle 

CONTENTS 

3 FOREWORD 

4 PREFACE 

5 CHAPTER 1 seat of future empire 

17 CHAPTER 2 “our experimental government has failed” 

25 CHAPTER 3 “there will be civil war right here” 

31 CHAPTER 4 “we are becoming accustomed to the railroad whistle” 

37 CHAPTER 5 laying cornerstones 

43 CHAPTER 6 the great dam 

57 CHAPTER 7 the era of frustration 

65 CHAPTER 8 “the New Deal was a good deal” 

71 CHAPTER 9 “win the war first” 

79 CHAPTER 10 toward the 21st century 

94 SHARING THE HERITAGE 

158 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

159 INDEX 


2

FOREWORD 

So many years have passed since I first discovered Austin. After 

my childhood spent in deep East Texas and two years of school in 

Dallas, I enrolled as a student at the University of Texas in the fall 

of 1930, and immediately came under the spell of the city and 

surrounding countryside. In those days, wildflowers spilled across 

a much smaller campus, dominated by the gothic main building. 

The population was less than fifty-three thousand, and lunch at 

Wukaschs on the drag cost thirty-five cents! 

We used to picnic “out in the country” by the lake or in broad 

meadows. Rocky limestone cliffs stood sentinel and blankets of 

bluebonnets, Indian paint brush, delicate pink evening primrose, 

along with many others, spread out their welcome. I couldn’t 

imagine anything more romantic and idyllic. 

For anyone who shared in political life, Wooldridge Park, with its charming gazebo and grounds 

rising around it to form a kind of amphitheater, was the place where all campaigns began or ended. 

The word “hometown” might have been coined in Austin. Even as the years passed and the city 

limits stretched, most of us—natives and newcomers—continue to regard the city as our own. 

That proprietary feeling has served Austin well. Historic old buildings, some rescued from the 

wrecking ball and carefully restored, have been transformed and given new life. A local bank 

moved several old houses to new sites and made them their branches with handsome results and 

goodwill as a by-product. 

Symphony Square, dear and well-known to all of us, stands as one of the most recognized 

restorations. Farsighted, innovative and determined women made a difference. 

Nowhere is re-development more obvious than downtown. A walk or drive down Congress 

Avenue finds commerce thriving in the setting of a building or storefront that would have looked 

familiar a century ago. 

The Capitol at the head of Congress Avenue is a picture engraved in all our minds. 

People are being drawn back to the center of town, allured by living quarters that are close to 

work and convenient to the music scene, the river front, the theater and other cultural attractions. 

Any many of those quarters are going to be housed in re-structured old buildings. 

Soon after Lyndon and I returned here from my ‘other favorite capital city,’ town lake became 

the focus of an effort to reclaim it from being used as a dumping site. A group of stout-hearted citizens, 

among whose number I was privileged to serve, raised funds and worked with the Austin 

Parks and Recreation Department on a plan to put in hike and bike trails and landscaping to make 

it an attractive place for residents and visitors to use and enjoy. We had the leadership and knowhow 

of the mayor, Roy Butler, the business community and, I believe, most of Austin! That kind 

of broad support has underscored every successful effort in making our city more livable. 

Our past, what has been recaptured and retained, speaks to our hearts, warms us. We mourn 

for the remnants now lost to all but memory. And it had brought us face-to-face with the age of 

high tech; so many changes in my long lifetime. 

This book tells the story of a vital city and of citizens who care. It will bring nostalgic smiles to 

long-time residents. To those new to our city, I hope these pages impart a sense of permanence and 

an invitation to nourish, as well as partake of life in our beloved Austin. 

Lady Bird Johnson 

FOREWORD 

3

REMEMBERING: A PREFACE 

✧ 

Mike Cox wrote his first history of Austin 

in 1959 as a fifth grader at T. A. Brown 

Elementary. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 

In a way, I started writing this book in the fall of 1959 when I was a fifth grader at T. A. Brown Elementary. The school 

was then on the far north edge of Austin, fronting a dead-end gravel road called Anderson Lane. 

Set down in a two-hole spiral notebook in a cursive hand I long since have abandoned in favor of a keyboard, my 

work-in-progress was called “History of Austin, Texas.” I still have that childhood manuscript. Though I don’t remember 

why I chose to ignore the use of the articles “The” or “A” in my title, I clearly recall the purpose of the book: It was 

optimisitically if not realistically undertaken as a commercial venture, not as a school project. My research, however, 

consisted of little more than the brief Austin history included back then in each telephone book. In fact, anyone comparing 

some of my passages against the text of the phone book might well have found shocking similarities. 

My mother, at the time a high school English teacher, graciously gave my opus-in-progress a light edit, using a red 

pen. But after advancing the history of Austin thirty years in fewer than five pages, I put the project aside, probably in 

favor of an expedition to nearby Little Walnut Creek with my BB gun and my friends, Bob and Randy. 

The BB gun came from my grandfather, L. A. Wilke, a retired newspaperman and writer who was born in the 

no longer extant Travis County community of Watter’s Park on June 16, 1897. As a toddler, he learned to swim 

in Lake McDonald, then the largest manmade impoundment in the world. He had no recall of the catastrophic 

1900 flood, but his father, Adolph Fritz Wilke, helped recover bodies from the ruins of the brick powerhouse near the 

breached dam. 

In addition to having played that prosaic role in Austin’s history, my great-grandfather was one of the men who helped 

build the Capitol. (No, he wasn’t one of the convicts. He was a paid laborer.) 

My interest in Austin’s history has its roots in the stories I heard from my granddad about his father’s experiences, as 

well as Granddad’s own recollections. For instance, every time we drove along Airport Boulevard, Granddad would point 

to a big block of granite on the railroad right-of-way and explain that it had fallen off the flatcars carrying rock from Burnet 

County intended for use in the construction of the Capitol. No one had bothered to move it and several others because 

of their weight, he said. The rocks are gone now, but I still find myself looking for them when I’m on Airport. 

Years later, as a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, I had the opportunity to write some of Austin’s history as 

it happened, including covering the 1983 Capitol fire. 

This book, then, is founded in more than a century of family heritage and personal experience, though its research 

was based on more than the Austin phone book. In fact, if you’ll check, the phone book no longer offers a history of the 

city it serves. 

As a collector of Texana, I have an extensive personal cache of Austin history material which came in handy during 

the writing of this book, but the richest lode is held by the Austin Public Library’s Austin History Center. I have been 

doing research there since the 1960s with the help of a succession of fine directors, the latest being Biruta Kearl. In addition, 

staff members Margaret Schlankey and Grace McEvoy were extremely helpful in making available many of the photographs 

in this book. 

Even more fundamental to the writing of this book were the two women who are the cornerstones of my writing 

career: My mother Betty Wilke Cox, who’s still editing my writing, and my wife, Linda Aronovsky Cox, who has a Master’s 

degree in communications but prefers to use her talents in a career specialty she calls Family Manager. Linda is my other 

editor and also the person who knows how to make my computer do more things than merely process words, which is 

all I can handle. 

Our daughter, Hallie Dorin Cox, was born in Austin. She’s a little too young to be interested in this book now, but I 

hope she will eventually turn to it to learn something about her hometown. It’s not the city my grand- and great-grandparents 

knew, and not even the one I knew when I first tried to write its history forty years ago, but Austin’s still a great 

place to live. It has an interesting and colorful history. I hope you’ll enjoy reading about it in this book, which I dedicate 

to my family—past, present and future. 

Mike Cox 

Austin, Texas 


4

SEAT OF FUTURE EMPIRE 

The entrada of two priests, an Indian guide, a captain and fourteen red-coated soldiers armed 

with swords and muzzle-loading escopetas rode northeast through grass hock-high on their horses. 

Topping a rise, the startled Spaniards saw their first herd of bison. The dark brown, shaggy 

beasts milled in seeming indifference to these intruders on the open prairie. Several soldiers 

spurred their blooded horseflesh and rode into the herd, easily killing a supply of fresh meat. 

In camp that evening, Brother Isidro de Espinosa penned his journal entry: 

We came to the river, which is sheltered on either side by luxuriant trees, nogales [pecans], ash 

trees, poplars, elms, willows, and wild grapes, much higher and larger than those of Castile. The 

river has sand banks all along its margins, showing the high water mark, and it is a quarter of a 

league wide. Its water is the best we have found. 

Espinosa and fellow priest Antonio de Olivares, along with Capitán Pedro de Aguirre and his 

men, were the first Europeans to see the Colorado River in what is now Travis County, at a point 

a only few miles downstream from what would become the city of Austin. 

This expedition, inauspicious by Spanish colonial standards, had ridden from the missionpresidio 

at San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande on April 5, 1709. Espinosa was following up on a 

report that the Tejas Indians of East Texas, whom the Spanish had unsuccessfully tried to convert to 

Christianity in the late 1600s, finally had become interested in mission life. Supposedly the Indians 

were ready to move west to the Colorado River if the Spanish would build a mission for them there. 

Following their northeast course, the expedition passed through what in a few years would 

become the settlement of San Antonio de Bejar, then crossed the Comal and San Marcos rivers. 

✧ 

Austin, the new seat of government of the 

Republic of Texas, was only a few months 

old when this lithograph was prepared in 

January 1840. Government offices line 

Congress Avenue. In the upper left is the 

Republic’s Capitol. In the upper right is the 

two-story residence of President Mirabeau 

Buonaparte Lamar. Most of the one-story 

log cabins feature the typical “dog trot” or 

open hallway between two rooms. 

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER. 

CHAPTER 

ONE 

5

✧ 

Above: Before the arrival of Anglo-Texans, 

Plains Indians depended on large herds of 

shaggy buffalo to provide food, warm robes, 

and hide for clothes and tents. 


Below: A buckskin-clad frontiersman flees 

through a thicket pursued by hostile Indians. 

ETCHING COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 


6 

The expedition reached what is now Travis 

County on April 16 and camped for the night 

on Onion Creek, which empties into the 

Colorado. Espinosa called the stream the 

Garrapatas [ticks] for the annoying little insects 

that dug into the flesh of both horse and rider 

as they worked their way along its bank. 

On April 17, fortified by the buffalo meat 

roasted over their fires the night before, the travelers 

left Onion Creek and marched thirteen 

miles to the river. There, at a spot that looked 

like a good crossing, they set up a base camp. 

The following day, seven soldiers stayed 

behind while the priests, escorted by Captain 

Aguirre and the rest of his men, forded the 

river. On the other side, not far from camp, 

the Spaniards discovered a large Indian village 

of more than 150 round huts arranged in 

a crescent. But there were no Indians. When 

Espinosa did make contact with them a few 

days later, he learned they had hidden, fearing 

at first that the approaching riders were 

raiding Apaches. 

The Espinosa entrada stayed on the 

Colorado only a few days before turning back 

toward the Rio Grande. If the friar envisioned 

that a major city one day would straddle the 

river not far from his camp site, he did not 

record any such sentiment in his journal. But 

Austin exists because of that wide river that 

Espinosa is believed to have been the first 

European to see at its midpoint. The river 

would be both the city’s prime asset and, 

because of the terrible floods it sometimes 

brought, for more than a century one of its 

principal liabilities. 

From its beginning in West Texas along 

Sulphur Springs Draw in present-day Dawson 

County, the Colorado bends and twists back 

and forth like a huge water snake chasing a 

bug, flowing 600 miles from the rugged 

ravines at its source to the Gulf of Mexico.

Anyone setting out to walk along the river’s 

edge from headwater to mouth would travel 

900 river miles before reaching brackish 

water on the coast. 

Though Espinosa was the first visitor to 

write a description of the Austin vicinity, man 

had come to the midpoint of the river not 

later than 10,000 B.C. The river and the 

spring-fed creeks that ran into it provided the 

necessities of life: water and food. Fruit and 

nut-bearing plants and trees thrived in its 

moisture and game animals—bison, deer, 

antelope, bear—came to drink its water. Fish, 

turtles, and mussels from the river provided 

additional variety to the diet of the first people 

along the Colorado. 

Clear, cold water erupted year-round from a 

series of limestone springs near this midsection 

of the river. A well-worn trail extending for hundreds 

of miles in each direction passed near the 

springs where prehistoric man had camped for 

millennia. Early man possessed neither the language 

nor the sophisticated mathematical skill 

for ordering comparative lists, but these springs 

on the edge of the Balcones Escarpment, disgorging 

68-degree water at more than 27 million 

gallons a day, were the fourth largest in the 

vast landscape that would become Texas. 

Long before the Spanish first splashed 

across it, this river cutting through the heart 

of Texas served as one of its major boundaries 

separating different Indian cultures. Perennial 

camp sites near natural crossings became 

meeting places for trade. Espinosa noted wellestablished 

trails along the river’s banks, 

paths worn by animal and his principal predator: 

man. 

Espinosa left the first written description 

of the area near what would become Texas’ 

capital city, but he did not stay. By April 21, 

1709 he was on his way back to the Rio 

Grande. Other entradas would follow 

Espinosa’s route across the Colorado during 

the time Texas was part of Spain’s already fading 

world empire. 

Twenty-one years after Espinosa’s entrada 

camped on the Colorado below what would 

become Austin, the Spanish may have established 

a mission upriver near the springs 

beneath the hills. Whether the mission was 

actually in Travis County or on the San Gabriel 

farther north in present-day Williamson 

County remains an open question. Late 20th 

century scholarship, based on new translations 

of Spanish diaries and comparisons of early 

maps with modern topographical charts, 

✧ 

Above: Plácido, a chief of the friendly 

Tonkawas, once helped General Edward 

Burleson recover a favorite horse stolen by 

the Comanches. 

Below: A History of the Emigrants to the 

Republic of Texas, published by Nafis & 

Cornish in 1844, featured Edward Hall’s 

sketch of Austin. 

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER. 

CHAPTER 

ONE 

7

✧ 

This 1853 map of Austin shows the 

development of Edwin Waller’s original plan for 

the capital city laid out north of the Colorado 

and between Shoal and Waller creeks. 


revealed a fair amount of miscalculation on the 

part of earlier historians in the locations of 

some early Spanish sites and trails. 

An historical marker in what is now Zilker 

Park commemorates a Spanish presence near 

the springs in 1730-31, but no ruins or 

European artifacts have ever been found in 

the area. 

However, in a cedar brake several miles 

upstream from the springs is a mysterious 

maze of stacked rock walls, ranging from 

knee- to waist-high. No one has ever determined 

who built them. Some have ventured 

that the rocks might date to colonial Spanish 

Texas, but others who have examined the 

walls maintain that they are not typical of the 

architecture of the period. 

Except for the short-lived mission, if it was 

ever there, the mid-range of the Colorado 

remained unsettled by people of European 

stock until well into the 19th century. 

While the river and the prolific springs 

east of the escarpment were the geographic 

factors leading to its settlement, the city that 

would develop on the Colorado’s banks 

owes its name—and indirectly its existence—to 

Stephen Fuller Austin, a young 

man who came to Texas to take over a colonization 

plan stalled by the death of his 

father, Moses Austin. 


8

Born in Virginia in 1793, Stephen Austin 

was raised in Missouri and educated in 

Connecticut, Kentucky and, to some extent, 

Louisiana, where he read law for a time in 

New Orleans. His gifts were a passion for 

hard work, an exacting eye for detail and a 

flair for compromise and diplomacy. His 

weakness was a lack of decisiveness, especially 

when assuming military leadership. 

Austin arrived in Texas in August 1821. At 

San Antonio, he succeeded in preserving the 

empresario [land agent] contract his father 

had obtained to settle 300 families in Spanish 

Texas, but, because Mexico had revolted 

against Spain and a new government was in 

place, it would be two years before Austin 

actually was able to grant land titles. 

Returning to New Orleans, he had no trouble 

recruiting immigrants for his colony. The first 

settlers arrived in December 1821. The lure 

was land, good land, at a per acre price so low 

as to give true meaning to the term “dirt 

cheap.” By 1828, Austin had contracts providing 

for the settlement of up to 1,200 families 

in Texas. Two years later, bolstered by an 

influx of immigrants under contracts with 

other empresarios, the Mexican province of 

Coahuila y Tejas had an Anglo-American 

population of 30,000. 

During these early years of settlement, the 

Colorado and Brazos rivers were the Tigris and 

Euphrates of Anglo Texas. The lower reaches of 

these two rivers, at points only fifty miles 

apart, in metaphor constituted a Texas-sized 

wagon road from the Gulf of Mexico straight 

into the heart of the Mexican province, each 

“rut” of the giant “road” filled with water. 

Most of Austin’s colonists stayed in the 

Brazos valley, but some settled farther to the 

west along the lower Colorado. Within a few 

years, some of the colonists, seeking fresher 

country and more distance from their neighbors, 

began exploring upriver toward “the 

Mountains,” the hills marking the Balcones 

Escarpment. 

A man named Cox (no researcher has ever 

determined his first name) rode up the river, 

likely as far as present-day Austin. He furnished 

Stephen Austin information on distances and 

tributaries of the Colorado that the empresario 

later used on a map depicting Texas between 

the Nueces and Colorado rivers. 

In 1827, Austin petitioned the Mexican 

government for a third empresario contract. 

He wanted to put settlers on land east of the 

Colorado and north of the old Spanish road 

from San Antonio to Nacogdoches, creating 

an additional buffer between his original settlements 

and hostile Indians. On October 11, 

1827, Austin won approval to place up to one 

hundred settlers in an area that came to be 

called the Little Colony. That land grant 

included the future capital of Texas. 

In March 1830, Austin and a surveying party 

made up of William Barton, Reuben Hornsby, 

Jesse Tannehill, John F. Webber, Martin Wells, 

and Josiah Wilbarger rode up the Colorado to 

take the measure of the new land grant. 

✧ 

Above, left: Texians named the Republic’s 

capital city in honor of Stephen Fuller Austin, 

the empresario who brought hundreds of 

Anglo-American families to Texas. 

Above, right: Castile, head chief of the 

friendly Tonkawas, served as a scout for the 

Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army. 

Below: “Scene near Austin,” by W. Bissett 

from Map & Description of Texas 1840, 

copied by Francis Moore, Jr. 


CHAPTER 

ONE 

9

✧ 

Above: Mirabeau B. Lamar, third President 

of the Republic of Texas, strongly favored 

the midpoint of the Colorado River as the 

location for the capital city. 


Below: The Swenson pioneer cabin, 

displayed in the Austin Botanical Garden 

Center, is typical of a small but well-built 

frontier home. 


A settlement rapidly developed at a point 

on the Colorado about thirty miles below the 

Balcones Escarpment where the San Antonio 

Road crossed the river. Austin named the collection 

of log cabins in honor of the Baron de 

Bastrop, an official who had helped his father 

get his initial settlement contract. For a short 

time the new community was called Mina for 

Xavier Mina, a Mexican hero, but Bastrop is 

the name that stuck. By 1834, only two years 

after its founding, Bastrop was a thriving 

town and the seat of local government. 

Two years earlier, the country seen on his 

surveying trip still fresh in his mind, Austin 

wrote his secretary Samuel May Williams from 

Saltillo on May 8, 1832 requesting that he 

secure for him several desirable tracts of land 

along the Colorado. The land Austin wanted 

included one tract that covered a large square 

north of the river and westward from the elevation 

later known as Mount Bonnell. 

“I shall fix a place on the Colorado at the 

foot of the mountains to live, and wish [the 

land] for my own use and not to sell,” he 

wrote. Of all the land the empresario had seen 

in Texas, he wanted acreage on the mid- 

Colorado as his retirement estate. Austin 

urged Williams to perfect the titles quickly, 

because he had heard that others had their 

eye on that section of the river. 

Indeed, the other members of Austin’s surveying 

party also were impressed by the 

country they had seen. 

Georgia-born Reuben Hornsby settled on a 

bend in the river about ten miles below present-day 

Austin in July 1832, receiving title 

from the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas to 

a league (4,427 acres) and a labor (177.1 

acres) of land on October 16 that year. His 

place, soon called Hornsby’s Bend, was the 

first settlement in Travis County. 

Jesse Tannehill built a cabin at a point on 

the river that later was called Montopolis. 

Barton, Wells, and Wilbarger settled in the 

vicinity of Bastrop. Wilbarger stayed put, but 

Barton and Wells would move farther upriver 

after Texas’ 1836 revolution against Mexico. 

At first, Austin had hoped Texas would 

remain a Mexican province, but he eventually 

supported independence, briefly if unspectacularly 

serving as commander of the Texian 

army. The man who replaced him as general 

was another Virginian, Sam Houston. 

Five months after his victory over General 

Antonio López de Santa Anna at the Battle of 

San Jacinto, Houston defeated Austin at the 

polls, becoming the Republic’s first President. 

Austin was appointed Secretary of State. 

The father of Anglo-American Texas did 

not hold office long and never got to enjoy 

retirement at his “place on the Colorado.” 


10

Austin was only forty-three when he died of 

pneumonia on December 27, 1836. Death 

came to the former empresario in Columbia— 

the infant Republic’s capital at the time—a 

community in present-day Brazoria County 

now called West Columbia. 

A top priority of Texas’ nascent government 

was frontier defense. Still a wilderness, 

the area that would become the city of Austin 

benefited from government spending for the 

first time in the fall of 1836. Under orders to 

raise three companies of mounted men and to 

“make your headquarters at some suitable 

point above the settlement[s],” Colonel 

Robert M. Coleman established a fort on high 

ground west of Walnut Creek about two and 

a half miles northeast of the Colorado River. 

Variously known as Fort Colorado, Coleman’s 

Fort, Fort Coleman, and Fort Prairie, the log 

fort—a pair of two-story blockhouses surrounded 

by a stockade—served as a base for 

Ranger operations against Indians for two 

years. The fort gave settlers confidence to 

start moving into the area. 

In 1837, William Barton chose a spot across 

the river from the land Austin had wanted, putting 

up a log cabin near the springs soon generally 

known as Barton’s Springs. The colorful 

Barton, sometimes described as “the Daniel 

Boone of Texas,” named the two largest springs 

after his daughters, Parthenia and Eliza. But his 

two-syllable surname is what stuck, though the 

possessive eventually disappeared. 

The area along the Colorado between 

Bastrop and Barton’s cabin was filling rapidly 

with settlers by 1838, though the distance 

between neighbors still was measured in 

miles. But the land Stephen Austin had 

desired remained unimproved. Austin never 

gained clear title prior to his death, and his 

heirs had no better luck. 

In July, Indian-fighter Edward Burleson, 

the man who had been Houston’s second-incommand 

at San Jacinto and one of two 

House members from Bastrop, had a townsite 

laid out on the river land Austin once wanted. 

The congressman, who had first seen the land 

while scouting for Indians, named the place 

Waterloo. “It has nothing in the way of 

improvement but a name,” a visitor said of the 

infant town in a letter to the Houston Telegraph 

and Texas Register, “and I wish it had not that, 

if the proprietors could not give it one without 

borrowing from a foreign country.” 

Among the first settlers at Waterloo was 

Jacob Harrell, one of the 300 original Texas 

colonists. Harrell put up a log cabin on the 

north bank of the river between Shoal Creek 

and what would become Congress Avenue. 

When Waterloo was incorporated on January 

15, 1839, Harrell was named the village’s first 

postmaster. 

Though the city which rose on the land 

Austin wanted as his own would in less than 

three years honor the late empresario’s name, 

✧ 

Above: Dr. J. S. Robertson, an early medical 

man in Travis County, based his drawing on 

an old sketch. Shown are the Republic's first 

buildings for the Navy Department, 

Executive Offices, State Department, and 

(in the upper right) the President's 

residence. 

Below: Furnishings and utensils of a typical 

pioneer cabin have been carefully preserved. 


CHAPTER 

ONE 

11

✧ 

Above: Edward Burleson, second-incommand 

at San Jacinto, laid out the small 

settlement of Waterloo in 1838. He was 

elected Vice President of the Republic, and 

was serving as President pro tempore of 

the Texas Legislature at the time of his 

death. He was buried in what later became 

the State Cemetery. 


Below: William H. Sandusky, a surveyor, 

arrived in Waterloo (Austin) in May 1839 

with 200 workmen to lay out lots for the 

Republic’s governmental buildings. He 

painted this somewhat idealized picture of 

the new capital city. 


the capital of Texas could as fittingly be 

called Lamar. 

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, a thirty-sixyear-old 

Georgian with a penchant for poetry, 

came to Texas in 1835 following his wife’s death 

from tuberculosis. Intrigued by letters from 

Texas written by his old friend James Fannin— 

soon to become a colonel in the Texian army 

during Texas’ fight for independence from 

Mexico—Lamar came to the province intending 

to write a book on its history. He never wrote 

the book, but he ended up making some of the 

history that could have gone into it. 

Following the March 6, 1836 fall of the 

Alamo and the massacre of Fannin and his 

men near Goliad on March 27, Lamar joined 

Sam Houston’s army as a private but soon was 

a colonel. He distinguished himself at San 

Jacinto on April 21, receiving high praise 

from Houston. When Houston was elected 

President of the new Republic, Lamar took 

office as Vice President. 

The authors of the Republic’s Constitution, 

wary of a too-powerful chief executive, limited 

the President’s time in office to two years and 

barred consecutive terms. It would seem natural 

that Houston would want his Vice President as 

his successor, but the two men, vastly different 

in temperament, had pulled apart during his 

administration. Despite Houston’s best efforts to 

thwart it, Lamar was elected President. 

In the fall of 1838, seeking the restorative 

qualities of life on the hunt, the Presidentelect 

and his private secretary, the Reverend 

Edward Fontaine, rode northwest from 

Houston to the Ranger post on Walnut Creek. 

From there, joined by six Rangers to serve as 

guides and protection against Indians, Lamar 

set out on a buffalo hunt. 

Riding upriver from the fort, Lamar’s 

entourage reached Harrell’s cabin at Waterloo, 

where they camped for the night near his splitlog 

corral. They were awakened early by Harrell’s 

young son, who excitedly told them that the 

prairie to the north was covered with buffalo. 

Lamar and the Rangers saddled up. 

Quickly overtaking the herd, the hunters 

scattered, each in pursuit of a shaggy buffalo. 

With his pistol, Lamar killed a big bull along 

the trail leading uphill from the river. 

Regrouping on a hill in answer to a bugle 

call from one of the Rangers, Lamar and the 

Rangers took in the view. 

“Gentlemen,” Lamar said in time, “this 

should be the seat of future empire.” 

The only source for this prophetic, oftpublished 

remark was the Reverend 

Fontaine’s son, who told the story years after 

his father and the other participants were 

dead. Even if the observation attributed to 

Lamar is only a legend, Lamar’s actions as 

president after taking office in December 

speak for themselves. 

On January 14, 1839, the new President 

signed an act passed by the first session of the 

Third Texas Congress empowering five commissioners 

to select a site for the Republic’s 

capital. The act also gave the commission 

authority to buy, through condemnation if 

needed, from one to four leagues of land as a 


12

seat of government. Named to the commission 

were A. C. Horton of Matagorda, I. W. 

Burton of Nacogdoches, William Menifee of 

Colorado (a long-vanished community near 

present-day La Grange), Isaac Campbell of 

San Augustine and Louis P. Cooke of Brazoria. 

After spending eleven weeks trekking 

across the wilds of the new Republic in search 

of the suitable site for its capital, the five commissioners 

became good friends. Had they 

encountered hostile Indians, a distinct possibility, 

they would have had to stand together 

to stay alive. But that did not mean they all 

thought alike. They did not agree on where 

the seat of government should be. 

Burton and Campbell wanted the capital to 

be on the more populated Brazos. Cooke and 

Menifee voted for a site on the Colorado. 

Breaking the tie was up to Horton, who sided 

with Cooke and Menifee. The next issue was 

where on the Colorado the capital would be: 

Bastrop or farther upstream at Waterloo? 

Despite what must have been spirited 

debate behind closed doors, the report the 

commission submitted to Lamar on April 13 

showed no sign of discord: “It was unanimously 

determined that Waterloo, and the 

lands around it, was the proper site.” The 

commissioners admitted that other sites were 

closer to the existing centers of population, 

but the location selected was central to the 

entire Republic “and this in connection with 

the great desideratums of health, fine water, 

stone, stone coal, water power, &c, being 

more abundant on the Colorado than on the 

Brassos [Brazos] river.” 

When roads from Texas seaports to Santa 

Fe and from the Red River to Mexico were 

opened, the report continued, the “two routs 

[sic] must almost of necessity intersect each 

other at this point.” In their only mistaken 

judgment, the commissioners also predicted 

the capital would be the “emporium” of “the 

Produce of the rich mining country known to 

exist” on the streams to the west. Texans of the 

era assumed that the Spanish had discovered 

and mined productive veins of gold and silver 

in the hills west of the Colorado, but neither 

metal was ever found in commercial quantity. 

The commissioners went on to express 

their belief that “a truly national city could, at 

no other point within the limits assigned 

them, be reared up” at the site they had 

picked on the Colorado. 

Near the end of the report was a sentence 

that the aesthetically-minded Lamar must 

have found pleasing: “The imagination of 

even the romantic will not be disappointed on 

viewing the valley of the Colorado, and the 

fertile and gracefully undulating woodlands 

and luxuriant Prairies at a distance from it.” 

For $3 an acre, the Republic bought 7,700 

acres on the Colorado River at Waterloo. The 

townsite for the capital city would be one 

mile square, 640 acres. 

Lamar named political ally Judge Edwin 

Waller, a Virginian who had come to Texas in 

1832, to oversee the surveying of the new capital 

and the construction of government buildings. 

Waller hired L. J. Pilie and Charles 

Schoolfield to lay out the new city. Most Austin 

histories credit that work to William H. 

Sandusky, but he entered the picture a bit later, 

following Pilie’s arrest for theft. A “volunteer 

jury” found Pilie guilty of stealing $3,500 and 

then graciously agreed to handle the punishment 

phase of the proceeding as well. The surveyor 

was tied to a “liberty pole” and flogged. 

The man who laid out the capital of Texas was 

then banished from the city he designed. 

Sandusky, born in Columbus, Ohio and 

raised in Illinois, surveyed the outlots and 

made copies of Pilie’s townsite map. The onemile 

square townsite had ten squares set aside 

for public purposes, including a capitol, a 

presidential house, an arsenal and magazine, 

a penitentiary and a hospital, as well as 

churches, schools, a university and four public 

squares. The government earmarked 

$113,000 for construction of the statehouse 

and other public buildings. 

By May 1839, 200 workmen were camped 

along Waller Creek and at Durham’s Spring, 

near the present-day intersection of Sixth and 

Neches Streets. “Drawn from all the 

nationalZities of the world—of all colors, 

classes and characters [Waller’s] employees 

were wild characters, many of them turbulent 

and restless under control,” an early-day 

biographer of Waller later wrote. The workmen, 

most of them inexperienced, labored 

through the summer, living mainly on dried 

CHAPTER 

ONE 

13

✧ 

Above, right: Edwin Waller was a 39-yearold 

land commissioner in Brazoria County 

when President Lamar sent him to Waterloo 

to survey, sell lots, and oversee the building 

of the Republic’s government buildings. 

Below: The first Capitol in Austin stood on 

the northeast corner of Hickory (Eighth) 

and Colorado streets. The stockade 

surrounding the Capitol protected against 

surprise attacks by Comanches. 


beef, corn bread and spring water. Too, they 

had to be constantly on guard against Indian 

attacks. In fact, two men caught alone on 

Waller Creek were killed and scalped. 

As construction of government buildings 

continued apace, Bastrop County Sheriff John 

King presided over the first sale of lots on 

August 1. Prospective property owners, along 

with speculators, gathered under a mott of 

liveoak trees in the public square at Pine 

(Fifth) and Guadalupe streets. By the end of 

what must have been a long, hot day, 301 lots 

had been auctioned. Prices realized ranged 

from $120 to $2800 for Lot 6, Block 55, at 

Pecan (Sixth Street) and Congress. The same 

high-end price was realized for a lot on the 

northeast corner of Cedar (Fourth) and 

Congress, but it later was forfeited to the 

Republic for lack of payment, as were seventy-six 

other lots. One hundred twenty-seven 

men had purchased property amounting to 

$182,525, a staggering amount for the time 

and more than enough to repay the Republic’s 

lean treasury for the money being expended 

in construction of the Capitol and other government 

buildings. 

The buyer of the lot at the corner of Pecan 

(Sixth) and Congress was Richard Bullock, 

who built Austin’s first hotel on the site. The 

two-story frame-and-log structure soon 

became the social center of the city. 

In addition to everything else, Waller also 

had to deal politically with the downstream 

community of Montopolis, which had complained 

about being passed over by the selection 

committee. 

A man who knew Waller, Judge George H. 

Gray, later recalled that Waterloo consisted of 


14

three families, with the rival town of 

Montopolis—just two miles from the newly 

staked out Congress Avenue—having only two 

families. “Quite a jealousy grew up between 

the towns,” Gray wrote, “but all differences 

were amicably settled on the first Indian raid, 

which happened in a very short time [after 

Waterloo’s selection as the new capital].” 

In four months, Waller and his men had 

constructed a seat of government on the far 

frontier of the young Republic. Twenty-one 

government buildings occupied twenty-three 

lots. Austin—like Rome— had not been built 

in a day. But like Rome, it rose on a series of 

seven hills. The one-story Capitol, 110 by 50 

or 60 feet, had gone up on one of those hills 

at Hickory (Eighth) and Colorado. To the east 

across Congress Avenue was the two-story 

President’s House on another prominence at 

Bois d’Arc (Seventh) and Brazos. The government 

workers even built “necessaries,” a 19th 

century euphemism for outhouses. All the 

structures were of pine hauled by ox-drawn 

wagons from an isolated coniferous forest east 

of Bastrop and cedar (mountain juniper) cut 

west of Austin. Inauspicious compared to 

most capital cities of the world, the whitewashed 

public buildings of the new Republic 

gleamed in the bright fall sunlight. Smelling 

of fresh-cut wood, they were a lot more comfortable 

than tents. 

In September, a wagon train arrived from 

the town of Houston with the records of the 

Republic. On October 17, a delegation of 

Austinians (as residents of the new capital 

were known until “Austinite” gained common 

usage) met President Lamar about two miles 

out and escorted him to town. 

Admitting that he was no orator, Waller 

addressed the President and his cabinet. 

“In the name of the citizens of Austin, I cordially 

welcome you and your Cabinet to the 

new metropolis,” he said. “Under your fostering 

care may it flourish, and, aided by its salubrity 

of climate and its beauty of situation, become 

famous among the cities of the New World.” 

A six-pound cannon fired twenty-one 

times in salute as the Presidential party 

retired to Bullock’s Hotel for dinner and a 

round of celebratory toasts that lasted five 

hours. The Austin City Gazette reported that 

the party went through thirteen “regular 

toasts,” from the first, which honored 

President Lamar, down to a round of drinks 

in honor of the late Benjamin Milam, hero of 

the Battle of San Antonio in 1835. Following 

these regular toasts came twenty-one “volunteer’s 

toasts and sentiments,” though after 

✧ 

The Lone Star flag flew over the first 

Capitol of the Republic of Texas, 

built in 1839. 


CHAPTER 

ONE 

15

✧ 

This well-known statue of Stephen F. Austin, dressed in buckskins and holding a rifle, was sculpted by Elisabet Ney. 

raising his glass thirty-four times, the Gazette 

writer may not have recalled every single 

salutatory drink by the time he was able to 

compose his account of the event. 

By act of the Fourth Texas Congress, 

Austin was incorporated as a city on 

December 27, 1839. Seventeen days later 

Waller was unanimously elected its first 

mayor, receiving 187 votes. 

At the time Waller assumed office, the new 

capital was in Bastrop County, its county seat 

a long day’s horseback ride downriver. But on 

January 25, 1840, the Republic’s Congress 

voted to lop a huge chunk of land from 

Bastrop County and make Austin the seat of a 

new political subdivision named in honor of 

Alamo hero William Barrett Travis. 

The same month Travis County came into 

being, a census by Amos Roark found that 

Austin had a population of 856—550 men, 

61 women, and 100 children. In addition to 

73 “professors of religion,” Roark enumerated 

35 mechanics, six doctors and four lawyers. 

The population supported nine stores, nine 

groceries, six inns, two printing offices, two 

tailor shops, two silversmith shops, and 

twenty gamblers equipped with six faro tables 

and one billiard table. 

“Its location for a small city is rather handsome 

than otherwise, but the lots have been 

made entirely too small, particularly in their 

depth,” the Reverend Mr. Beverly Waugh, a 

Methodist bishop, wrote of Austin in 1841. 

Houses in the new capital “are but little in 

advance of shanties and cabins,” Waugh continued. 

“The President’s house forms an exception. 

It is situated on a high hill overlooking 

the city, and is a two story building, painted 

white, and indicating from its exterior a house 

which may have been finished within. If this 

description of the metropolis should appear 

strange to any one, let him recollect that Austin 

is an infant city—of an infant republic.” 

While its appealing geography was the 

prime factor figuring in the location of 

Austin, politics is what kept the city alive and 

at various times threatened to kill it. For nearly 

a quarter century, whether Austin would be 

Texas’ permanent capital remained in doubt. 

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 


16

“OUR EXPERIMENTAL 

GOVERNMENT HAS FAILED” 

In the spring of 1842, New York-born surveyor Warren Ferris wrote his brother Charles from 

the East Texas community of Crockett. 

“Our experimental government has failed,” he penned, referring to the Republic of Texas. 

“Emigration has ceased. The people are barely able to get the absolute necessaries of life…nine out 

of ten cannot pay their taxes.” 

The situation was so bad, he continued, that the Republic’s postal system “has failed…discontinued 

the mail [Ferris’ emphasis].” 

While lack of revenue was a definite problem, Texans had more than that to worry about. 

Mexico, which had never recognized Texas’ independence, continued to pose a serious threat to 

the new Republic. Santa Anna was back in the presidential palace and his rhetoric was not assuring 

to Texans. Also back in office for a second term was the man who defeated the Mexican general 

at San Jacinto, Sam Houston, newly-married and foresworn of alcohol. 

Clearly, conditions in the Republic were as sobering as the stern admonitions of Houston’s 

Baptist wife, Margaret Lea. In March 1842, 500 Mexican troops under General Rafael Vásquez 

marched up from the Rio Grande and took San Antonio with little effort on March 5, the day before 

the sixth anniversary of the Alamo. The invasion, while more a punitive expedition than a full-scale 

attempt to reclaim Texas, created panic in the Republic. President Houston, invoking executive 

✧ 

Despite efforts made toward beautification 

and landscaped terraces, the 1853 Capitol 

attracted more criticism than compliments. 


CHAPTER 

TWO 

17

✧ 

Above: In his prime, General Sam Houston 

led Texians to victory at San Jacinto. 


Above, right: Portrait. As President of the 

young Republic of Texas, Sam Houston 

opposed Austin as the capital city and also 

helped trigger the Archive War. Later, as 

Governor, Houston lost much of his political 

support when he opposed Secession. 



18 

power, ordered the seat of government 

removed from Austin. Most of the capital’s 

residents quickly left as well. 

After General Vásquez issued a proclamation 

that Mexican law still held sway in Texas, 

the Mexican force withdrew from Texas 

almost as abruptly as it had arrived. The 

dozen or so families who had stayed in Austin 

felt more threatened by Houston’s designs on 

the government records than they did by 

Mexican troops. A committee of vigilance was 

formed and its chairman made it known that 

the papers of the Republic—primarily land 

records—were not going to leave Austin, even 

if Houston had effectively pulled the rest of 

the government back to Washington-on-the- 

Brazos by ordering that Congress convene 

there in October. 

In September, a larger Mexican contingent 

returned to San Antonio. Troops occupied the 

city less than a month, however, before withdrawing 

again. While the mood of Congress 

seemed to be to retain Austin as the capital 

even though it was temporarily vacated, 

Houston decided to act unilaterally to get the 

government records moved east to 

Washington-on-the Brazos. 

Houston, who had once referred to the 

new capital as “that damned hole,” issued 

secret orders to raise a militia company to 

travel to Austin and seize the records. The 

President’s cover story was that the citizensoldiers 

under the command of Colonel 

Thomas Smith were being activated to put 

down an Indian uprising. 

A vigorous norther was blowing on the 

morning of December 30, when three wagons 

escorted by a score or so of armed men were 

seen headed up Congress Avenue. Soon they 

reached the log building that served as the 

Land Office and began loading boxes of 

records into the wagons. Angelina Belle 

Eberly, who ran a boarding house, sounded 

the alarm. 

Houston’s men were on their way out of 

town with ten boxes of government papers 

before a small force of Austin men mustered 

to take up the matter. As the wagons rolled 

north toward Kinney’s Fort on Brushy Creek, 

where the soldiers intended to stay for the 

night, a brass howitzer loaded with grapeshot 

was fired in their direction. But the wagons 

already were almost out of range and no one 

was hurt. Folklore has it that Mrs. Eberly 

touched off the gun, but no documentation 

has ever been found. 

The ad hoc welcoming committee withdrew 

to recruit more volunteers and warm up 

over a drink or two. Reinforced literally and 

figuratively, the Austin party rode north to 

catch up with the wagons carrying the 

nation’s archives. 

Colonel Smith and his men woke up the 

next morning to discover they were surrounded 

by armed men determined to get the 

government records back. To underscore 

their point, the Austin men had brought 

along the howitzer, reloaded with another 

charge of grapeshot. Seeing no need for 

unpleasantness on New Year’s Eve, the 

colonel agreed to return the records to Austin. 

“The scene was a rich and rare one when 

the returning victors were met and welcomed 

by the ladies of Austin,” a journalist who 

probably knew some of the participants wrote 

thirty years later. The “archive warriors” were 

honored by the women “not only with their 

smiles and embraces, but with their loudest 

huzzas of approbation.” 

Captain Mark B. Lewis, leader of the 

Austin volunteers, did not live out the year.

He was killed some months later during an 

argument over politics. Austinians were contentious 

folks. 

Later in the year, when Comptroller James 

B. Shaw and a judge came to Austin merely 

to collect some blank forms for the government’s 

use, James M. Morphis wrote in 

his 1874 History of Texas, “they went away 

without them…the tails and manes of their 

horse and mule sheared, and with their 

mule’s ear cropped.” 

Though the miniature insurrection that 

later came to be called the Archives War kept 

the government’s records in Austin, its citizens 

had not been particularly effective in 

dealing with hostile Indians. A person venturing 

too far from Austin was taking a big risk. 

“Singular as it may appear,” the Clarksville 

Northern Standard observed, “the capital of 

Texas is the extreme frontier town and, what 

may appear even more singular, the Indians 

have been frequently known to enter the 

principal streets and… have even robbed and 

even murdered the inhabitants of the seat of 

government, with[in] a few hundred yards of 

the capital.” 

On the third day after the unsuccessful 

raid on the archives, Alexander Coleman and 

William Bell left a public meeting in Austin 

and headed out of town on the Bastrop road 

in a buggy, accompanied by Joseph Hornsby 

and James Edmonson on horseback. 

When the two riders topped Robertson’s 

Hill east of the city, they saw Coleman and 

Bell suddenly alight from their wagon, hurriedly 

climb a rail fence and then run across a 

field. Soon they realized why the two men 

were acting so strangely: thirty or so Indians 

had ridden up on them. The Indians dismounted, 

went over the fence, and pursued 

the men on foot. 

As the two men on horseback continued 

to look on, the Indians overtook the fleeing 

men. Bell fell dead, full of arrows. The 

Indians were about to kill Coleman, who 

was pleading for his life, when Hornsby 

and Edmonson made a gutsy decision. 

Though they had only one pistol between 

them, they kicked their horses’ flanks and 

charged downhill, yelling, and firing the single-shot 

handgun. 

The bluff worked. Believing more Texans 

were right behind the two riders, the Indians 

freed Coleman, who had had most of his 

clothes ripped off, and scattered for the 

brush. As Coleman ran back to town for help, 

Hornsby and Edmonson kept up the pursuit. 

More men with guns soon joined the chase, 

killing three Indians and capturing their horses 

and accoutrements. 

The killing of Bell was not an isolated incident. 

In the twelve-year period from 1833 to 

1845, at least twenty-nine men, women, and 

children died violently at the hands of 

Indians within the city limits of Austin or 

inside Travis County. During that time, the 

county never had more than some 850 residents, 

and for much of the period far fewer 

than that. Based on that maximum population, 

the mortality rate from Indian hostilities 

amounted to at least three out of every one 

hundred people. The actual ratio probably 

was even higher. 

The attack on Coleman and Bell happened 

near where a member of the French diplomatic 

corps, Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, 

soon began construction of a house that 

would serve as his country’s legation in Texas. 

The young Frenchman had come to Austin in 

January 1840 in response to France’s formal 

recognition of the Texas Republic. The United 

States and Great Britain also sent representatives 

to Texas, but neither were as colorful or 

controversial as de Saligny. 

✧ 

This dramatic depiction of Angelina Belle 

Eberly firing a cannon at wagons carrying 

the Republic’s archives away from Austin 

probably has no foundation in fact. Mrs. 

Eberly’s actual role has been expanded 

into the realm of Texas mythology. 


CHAPTER 

TWO 

19

✧ 

When Texas entered the Union in 1845, 

the new state was cash-poor but land-rich. 

In 1850 Texas sold 67 million acres—parts 

of what would become the states of New 

Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, 

and Wyoming—to the United States. 

MAP COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 

The charge d’affaires, known 

for his partying and propensity 

for accumulating unpaid bills, 

soon became embroiled in a 

dispute known as the “Pig 

War.” It started when a group 

of meandering pigs entered the 

Frenchman’s residence (802 

San Marcos Street, Austin’s oldest 

building), and, as he later 

described it, “penetrated to my 

bedroom and ate my linen and 

destroyed my papers.” The 

diplomat instructed his servant 

to kill any other pigs that ventured 

onto the diplomat’s property. 

Following orders, the servant 

responded to the next 

incursion with deadly force. 

The trespassing swine happened 

to belong to hotelier 

Richard Bullock, to whom de 

Salingny also owed money. The situation escalated 

when Bullock thrashed the servant and 

made it known that the charge d’affaires might 

be next. The diplomat demanded government 

action against Bullock. When nothing was 

done about the assault, the Frenchman indignantly 

left Austin for New Orleans, severely 

straining Franco-Texan relations. 

The Republic of Texas, though providing 

only minimal protection for its citizens—not 

to mention its pigs and foreign diplomats— 

endured longer than all but the most naively 

optimistic expected. The hope of most 

Texans, expressed in an election shortly after 

Houston became their first President, had 

always been that Texas would be annexed to 

the United States. It merely took almost a 

decade for it to happen. 

Such government as the Republic could 

provide was handled out of Washington-onthe-Brazos, 

which, for all practical purposes, 

despite Austin’s retention of the government 

records, was the capital until Anson Jones 

succeeded Houston as President late in 1844. 

During the nearly two-year hiatus following 

the archives incident, Austin had become a 

virtual ghost town, with barely 200 residents. 

With the change in administration, plans 

were in the works to move the Texas Congress 

back to Austin when the United States 

Congress passed an annexation resolution on 

March 1, 1845. 

Jones, whose principal accomplishment in 

office was presiding over the transition from 

independent Republic to statehood, issued a 

proclamation setting a convention in Austin 

for July 4 to consider the annexation proposed 

by the United States. In effect, the capital 

had returned to Austin. Sixty-one 

deputies met for fifty-five days before voting 

60-1 in favor of annexation. 

The Houston Morning Star reported on 

January 13 that “the Steam Ship Alabama 

had arrived in Galveston and brought the joyful 

news that the bill for the Admission of 

Texas into the Union had passed the 

American Senate on the 22nd and that ‘The 

resolutions were then, by consent read a third 

time and passed.’” 

A little more than a month later, on 

February 19, 1846, the last President of the 

Republic spoke to a crowd gathered outside 

the frame Capitol west of Congress Avenue. 

As the Lone Star flag was lowered and the 

Stars and Stripes went up, Jones said: “May 

the Union be perpetual and may it be the 

means of conferring the benefits and blessings 

upon the people of all the States.… The final 

act in this great drama is now performed. The 

Republic of Texas is no more.” 

Three years into statehood, Austin still had 

little to offer but its scenery. Friedrich 

Schlecht, newly arrived in Texas from 

Germany, approached the capital on horseback 

from the southwest, moving down 

Spring Creek (now called Barton Creek) to 

the Colorado. 

“I found the wooded land along the bottomland 

of the Colorado very impressive,” he 

later wrote. 

Schlecht, noting that Austin’s hills “lent to its 

charm,” judged that the state’s capital amounted 

to maybe two hundred houses and buildings. 

The modest wooden buildings housing 

the offices of government seemed to 

dominate their surroundings. The view 

from here was quite impressive—a continuous, 

park-like countryside as far as 

the eye could see. However, this town 


20

seemed less animated to me than I would 

have imagined a similar city where the 

seat of government was located. 

Describing Austin as “less animated” than 

he expected a capital city to be was quite an 

understatement, though Schlecht would not 

have realized it. Two years after the German 

passed through town, the U.S. Census for 

1850—the first federal reckoning of Austin’s 

population—counted only 629 residents. 

That was a drop of 26.5 per cent from the 

1840 estimate. 

Small though the town was, the majority of 

Texas voters thought Austin should continue 

as the capital city. By a comfortable two to one 

margin, Austin won over four East Texas 

towns—Tehuacana, Palestine, Huntsville and 

Washington-on-the-Brazos—in an election 

held March 4, 1850 to determine the location 

of the capital for the next twenty years. Two of 

the four communities that had been in the running, 

Tehuacana (the Limestone County town 

came in second with 3,142 votes to Austin’s 

count of 7,679 votes) and Washington-on-the- 

Brazos, would become quasi-ghost towns in 

little more than a decade. 

In addition to a guarantee of its status as the 

seat of government for at least the next two 

decades, Austin benefited from the U.S. military’s 

establishment of a line of forts west of the 

city to protect the frontier from hostile Indians. 

Settlers in the Hill Country still had to keep a 

careful eye out for Comanche raiders, but 

Travis County was fairly safe. Austin finally 

began to grow from village to town. 

“Upwards of 100 residences have been 

completed in the last four months,” the Texas 

State Gazette reported in the spring of 1851. 

“This is, if providence should hold out, agoing 

to surpass eney citty in the west,” 

Austinite William Holt wrote to an acquaintance 

back in Mississippi, his optimism 

stronger than his spelling. 

Two brick kilns were in operation near the 

mouth of Shoal Creek. “There is 50 persons 

engaged in making brick at this time,” Holt 

wrote. “Brick is worth $10 a thousand.” 

When fired, clay from the river turned into a 

sand-colored brick that would “compare 

favorably with the best brick made in the 

South,” as the State Gazette put it. A two-story 

store at Bois d’Arc (Seventh) and Congress 

soon went up, the first brick building in the 

city, coming thirteen years after its founding. 

The commissioners who picked old 

Waterloo as the site of the capital had noted 

the ample supply of limestone in the area, but 

no significant quarrying occurred until 1851, 

when the state embarked on the most ambitious 

building program the young city had 

seen since 1839. The first structure was a 

one-story stone building for the land office, 

but the repository of Texas’ land grant records 

and maps would need a bigger home soon. A 

year later, the state put up a two-story stone 

building for its treasury. The attractive Greek 

Revival structure, in the northeast quadrant 

of the square at the head of Congress Avenue 

intended for the Capitol, cost $35,000. 

For the first time in Texas history, that treasury 

actually held a surplus. One of the conditions 

of Texas’ admittance to the Union was that 

it would pay off the debt it had built up as a 

Republic. In 1850, Texas sold 67 million 

acres—parts of what would become the states of 

New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and 

Wyoming—to the United States to repay that 

debt. Of the $10 million sale price, Texas had $3 

million left over after its debt was retired. 

The state had money but Austin’s remote 

location kept prices high. A barrel of good 

✧ 

The Lone Star flag flew over the Capitol of 

the Republic of Texas until annexation to 

the United States became official. The U.S. 

flag replaced the flag of the Republic and, 

on February 19, 1846, President Anson 

Jones declared “The Republic of Texas is 

no more.” 


CHAPTER 

TWO 

21

✧ 

Above: Mule-drawn stagecoaches carried 

the mail and provided transportation. The 

daily 80-mile trip to San Antonio cost $10. 

Below: “Buaas Hall & Garden, 1869, Pecan 

Street, Austin, Texas.” This drawing by 

Franz Gustav Blau, a draftsman at the 

Land Office, shows the popular public hall. 

There were other entertainment centers but 

when John L. Buaas’ hall opened on June 

21, 1860 with Peters’ Patent Gas Lamps, an 

eight-octave piano, and a “large refreshment 

Saloon,” it quickly became a favorite. 



22 

whiskey cost $10, with what 

one resident called “common 

whiskey” going for $3 a gallon. 

A barrel of Irish potatoes was 

half as much as a barrel of 

whiskey. Bacon went for 18 

cents a pound, meal (ground 

corn) for $1 to $1.25 a pound, 

coffee 16 to 18 cents a pound, 

brown sugar 10 to 15 cents a 

pound. A good horse cost 

$100 while a good mule was 

worth $150. Unimproved land 

was 50 cents to $1.50 an acre, 

improved land from $3.50 to 

$5 an acre. 

The story of a civil engineer 

from San Antonio who earned 

less than the value of a good 

mule for designing a new 

Capitol for Texas and whose efforts came to 

nothing shows that cheaper is not always 

best, at least when it comes to constructing 

public buildings. 

The Legislature of the new state had continued 

to meet in the original wooden Capitol 

built by the late Republic, but a new building 

was badly needed. On November 11, 1851, 

the Senate adopted a resolution asking that 

Governor Peter Hansbrough Bell “obtain from 

some competent architect or master builder, a 

plan of a building for a State Capitol.” The 

state house was to be constructed of brick or 

stone “on as cheap a plan as practicable.” 

Three days later, Francois P. Giraud, a civil 

engineer in San Antonio, received a letter 

from the Governor’s office asking if he might 

be interested in the project. Interested 

indeed, Giraud left for Austin almost immediately. 

Meeting with the Governor, he later 

recalled, he “was told…to make a plan for 

something [in the way of a statehouse] which 

would be a credit to the State.” 

Giraud stayed in Austin about a week, 

“getting the necessary information respecting 

quarries &c,” then returned to San Antonio 

and began drawing plans for “a fire proof 

building…with an iron dome…estimated to 

cost $355,000.” 

The engineer apparently was so busy with 

his work that he neglected to keep the 

Governor up to date on his progress. On 

December 20, Executive Department secretary 

Charles A. Harrison wrote Giraud that 

“Some of our Honorable Senators are becoming 

fidgetty [sic] about the plan and estimate 

for the State Capitol. I therefore told His 

Excellency that I would write to you by this 

Evening’s Mail on the subject.” Harrison, who 

must have met Giraud’s family when he came 

to Austin to talk with the Governor, added, “I 

hope Mrs. Giraud and family as well as yourself 

enjoy good health. I request you to present 

my best remembrances.” 

Five days into the new year, on January 5, 

1852, Harrison wrote Giraud somewhat less 

cordially that “the Senate are [sic] very anxious 

to obtain as soon as possible the plan and 

Estimates for the Erection of the State Capitol. 

Please answer this by return mail and oblige.” 

Giraud delivered his drawings three days 

later, but the “fidgetty” Senate soon decided it 

did not like Giraud’s vision of a new Capitol. 

And Giraud definitely did not like the Senate’s 

reaction to his $350 bill for services rendered. 

The body appropriated only $100 in payment. 

A year later, in a petition arguing for 

payment of the rest of his fee, he wrote, “The 

Senate appropriated…$100 for my plan of a 

building costing $355,000 and then voted 

$500 for the plan of a building which was to 

cost only $100,000.” Giraud’s claim went to 

the Senate Finance Committee, which forwarded 

it to the Select Committee, which 

declined to pay the bill. 

The San Antonio engineer and the State of 

Texas both would have been better off if the 

Senate had opted for Giraud’s plan. As Giraud 

had pointed out in his memorial, as petitions

were called, Texas spent five times as much 

money to buy plans for a cheaper building. 

Those drawings were made by John Brandon, 

a carpenter. Even Brandon later said he was 

paid $500 for a $60 plan. 

As construction proceeded, Brandon’s 

plan, which had taken him only three days 

and three nights to complete, was modified as 

corners were cut. Allegations later arose that 

some of the money saved in the construction 

of the Capitol did not make it back to the 

state treasury, but nothing ever came of a legislative 

investigation. 

A young man named Wende, a recent 

immigrant from Germany, who was a journeyman 

bricklayer and stonemason, was paid 

$50 a month by the contractor building the 

new Capitol. 

“The building started in the Spring of last 

year and, with the auxiliary buildings, which 

are also of stone, will take until Easter of this 

year,” Wende’s wife Agnes wrote her cousin in 

1854. “Much is spent on it because it is meant 

to be the same as in Berlin the ‘Session’ 

Building.… I believe Austin will become, in 

time, a Posen and Berlin.” 

But when it was completed at a final cost 

of $150,000, the Texas Capitol stood not as a 

monument to the state but as an example of 

what can come out of a committee: a Greek 

Revival structure lacking any classical grace. 

One writer later said the Capitol, with a dome 

too small for the three-story building it sat 

on, looked like “a corn-crib with the half of a 

large watermelon on top of it.” 

The new structure did have a positive effect 

on the city where it stood: With its construction 

on the hill first set aside for a capitol in 

1839, the focus of the city shifted from Pecan 

(Sixth) and Congress farther north to the head 

of the Avenue. That in turn gave impetus for 

growth to the north of the Capitol. Though 

poorly built, the limestone state house nevertheless 

was the biggest building in Austin and 

one of the largest in the state. As buildings of 

masonry and brick went up, Austin was 

beginning to look like a city. 

With the new Capitol, the Texas State 

Times clearly had high hopes for Congress 

Avenue but little faith in the city’s government, 

as it expressed on November 18, 1854: 

We do not think there can be found in 

any State Capitol [sic] in the Union a 

more beautiful Street than Congress 

Avenue, or rather what, with an inconsiderable 

outlay, might be made one of 

the most lovely thoroughfares in the 

world; and yet, if something is not done, 

it will soon be little better than a hogwallow. 

The Mayor and corporation will 

do nothing, and every rain, such as we 

were visited with last week, renders matters 

worse, which will ultimately depreciate 

the value of property, while the 

inconsiderable sum of $2,000, paid by 

parties owning lots on each side of the 

street is all that is required. Will not 

some enterprising citizen of leisure interest 

himself in this matter? We had hoped 

the Grand Jury at its last session would 

have pronounced our corporate authorities 

a nuisance, but they did not do it. 

While the Texas State Times railed about 

Austin’s city government, the state was proceeding 

with plans to build a new house for 

its governor. On February 11, 1854, the 

Legislature had approved the expenditure of 

$17,000 (including $2,300 for furnishings) 

for “a suitable residence and out-buildings for 

the executive.” 

The 1839 “President’s House” (Mirabeau B. 

Lamar had been the only official occupant it 

✧ 

A view of the Governor’s Mansion taken 

from the Capitol shows only a few homes 

and buildings. Most of the city’s 

development lay to the north of the Capitol. 


CHAPTER 

TWO 

23

✧ 

Above: Abner Cook designed the elegant 

Greek Revival Governor’s Mansion. On June 

15, 1856, Elisha M. Pease became the first 

Governor to occupy the official residence. 

Below: The imposing German Romanesque 

limestone and brick Land Office, designed by 

Conrad Stremme, a Land Office draftsman, 

is the first building in Austin to be designed 

by a trained architect. 


ever had) burned in 1847. Even before 

its demise, later Presidents of the Republic 

had not deigned to live in it. The state’s first 

three Governors had stayed with supporters 

or in hotels. 

Abner Cook, who came to Austin the year 

it was surveyed and designed and built many 

of its houses and buildings, got the contract 

for the two-story brick Greek Revival 

Governor’s Mansion, which was completed in 

the spring of 1856. Governor Elisha M. Pease 

moved into the elegant house just southwest 

of the Capitol on June 15. 

The Governor could look out his window 

and watch the progress on the state’s new Land 

Office building. The building was designed by 

Conrad Stremme, a land office draftsman who 

had been an architectural professor in 

Germany before immigrating to Texas in 1849. 

The limestone and brick German Romanesque 

structure, reminiscent of a castle on the Rhine, 

had the distinction of being the first Austin 

building planned by a trained architect. Built at 

a cost of $40,000, the new fireproof Land 

Office on the southeast corner of the Capitol 

grounds was ready for occupancy in 1857. 

The new state also earmarked money to benefit 

citizens with mental or physical disabilities. 

The first state facility south of the Colorado was 

opened in 1857 with the construction of twostory 

wooden buildings for what was then called 

the Asylum for the Deaf. Three miles north of the 

Capitol, work on the State Lunatic Asylum (now 

known as the Austin State Hospital) was begun. 

Larger than the Capitol, the three-and-a-half 

story masonry structure would be the biggest 

building in Austin for three decades. Seven 

blocks northeast of the Capitol, construction 

began on the Asylum for the Blind. In that era, 

the word “asylum” carried its original connotation 

as a place of refuge and safety. 

The state also provided a place for its dead. 

Though it would not receive a clear title for 

nearly thirty years, the state bought eighteen 

acres east of town for use as a cemetery. The 

first burial on the property was Texas hero 

Edward Burleson, the man who had founded 

Waterloo. He had died the day after 

Christmas in 1851. 

Recalling his first visit to Austin in 1858, 

J. H. McLean later wrote: 

Austin then was a string town fronted 

by the old capitol, and extending down 

the avenue two or three blocks. The 

Land Office had just been completed 

and was the most imposing and attractive 

building I had ever seen, and I presume 

overshadowed any building in the 

State at that time. There was no architectural 

display about the old capitol, a 

plain, massive stone structure. 

Visitors and locals alike might disdain the 

architecturally mundane state house, but a 

lot of history would be made inside its limestone 

walls. 


24

“THERE WILL BE CIVIL WAR 

RIGHT HERE” 

The old man sat alone in the basement of the Capitol at the head of Congress Avenue, whittling 

on a piece of pine as he leaned back in his chair. 

Gathered above in the House of Representatives chamber were 131 men embarked on a course 

of action that the big man with the knife strongly believed, as he later wrote, would “bring civil 

strife and bloodshed” to his beloved Texas. 

Six weeks earlier, citing as their authority the Constitution of the nation they had lost faith in, 

these men, sitting in convention, had voted to secede from the United States. The electorate of 

Texas ratified their action three weeks later. 

Now it was Saturday, March 16, 1861. The day before, convention members and all but two 

state officials, Governor Houston and Secretary of State E. W. Cave, had taken an oath of allegiance 

to the newly created Confederate States of America. 

The convention reconvened at noon on Saturday. The convention secretary, R. P. Brownrigg, 

stood before the assemblage and the spectators in the gallery and called out, “Sam Houston!” 

If the man in the basement heard his name, he gave no sign of it. He shaved another piece of 

wood off the stick in his leathery hands. 

“Sam Houston!” came the third and final call. 

The first President of the Republic of Texas, and following annexation to the United States, one 

of its two Senators for thirteen years, Houston had become Texas’ governor in 1859. He had kept 

✧ 

Before the Civil War, the economy of the 

eastern third of Texas—as well as most of 

the states of the South—was based on 

agriculture and slave labor. 


CHAPTER 

THREE 

25

✧ 

Below: A State of Texas Historical Marker 

shows the original site of Anderson’s Mill, 

west of Austin. 


Bottom: The mill, built in 1863 on Cypress 

Creek by Thomas Anderson, manufactured 

gunpowder for the Confederate Army. In 

more peaceful times the mill ground grain 

for farmers in the vicinity. 


the dream of an independent Texas alive 

by defeating Santa Anna at San Jacinto. But 

after the election of Abraham Lincoln as 

President of the United States in 1860, Sam 

Houston had not been able to head off Texas’ 

rush to secession. 

Reconvening at three o’clock that afternoon, 

in light of Houston “having failed to 

come forward and take the oath of office as 

prescribed by this Convention,” the convention 

voted 127-4 in favor of a resolution 

vacating the office of Governor. Lieutenant 

Governor Edward Clark, who had taken the 

Confederate oath, would be sworn in as 

Governor at noon the following Monday, 

March 18. 

Houston’s refusal to swear an oath of allegiance 

to the Confederacy marked the climax 

in Texas to years of political contention 

between the slave-holding states and the 

North. The 1861 secession convention in 

Austin was the most momentous event in the 

twenty-one-year history of the capital city, 

readily eclipsing the convention vote in 1845 

to accept annexation in the United States. 

Fed up with the federal government’s 

inability to stop Indian raiding on the state’s 

frontier, and deeply concerned that Northern 

Republicans would abolish slavery, many 

Texans fell in with the Southern sentiment 

that separation from the Union was the 

only solution. Still, a substantial minority, 

particularly in Travis County and in the 

German settlements of the Hill Country, 

opposed secession. 

One Austin woman, in a letter to Charles 

S. Taylor, said she feared the worst as the conflict 

heated to the boiling point: 

My Dear Uncle: 

…I think the people, at least some of 

them, have lost their reason. They are 

determined to have a convention, if 

they can’t make the Gov. call a session 

of the legislature, they have set the 8 of 

Jan. to meet, and if they keep on the 

way they are going on now there will be 

civil war right here in Austin. I never 

saw so much excitement politically in 

my life…. 

Affectionately, 

E. [Eugenia] Barret 

Convening January 28, 1861, the convention 

passed an ordinance of secession on 

February 1. The document declaring Texas’ 

admission to the union “repealed and 

annulled” would go into effect “on or after” 

March 2, subject to ratification by the people 

of Texas. The first signature beneath that of 

convention president Oran M. Roberts was 

Edwin Waller’s, the only signer of the document 

who also had signed Texas’ 1836 declaration 

of independence from Mexico. 

If the voters of Travis County had had their 

say, however, Texas would have stayed in the 

Union. The county ballot count was 704 to 

450 against secession, but of 60,826 votes tallied 

statewide on February 23, 1861, 46,129 

were for secession and only 14,697 against 

leaving the Union. Of 122 organized Texas 

counties reporting vote totals, only eighteen 

counties voted against secession. 

The Union was falling apart. Throughout the 

Southern states similar conventions were taking 

place. Newly appointed Confederate officials 

seized Federal property within the seceding 

states, and hastily-raised volunteer companies 

drilled and paraded. 

March 2, 1861 was the twenty-fifth 

anniversary of Texas’ declaration of independence 

from Mexico. It also was Sam Houston’s 

68th birthday. He knew he had to acknowl- 


26

edge the convention’s action and the people’s 

vote, even though turnout had been light 

across the state, but he was not going to do it 

on March 2. Two days later, on March 4, 

Houston finally issued a lukewarm petition 

declaring that “a large majority of the 

votes…of the said Election are in favor 

of ‘Secession’.” 

The secession convention reconvened in 

Austin on March 5 and voted 109-2 to make 

Texas a state in the Confederate States of 

America. Houston proclaimed the action illegal, 

but the hero of San Jacinto had little 

political clout left. 

Still, the old general’s personal conviction 

that secession would be a disaster for Texas 

never waned. “The voice of Sam Houston 

rang through the land like an inspired 

prophet, but was drowned in the whirlwind 

that heralded the impending war,” one 

Austinite who had sided with Houston later 

recalled. At one point shortly after his ouster, 

an enraged Houston may have decided to kill 

the man who had replaced him as governor. 

Buried in a long-forgotten 1890 profile of 

Matthew Addison Taylor, an Austin doctor 

who had been Houston’s family physician, is 

an account of an incident that does not seem 

out of character for Houston: 

Houston…armed himself and came 

down town. Before going to the capitol, 

he called upon his friend [Dr. Taylor]. 

Dr. Taylor observed an unusual excitement 

in his voice and manner, and 

catching hold of his arm, exclaimed: 

“Governor, you are sick, sit down; what 

is the matter?” The Governor could 

scarcely speak for emotion, or anger; 

but finally said: “They have kicked me 

out; they are mad, and will live, some of 

them, to rue this day.” Dr. Taylor talked 

calmly to him, reasoned with him, and 

finally allayed his excitement. 

[Houston] arose to leave, and as he did 

so he took the Doctor’s hand in his and 

said: “Doctor, I owe you much…. I 

came here on my way to the capitol, 

fully determined to kill Clarke [sic].” 

Houston opened his coat and showed 

Taylor that he was carrying two pistols. He 

left the weapons in Taylor’s office and the 

doctor walked with him to the Governor’s 

office, where Clark received him graciously. 

Secessionist sentiment in Texas and the 

South was a raging prairie fire fanned by a 

strong wind of overconfidence and a passionate 

dislike of the federal system. Sleepy 

Austin—still a town of only 3,500 residents 

despite its status as state capital—was the 

focal point of the crisis in Texas. 

No matter the earlier reluctance of 

a majority of Austin and Travis County 

voters, once the war was under way, most 

citizens pitched in for the South. Military 

units organized in Austin included the 

Austin City Light Artillery, Austin City Light 

Infantry, Austin Grays, Tom Green Rifles, and 

Travis Rifles. 

Austin women formed the Ladies’ Needle 

Battalion to sew uniforms. The Ladies Aid 

Society joined in the effort and women in the 

Austin Collegiate Female Institute did their part 

by knitting socks. The Reverend B. J. Smith, 

principal of the institute, ordained that each 

young lady attending the school was responsible 

for making six pairs of woolen socks. 

The new state government’s military board 

quickly established two factories in Austin for 

production of paper cartridges and percussion 

caps. On Waller Creek, near its juncture 

with the Colorado, a foundry for the forging 

of cannon went into operation. 

In December 1862 it looked as if the war 

might reach Austin. Union forces had taken 

Galveston. General John Bankhead Magruder 

rushed to Austin to oversee fortification of the 

city against possible federal invasion. A hill 

north of town and another elevation three 

miles to the south overlooking the road to San 

Antonio were selected as points for construction 

of earthworks. 

Halfway across the state at the Confederate 

fortifications at Sabine Pass, near Beaumont, 

Major Julius G. Kellersberger, a Swiss engineer, 

had just issued passes for the Christmas holiday 

to the four officers under his command 

when he received a letter from headquarters: 

…You will start immediately to Austin 

with ten to twenty of your men. In La 

✧ 

John Bankhead Magruder, a West Point 

trained veteran of the Mexican War, 

resigned his commission in 1861 to join the 

Confederate Army. In December 1862, 

Magruder rushed to Austin to defend the 

city against an attack that never came. In 

January 1863, his decisive action against 

Federal troops at Galveston shielded Texas 

from occupation during the war. 


CHAPTER 

THREE 

27

✧ 

Above: The Confederate flag (1861-1865) 

was the fifth of the Six Flags of Texas. 

Below: No Union shell ever fell on Austin, 

but the Civil War had a devastating impact 

on the capital city. Even though few 

engagements were fought on Texas soil, some 

of the smoke, noise, chaos, and horror of 

Civil War battles is suggested in this image 

depicting the Battle of Missionary Ridge. 

ETCHINGS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 

Grange you will meet 500 negroes with 

their overseer, equipment and cooking 

gear, who have been put under your 

command. You will proceed by shortest 

way there, and begin immediately to 

fortify the place in order to protect 

property and houses in the event they 

should fall in the line of fire. 

Kellersberger, his officers, and slaves 

arrived in Austin on a cold Sunday night. 

“People stared at us very curiously and our 

arrival caused a great deal of anxiety,” the 

engineer later recalled. “My quarters were in 

an old rock house, where my men had to 

paste newspapers over the windows to keep 

out the cold…. The city itself lay at the foot of 

hilly terrain, and it was possible to see from 

one fortification to another and I became 

quite curious myself just how this whole 

thing would turn out.” 

Under Kellersberger’s supervision, the slaves 

dug a 200-foot long trench and put up earthworks 

at the site south of town. At the north 

location, to the dismay of many Austinites, they 

cut down an ancient stand of oaks preparatory 

to construction of defensive works. 

The Federals did not hold Galveston long 

and no Union artillery shell ever fell on Texas’ 

capital, but the Civil War had a devastating 

impact on the city. 

Many of the men who marched off to join 

the fight never returned. An exact figure will 

never be known, but based on an estimated 

Confederate casualty rate of 28 percent, some 

28,000 Texans died in the war. Many soldiers 

who did make it back to Austin arrived forever 

scarred, either physically or mentally, by 

the conflict. 

One of those men was Lieutenant Albert J. 

Jernigan. He joined Company G, 6th Texas 

Infantry in Austin in October 1861. At the 

Battle of Missionary Ridge, a chunk of shrapnel 

shattered his right arm. Surgeons amputated 

the limb six inches below the shoulder 

and later administered repeated doses of 

nitric acid to burn away infected flesh left 

behind after the amputation. Jernigan nearly 

died, but the wound finally began to heal and 

he slowly regained strength. 

“I found my company, originally consisting 

of eighty men, reduced to a little squad of 

thirteen,” he later wrote his mother. “What a 

sad commentary on war! I made application 

for a furlough, which was granted, and…with 

a large package of letters from soldiers to their 

friends in Texas I bid adieu to my old comrades 

in arms, many of whom I have never 

seen since, for they ‘Sleep the sleep that 

knows no waking.’” 

By the time Jernigan got home, arriving via 

stagecoach from Brenham, the war was over. 

One hundred miles east of Austin, 

Brenham was the western terminus for the 

Houston and Texas Central, a railroad line 

chartered on September 1, 1856. The investment 

capital it would have taken to extend 

the tracks to Austin, which would give it a 

connection to Galveston and maritime trade, 

dried up during the contentious and uncertain 

days before the war. 

By war’s end, only two of the ten railroads 

in Texas at the beginning of the conflict still 

were in operation. The Houston and Texas 

Central was one of those lines, but just barely. 

Given the South’s shattered economy after 

the war, no capitalists were in a hurry to risk 

their money on extending the line westward 

to Austin. 

Sam Houston, who died in Huntsville on 

July 26, 1863, did not live to see the outcome 

of the war he had warned against, but he had 

been right. Seccession was a disaster for Texas 

and for Austin. 


28

What followed was a period of virtual 

anarchy. Governor Pendleton Murrah and 

other Confederate state officials, fearing prosecution, 

rode south to Mexico. Returning 

Confederate soldiers and townspeople alike 

looted government facilities, carrying off 

everything from coffee to gunpowder. Those 

crimes and others went uninvestigated. 

The most flagrant example of the breakdown 

of order happened on June 11, 1865. 

On that moonless Sunday night, thirty to 

forty armed men burglarized the State 

Treasury. Their efforts to peel open several 

safes in the two-story building made a lot 

of noise and the citizenry quickly realized 

what was happening. Soon, the bell atop 

the First Baptist Church rang out in alarm. 

Armed volunteers under recently returned 

Confederate Captain George R. Freeman 

rushed to the scene. Realizing they were out 

of time and luck, the thieves fled, escaping 

with about $17,000 in coin. They left nearly 

$3 million behind, though most of it was 

in already worthless Confederate bills or 

certificates and bonds that would have been 

difficult to cash, at least in Texas. Freeman 

suffered a minor wound in a brief gunfight 

with the gang and one of the burglars 

was mortally wounded. No one was ever 

charged with the break-in and the money 

never was recovered. 

Blue-coated soldiers did not reach Austin 

until July 25, 1865, nearly four months after 

the end of the war. Additional soldiers followed 

and, for a time, several thousand 

Union troops occupied the capital city. Rows 

of white canvas tents went up on the Capitol 

grounds and along Shoal Creek near Seider’s 

Springs. Officers took up quarters in the 

Governor’s Mansion and at the Blind Asylum 

while doctors established a hospital in 

Woodlawn, former Governor Pease’s mansion 

west of the city. An open log stockade locals 

soon began calling the “Bull Pen,” located 

near Shoal Creek where West Sixth Street 

now crosses it, was constructed to contain 

those arrested by the military. 

By the end of the decade Austin had made 

no great strides in its development as a city, 

other than achieving some degree of stability, 

at least compared to the war years and the 

chaotic first few months after the fighting 

ended. Spending by the occupying troops 

had perked up the economy and goods and 

services were more generally available. Nearly 

a thousand residents had moved to town 

since 1860, but census takers still 

found only 4,448 people living 

there in 1870. 

One of those new residents was 

Tom Tolman, a tall young man from 

Maine, late of the Sixth U.S. 

Cavalry. He and the other members 

of his company had marched up 

Congress in 1866 to the icy stares of 

most Austinites. 

Not long after arriving in the 

capital city, Lieutenant Tolman 

came down with “a fever,” as most 

contagious diseases were referred 

to at the time. Written off as mori- 

✧ 

Above: An 1866 photograph shows an 

encampment of Union cavalry troops north 

of the Capitol. The lone mount may be the 

sole survivor of a storm off Cape Hatteras 

as the ship sailed from New York to New 

Orleans. Troops reached Austin November 

29, 1865 and marched through the city in 

early December. 

Below: A view looking north from the Capitol 

shows Austin still was only partially 

developed. Within a decade after the end of 

the war, a construction boom greatly increased 

the number of businesses and buildings. 


CHAPTER 

THREE 

29

✧ 

Above: Austin was occupied by Federal 

troops from July 1865 until 1870. Shown 

in a photograph dated July 1869 is the 

headquarters for the Fifth Military District. 

In 1871, the Raymond House occupied 

the building. 

Right: Bullock’s Hotel, located on Congress 

Avenue between Pecan (Sixth ) and Bois 

d’Arc (Seventh) streets, was an important 

meeting place for early settlers. Notice the 

tall wooden flagpole and the iron bridges 

over the gutters. 

Below: The broad, unpaved Congress Avenue 

shows deep ruts from buggies and wagons. In 

this photograph looking north toward the 

Capitol, the San Marcos Hotel and 

Sampson-Henricks are on the left. The 

Avenue Hotel is in mid-distance on the right. 



30 

bund by a military doctor, Tolman 

lay tossing on a cot in the medical 

tent, his men waiting for him to die. 

Word reached an Austin widow, 

Eva Stern Barrett, that the young 

officer was gravely ill and expected 

to die. Mrs. Barrett had her former 

slave hitch her horse to her buggy 

and drive her out to the Army camp. 

Years later, one of Mrs. Barrett’s 

descendants reconstructed the conversation 

that occurred when she reached 

the military tent city. 

“What can I do for you, 

madam?” the Union colonel 

asked. 

“I came to get that sick officer,” 

she replied. 

“Why, madam—” the colonel 

began. 

“They tell me he can’t live, so 

he’s not worth much to you. 

Anyway I’ll take him and see 

what I can do for him. I’m a 

good nurse.” 

Mrs. Barrett succeeded in 

nursing Tolman back to health. 

Helping out, though reluctant at 

first, since Tolman was a Northerner, was Mrs. 

Barrett’s daughter, Corinne. When Tolman was 

strong enough to sit in a chair, Corinne read to 

him. Soon their conversation moved from politics 

to more casual discussions. When Tolman 

was up to it, they went riding together. 

Corrine’s abiding disdain of Yankees was 

beginning to wane. 

On Christmas Eve, the fully recovered and 

grateful Lieutenant Tolman and several enlisted 

“volunteers” rode west of town in a government 

wagon and returned with a large 

mountain cedar they then delivered to the 

Barrett residence. After the tree was decorated, 

the lieutenant and Corinne went for 

another of their now quite frequent rides. At 

Mount Bonnell, Tolman asked her to marry 

him and she said yes. 

As the day progressed, Austin’s drinking 

establishments filled with blue-coated soldiers 

and many of their former foes. 

Inhibitions and sectional resentments lowered 

along with the contents of the glasses 

and bottles in their hands. A degree of conviviality 

developed between them. After all, it 

was Christmas, and the killing was over. 

At the Capitol that afternoon, the regimental 

band of the Sixth assembled to present a 

concert for the citizenry. Near the end of their 

performance, which up to that point had 

been well-received by the war-weary townspeople 

who had turned out for the event, the 

band began playing “Yankee Doodle.” The 

soldiers in the crowd cheered, but the civilians 

were loud in their silence. Then the 

bandleader passed out new music to his 

musicians. When he raised his baton, the 

band struck up with “Dixie.”

“WE ARE BECOMING ACCUSTOMED 

TO THE RAILROAD WHISTLE” 

All over town, they climbed hills and stood on rooftops, looking east. 

On the hill where St. David’s Church still stands, twenty-five to thirty people gathered in anticipation 

of getting the first glimpse of something they had never seen before: a train. 

Most of them went away disappointed. 

The train was late, and when rain started falling, people began heading home. 

Late on Christmas Day, 1871, the Houston and Texas Central work train finally arrived in 

Austin. Three days later, the first passenger train pulled into the Capital City. 

“Cheer after cheer in deafening shouts arose from the assembled throng until the train cars 

swept up in all their majesty and stood ready to deliver the freight of 1,000 human beings, and the 

pealing cannon told it far and near that ‘hope deferred’ was at least realized,” the Austin Statesman 

reported on December 30. 

The Austin Brass Band began playing on the Capitol steps at 8 p.m. and Austinites and their 

guests danced all night. At midnight they paused for supper, then continued cutting the rug until 

5 a.m. 

Austin had become only the third major city in Texas with rail service. A new arrival to the state 

could now get off the ship at Galveston, get on a train a few blocks from the wharves, and ride the 

✧ 

The Civil War derailed Austin’s plans to be 

served by a railroad. Not until December 

26, 1871 did the Houston and Texas 

Central reach the capital city. The H & TC 

greatly enlarged Austin’s trade center. Seen 

here is the crew on the run from Hemphill 

to Austin, ca. 1900. 


CHAPTER 

FOUR 

31

✧ 

Peck’s Corner at East Pecan (Sixth) and 

Brazos Streets was a popular place for 

parties and balls and also served as 

headquarters for an Austin volunteer firefighting 

company. St. David’s Episcopal 

Church can be seen in the background. 


rails all the way to the center of the state via 

Houston, Hempstead, and Brenham. 

“We are becoming accustomed to the railroad 

whistle,” former governor Elisha Pease 

wrote his daughter Julia on January 14, 1872. 

“It is the first thing we hear in the morning and 

the last at night. The passenger train leaves at 

5 in the morning and comes in about 11 at 

night. I can perceive that the road has added 

largely to the number of visitors to our town.” 

Pease’s perception was quite accurate. 

Before the arrival of the railroad, the sole 

engine of Austin’s economy—other than its 

merchants and their customer base of local residents—was 

its status as state capital. When it 

became the westernmost point of rail service in 

Texas, it also became a regional trade center. 

Wagons with cotton, pecans, wool, and hides 

rolled into Austin from Fredericksburg, San 

Antonio, and as far away as Coleman. 

“Pecan Street, east of the Avenue, is 

becoming quite a place for business, some 

five or six large stone stores have been put up 

this summer, and as many similar stores have 

been put up on the Avenue,” Pease wrote in 

another letter to his daughter. “More dwelling 

houses are being erected in every part of the 

city, more rapidly than ever before.” 

For years, perceptive Austinites like Pease 

had realized that Austin needed better transportation. 

Traveling from Austin to Houston 

by stagecoach took three days in good weather. 

In wet weather, the trip could last five or 

six days. Freight took longer and was expensive, 

sometimes $6 per hundred pounds. 

Hopeful of improvement, Pease during his 

terms as governor had signed numerous railroad 

charters—some of them for companies 

which envisioned Austin as a destination— 

but none had ever materialized. Even Stephen 

F. Austin, nearly four decades before the city 

which would bear his name got rail service, 

had written that “Texas is susceptible of great 

internal improvements by rail, turnpike and 

cannalling.” But imagination and enthusiasm 

in antebellum Texas always exceeded available 

capital. Until well after the Civil War, 

most of Texas’ railroads existed on paper only. 

“Cannalling,” of course, would be predicated 

on navigable rivers. Austin and other 

early Texans had great hopes for the Brazos 

and Colorado and other rivers, but reality 

never equalled expectation. Not that a fair 

amount of effort did not go into turning the 

state capital into a river port. 

Two factors made river navigation to and 

from Austin a problem: First, though the river 

was deep enough most of the time to float 

a shallow draft boat, during dry spells the 

river would get too low. Second, the Colorado 

near its mouth was blocked by a deep and 

long log raft. 

Several efforts had been mounted over the 

years to remove the raft but none succeeded. 

Finally, in March 1854, the Kate Ward, which 

had been fitted for work as a snag boat, cut a 

channel to circumvent the raft. 

For six years, steamboats plied the 

Colorado as far upstream as Bastrop and occasionally 

all the way to Austin. More often, 

cargo out of Austin went downstream to 

Bastrop by flatboat, with Austin-bound goods 

returning the same way. 

In 1851, Austin resident William Holt 

wrote an acquaintance in Mississippi about 

the expected arrival of a steamboat, probably 

the Colorado Ranger: 

She is now within five miles of Austin. 

She will be in this place this evening. I 

think I see the smoke of her chimneys 


32

just below Stonees ferry which is just 

two miles. She left Bare Strop [Bastrop] 

Thirsday and yesterday at 10 o’clock 

she was in 12 miles of this place…. 

There are 25 fine cannon taken from 

the arsnol this morning and placed on 

the banks of the Colarada to give the 

arrival of the boat a Texas salute. 

Floating timber had clogged the river again 

by 1860. Before anything could be done 

about it, the Civil War reordered priorities. 

In 1873, another try was made to cut a 

channel around the log raft, but it was not 

successful. By that time, Texans were beginning 

to realize that railroads afforded more 

practicable transportation. 

The fickleness of the untamed river also 

kept Austin largely confined to the north side 

of the stream. To cross the river, a person had 

to walk or ride across at one of the hard rock 

fords or use one of two ferries. In the 1850s, 

a fully-loaded wagon and team could be carried 

across for one dollar. A man with a horse 

had to pay ten cents to cross, five cents if he 

was afoot. Cattle cost a nickel a head, while 

sheep, hogs or goats cost two-and-a-half cents 

to cross. 

The first effort at infrastructure came 

in 1869, with construction of a pontoon 

bridge, an engineering project consisting 

of twenty-one boats overlaid with oak planking 

and secured by two heavy iron chains. 

The English-made iron, however, was not 

equal to a flood in October 1870. The bridge 

washed away. 

“Let our citizens now move in the matter 

of a bridge,” the Daily State Journal urged a 

few days later. “We want a structure that will 

be solid, permanent and useful at all times— 

not a floating, bobbing concern, that must be 

removed after every rain, or run the risk of 

being swept to Labrador.” 

Until 1872, Austin’s status as the state capital 

was as uncertain in duration as anything 

built in the floodplain of the Colorado. But in 

an election held November 5-8 (voters had to 

be given ample time for travel to the polls), 

63,377 Texans agreed that Austin should be 

the permanent seat of government. Houston 

got 35,143 votes while 12,776 citizens cast 

their ballot for Waco. One hundred one other 

voters wrote in their preference for various 

other cities, including 10 who thought Bryan 

should be the capital. Four years later, the 

Constitution of 1876 made Austin’s status as 

the seat of government part of the state’s 

organic law. 

The railroad brought an economic boom 

and the electorate let Austin keep the seat of 

government, but Reconstruction politics in 

the early 1870s verged on escalating from 

heated rhetoric to bloodshed. Austin was a 

drought-dried cedar brake needing only a 

spark to explode into flames. In January 

1874, a semicolon nearly started another civil 

war in Texas. 

✧ 

Top: For a time the 1869 Congress Avenue 

pontoon bridge—the first bridge to span 

the Colorado River at Austin—seemed to 

answer the need for a safe, economical 

crossing. In less than a year, a flood 

washed the bridge away. 

Above: Austin was becoming a city of stone 

and brick structures. 


CHAPTER 

FOUR 

33

✧ 

Below: By the time Austin’s second railroad, the 

International and Great Northern, reached the 

capital city on January 17, 1877, there were 

many ways to get from here to there. A muledrawn 

streetcar, stagecoaches, and buggies are 

shown with an I&GN train. 

Bottom: Mud from rains and numerous 

small underground springs along with scars 

from horses’ hooves, wheel ruts from 

wagons and stagecoaches—and trail herds 

of Longhorn cattle—kept the unpaved 

Congress Avenue churned up. Trees and iron 

footbridges served a practical purpose, 

offering some protection for pedestrians. 


Four years earlier, in November 1869, 

Republican Edmond J. Davis had been elected 

governor. During the Civil War he had 

served as a Union officer, commanding federal 

troops in action against friends and relatives 

of many of those who for obvious reasons 

voted against him. Many Texans viewed 

Davis as a carpetbagger, even though the 

Florida native and former judge had lived in 

Texas since 1848. 

As governor, Davis declared martial law on 

several occasions and controlled a newly-created 

state police force that was not popular 

with the people. Neither were most of his 

other policies. There had been talk of 

impeachment. 

But by a two to one margin, Davis was 

voted out of office on December 2, 1873. The 

new governor would be a Democrat, Richard 

Coke. Thirty-four days later, on January 5, 

1874, the Texas Supreme Court, on a 

trumped up technicality that had to do 

with the placement of a semicolon in the 

state election statute, ruled the election 

unconstitutional. 

Based on this decision, Davis declared that 

he would not vacate the office. Coke, in turn, 

said he would not be denied the governorship. 

From January 5 until January 19, like a 

runaway wagon hanging with two wheels off 

the edge of a cliff, Austin verged on civil 

insurrection. The Capitol became an armed 

camp as two different sets of party partisans, 

legislators and elected officials tried to keep 

or gain control of the building. 

A forgotten minor hero in the matter was 

A. H. “Hamp” Cox, storekeeper at the State 

Arsenal. He was a Davis man, but he was 

brave. During the noon hour on Friday, 

January 16, twenty armed men, members of 

the Travis Rifles—having turned out in support 

of the Coke camp—showed up outside 

the weapons storehouse west of the Capitol. 

Lieutenant A. S. Roberts demanded the keys 

to the arsenal. 

The storekeeper, who had only eight men 

to defend the arsenal, described what 

happened next in a report he wrote three 

days later: 

I refused to deliver up the keys…. Mayor 

[T. B.] Wheeler and I then had considerable 

talk, in which he in a quiet and gentlemanly 

manner urged the advisability in 

the interest of public peace and good order 

of my surrendering the arsenal…. I respectfully 

declined in consideration of my duties 

as a public bonded state officer. Roberts 

about this time drew out his watch stating 

that he would give me just five minutes to 

decide and if I didn’t give him the keys… 

he would kill the last man of us. 

Cox’s family lived adjacent to the arsenal 

and he asked for time to get them out of the 

line of fire. Chivalrously, the lieutenant of the 

Travis Rifles agreed. 

Bloodshed was averted by the efforts of 

Mayor Wheeler and the arrival of an armed 


34

pro-Davis party under Captain A. C. Hill. The 

Travis Rifles retreated, but later that afternoon 

the Coke men returned with reinforcements. 

This time Cox was at the arsenal alone and 

the men forced their way in and collected all 

the weapons. 

The arsenal crisis ended when Governorelect 

Coke ordered that the seized weapons 

be returned. Still playing by the rules, Cox 

reported that he “refused to receive anything 

officially which they had forcibly taken away.” 

The Coke men left the weapons at the arsenal 

anyway. When President U. S. Grant turned 

down Davis’ telegraphed request for Federal 

troops, the governor finally agreed to step 

down from office. The only shooting that 

occurred was the 102-gun salute fired on the 

Capitol grounds after Coke’s inauguration. 

Had fighting erupted between the two 

factions, the President would have sent in 

troops and placed Texas back under military 

government. But with the peaceful, if tense, 

resolution of the matter, the era of 

Reconstruction was over in Texas. Under the 

Coke administration, the political climate 

cooled to a normal level of contentiousness 

and Austinites returned their attention to 

everyday life and business. 

Four years after Austin got its rail connection, 

another form of public transportation 

became available on January 5, 1875: Muledrawn 

streetcars. On the first streetcar’s inaugural 

run, it overturned at Eleventh and 

Congress Avenue, spilling company officials 

into the mud. A ride on the two-mile line, 

which extended from Lavaca north of the 

Capitol to the train station, cost a nickel. 

In 1873, the city council had granted a 

franchise to a company to provide Austin 

with gas. The gas was manufactured through 

a coal-firing process, which made it expensive—$5 

per thousand cubic feet. By 1878, 

the city had 44 gas streetlights. 

Though Austin had the urban amenities of 

gas lighting, rail service and streetcars, the 

only way to move large numbers of livestock 

was for men on horses to herd them. Shortly 

after the Civil War, Texans began to exploit a 

Northern taste for beef by driving longhorn 

cattle—wild descendants of stock brought to 

Texas by the Spanish—north to railheads in 

Kansas for shipment to markets in Kansas City 

and Chicago. From processing plants in those 

cities, Texas beef went by rail to the northeast. 

By the mid-1870s, thousands of head of 

cattle raised dust on the eastern edge of 

Austin along what came to be called the 

Chisholm Trail. As many as four or five 

droves a day passed through the city up East 

✧ 

Above, left. Herds of longhorn cattle stirred 

up dust—or mud—as they pushed along 

Congress Avenue toward the Chisholm Trail. 

The ornate Travis County Courthouse (later 

the Walton building) stands at the head of 

the Avenue. 

Above, right: Built in 1855, the old stone 

Travis County courthouse and jail stood at 

Cedar (Fourth) and Guadalupe. But Austin 

also was a city of churches. 

Below: Saddle horses, buggies, mule-drawn 

buckboards, and covered wagons continued 

to be common modes of transportation in 

the capital city. 


CHAPTER 

FOUR 

35

✧ 

Top: Rangy longhorn cattle from South Texas ranches waded the Colorado River at hard-rock crossings to reach 

Austin in the days of the Chisholm Trail. 

Middle: Trench crews prepared Congress Avenue for electric streetcar tracks (1904-05). 

Above: Congress Avenue was lined with two- and three-story buildings. Covered porches extended to the curb 

to allow people to alight from their buggies without stepping in mud. 


Avenue after splashing across the Colorado at 

a shallow, rocky ford east of town. The cattle 

and the cowboys pushing them north were 

just passing through, but they left behind 

money in addition to littering the dusty thoroughfare 

with the more prosaic reminders of 

a large animal herd. 

“The number of cattle that have been 

driven out of Texas this season to 

[Northern] markets is truly amazing and 

unparalleled,” the Austin Statesman reported 

on August 27, 1875. 

Nute Mayfield, operator of the ferry at the 

Montopolis ford about three miles below 

Austin, estimated that 250,000 head of cattle 

worth at least $20 each would have passed 

near Austin by year’s end. 

In the half-decade since the 1870 U.S. 

Census, the city had more than doubled in 

size to an estimated 10,500. The Austin 

Statesman claimed the city was even bigger, 

perhaps as large as 14,000. 

“Austin is growing so rapidly and her 

improvements are so varied, that one can 

hardly realize what is taking place,” the 

Statesman observed on June 14, 1876. 

Eighteen days later, as if to better illustrate 

the point, the newspaper reported that nearly 

half a million dollars in construction was 

under way in the city. 

Among the projects and their costs were: a 

public school building, $18,000; the threestory 

Brueggerhoff and Tips Building at 708 

Congress, $65,000; two new churches totaling 

$80,000; a new courthouse at 11th and 

Congress, $90,000; and a bridge across the 

river, $100,000. 

The wooden bridge lasted until 1882, 

when a stampeding herd of cattle collapsed 

two spans. The cattle fell fifty feet into the 

river, most of them drowning. In 1884, a private 

company began construction of an iron 

toll bridge on stone piers. “This bridge will 

stand, with light repairs at times, as long as 

time lasts,” the Statesman declared. Two years 

later, Travis County bought the bridge and 

eliminated the toll. 

The Statesman was justifiably proud of the 

projects under way in the city in the latter 

part of the 1870s, but far more significant 

construction projects lay ahead. 


36

LAYING CORNERSTONES 

Shortly before noon on November 9, 1881, the wind blew out of the north and a light rain fell 

from a sky as gray as an old Confederate Army coat. With the norther dropping the temperature, 

maybe the porter sweeping the floor in the Attorney General’s office on the first floor of the Capitol 

had in mind warming up the room. Or maybe Henry McBride was just getting rid of a basket of 

wastepaper the easy way, by stuffing the trash in the heating stove. 

Whatever his intention, McBride moved on to the next room, pushing his broom. Soon he 

smelled smoke. Running back into the room where the stove was, he found that burning paper and 

embers had fallen from the heater onto the wooden floor. As he watched in astonishment, the fire 

spread. There was nothing to do but run. 

A writer for the Texas Siftings was on his way home from lunch when he noticed wisps of smoke 

coming from one of the windows of the limestone state house. 

“That’s the way those State officials waste firewood,” he thought, or at least so he claimed in a 

tongue-in-cheek article he later wrote. “There they are toasting their sinful shins before fires in 

which they waste enough wood to do a respectable family for a week.” 

But soon the fire bell atop City Hall was ringing. The number of clangs informed the volunteer 

fire fighters—rushing to the hall to get their equipment—that the fire was in the 8th Ward, downtown 

Austin. 

The old Capitol had been a bonfire waiting to happen. 

Governor Oran Roberts, remembering the 1865 robbery of the state’s treasury, feared history 

was repeating itself. Holdup men must have started a fire in the Capitol to divert attention, he 

✧ 

Convict labor and hired stone cutters 

quarried red Texas granite near Marble 

Falls in Burnet County. Railroad flatcars 

hauled the massive blocks from the quarry to 

the Austin building site of the new Capitol. 


CHAPTER 

FIVE 

37

✧ 

The old Capitol caught fire about noon on 

November 9, 1881. Efforts by volunteer 

firemen to save the building were 

unsuccessful due to the lack of water power. 

Valuable books, paintings and legal 

documents were destroyed. 


thought. The Governor quickly ordered several 

Texas Rangers who had been camped on 

the Capitol grounds to guard the vault. 

The only enemy on this day, however, was 

the natural consequence of fuel, oxygen, and 

an ignition source. 

“It was a thrilling scene,” the next edition 

of the Texas Siftings reported. The writer 

continued: 

The fire demon’s cruel tongues licked 

the fair proportions of the historic pile, 

while huge volumes of black smoke 

poured from the doomed building, and 

settled over the fair city… like a sable 

funeral pall, enveloping in its somber 

folds the spires and domes that glitter 

on the several hills of the Capital City 

of Texas, while the toot, toot, toot of 

the fire engine, and the hoarse profanity 

of the enthusiastic volunteer firemen, 

seemed a solemn and appropriate 

dirge as the old sarcophagus crumbled. 

Low water pressure at the nearest hydrant, 

which was not all that close due to the fact 

that the two previous sessions of the 

Legislature had not seen fit to appropriate 

money for fire hydrants on the Capitol 

grounds, prevented the volunteer firefighters 

from putting much more than a light mist on 

the blaze. In two hours the building was 

nothing but a blackened limestone shell. 

“The architectural monstrosity…at the 

head of Congress Avenue, is no more,” the 

Texas Siftings summarized. “The venerable 

edifice that bore such a striking resemblance 

to a large size corn crib, with a pumpkin for a 

dome… took fire on Wednesday at noon.” 

Though newspaper reaction to the loss of 

the Capitol varied from near indifference to 

open sarcasm, many government records dating 

back to the days of the Republic burned 

in the fire. Geologic samples and a collection 

of cultural artifacts, including shields and 

lances seized by Indian-fighting Texas 

Rangers—the beginnings of a state museum—also 

were destroyed. In addition, 8,000 

books were lost. 

If the burning of the statehouse was truly 

Henry McBride’s fault (he never denied the 

dubious honor, but shoddy installation of the 

stove pipe also played a role), the fire did not 

cost him his job. He stayed on the state payroll 

until 1931. 

When McBride died at the age of 76 on 

April 8, 1936, the Associated Press, which 

like the rest of the mainstream media in Jim 

Crow days did not normally report the natural 

passing of black people, distributed a fourparagraph 

story noting the death of the 

“negro who indirectly caused construction of 

Texas’ massive granite capitol.” 

In truth, though McBride may have accidentally 

started the fire, state officials already 

were planning for a new Capitol, a grand 

structure that would be a much more fitting 

home for the government of the nation’s 

largest state. But the fire did speed up the 

process. Since the new Capitol was to be 

erected where the old one stood, the fire 

might even have saved the state a little money 

in wrecking costs. 

What would rise from the ashes of the old 

statehouse was a world-class building, a 

structure nearly as big as the national Capitol 

and bigger than the houses of the German 

Reichstag or England’s Parliament. The new 

Capitol and one other structure that went up 

in Austin during the 1880s—the Gothic 

three-story brick building that was the first 

home of the University of Texas—would 


38

come to define the city and be the cornerstones 

of its economy for decades. 

The events leading to a new Capitol began 

in the fall of 1875 during the Constitutional 

Convention. On November 20, 1875, ninety 

delegates in convention to draw a new state 

charter passed an ordinance setting aside 

three million acres “of the public domain” to 

fund construction of a new Capitol “and other 

necessary public buildings at the seat of government.” 

That provision became a part of the 

new constitution, a document ratified by the 

electorate on February 15, 1876. 

By the summer of 1881, the so-called 

Capitol Lands in the Texas Panhandle 

(3,050,000 acres covering parts of ten counties) 

had been surveyed, a building superintendent 

and two commissioners had been 

appointed, architect Elijah E. Myers had been 

hired, and the state was advertising for bids 

from building contractors. (The syndicate 

that bought the land established a ranch, the 

XIT, that for more than two decades was the 

largest ranch in the world.) 

In an irony not lost on the press of the day, 

Governor Roberts had been meeting with the 

Capitol Board (made up of, in addition to the 

Governor, the comptroller, treasurer, attorney 

general, and land commissioner) and discussing 

plans for the new Capitol when the 

fire broke out. 

After more than six years of discussion and 

planning, a construction contract for a modernized 

Renaissance-style structure similar to 

the U.S. Capitol was awarded in January 

1882. Ground was broken on February 1 at 

the site of the old Capitol at the head of 

Congress Avenue. Austinites became used to 

rattling window panes as the contractor 

began blasting into caliche rock. By 1884, 

workers had completed the basement. 

The underground walls were of limestone 

quarried west of Austin near a community 

then known as Oatmanville (present-day 

Oakhill). Limestone also was intended for use 

in the construction of the rest of the building, 

but when tests showed the limestone was of 

poor quality, prone to develop dark streaks 

when exposed to water, the decision was made 

to build the Capitol with red Texas granite 

from near Marble Falls, in Burnet County. 

An estimated 20,000 people came to 

Austin from across the state for the laying of 

the cornerstone on March 2, 1885, the fortyninth 

anniversary of Texas’ independence 

from Mexico. The massive polished stone, 

weighing 12,000 pounds and nearly five feet 

wide and long and three feet deep, had been 

cut from a granite block weighing 18,000 

pounds. It took fifteen oxen to haul it from 

the granite quarry in the Hill Country to the 

railroad at Burnet, where it was loaded on a 

flatcar for the trip to Austin. 

The festivities began with a parade on 

Congress Avenue led by a platoon of city 

police. The procession represented all facets 

of Texas, from the Governor and other state 

and city officials to gray-bearded Mexican 

War veterans to “Citizens on foot and in carriages,” 

as one account noted. 

The items placed in the cornerstone for 

posterity were as eclectic as the parade that 

went up the Avenue: A piece of stone from the 

old Capitol, a twenty-five cent meal ticket 

dated August 9, 1862, an olive leaf from 

Mount Zion, two ears of corn, Confederate 

money, Texas newspapers, a March 7, 1785 

copy of the Boston Gazette, and a “silk winder 

made and presented by Gen. Sam Houston to 

Miss Annie E. Kyle,” among many other items. 

Two years after the cornerstone ceremony, 

metal workers were erecting the Capitol’s 

✧ 

Above: The temporary Capitol was gutted 

by flames on September 30, 1899. 

Below: While the new Capitol was under 

construction, a temporary Capitol at 

Congress Avenue and Mesquite (Eleventh) 

Street housed the State’s governmental 

offices. 


CHAPTER 

FIVE 

39

✧ 

Above: An inner dome was suspended in a 

steel outer dome with the Goddess of Liberty 

on top. 

Below: From groundbreaking in February 

1882 to dedication in May 1888, Capitol 

construction required six years. More than a 

1,000 men were involved in the project. 



40 

double dome. An inner dome was suspended 

in a steel outer dome, much like the 

Basilica in Rome. Early in 1888, a zinc statue 

of the Goddess of Liberty—with exaggerated 

features that made her look ugly up 

close but lovely from a distance—was lifted 

to the top of the dome. The five-point star in 

her raised left hand was 309 feet and 9 inches 

above ground, roughly equivalent to the 

height of a 30-story building. When completed, 

the new statehouse was the seventh 

largest building in the world. It had taken 

11,000 carloads of limestone, 4,000 traincarloads 

of granite, 7 miles of lumber (the 

wood in most structures is calculated in 

board feet), and 85,000 square feet of copper 

roofing to build. 

In addition to having a monumental landmark 

visible for miles in any direction, 

Austin’s economy benefited from the construction 

work. More than 1,000 workers were 

involved in the project. Only the one hundred 

or so skilled tradesmen made much money by 

the standards of the day, but all the workers 

had to buy the necessities of life, and on payday, 

maybe some of the pleasurable nonessentials 

like beer at the nearby Scholz 

Garden, an Austin institution opened in 1866. 

State Senator Temple Houston, Sam 

Houston’s only surviving son, delivered the 

keynote address at the Capitol dedication on 

May 18, 1888. 

“The greatest of states commissions me to 

say that she accepts this building, and henceforth 

it shall be the habitation of her government,” 

Houston began. “When the title to the 

noblest edifice upon this hemisphere thus 

passes from the builder to Texas, reason 

ordains a brief reference to the deeds and 

times that eventuate in this occasion.” 

Houston’s “brief reference” went on for 

some 3,200 words. The festivities surrounding 

the dedication, which ranged from “sham 

battles” put on by the state militia to an elegant 

ball in the new statehouse, would go on 

for five days. 

With proper modesty, Temple Houston did 

not mention his father’s name in his long 

speech. But neither did he mention Lamar, 

his father’s old political rival. It was this man, 

however, who in addition to his advocacy of 

Austin as Texas’ capital was a strong voice 

(though not strong enough during his administration) 

in pushing for an institution that 

would become Austin’s other cornerstone. 

“[A] cultivated mind is the guardian genius 

of democracy, and, while guided and controlled 

by virtue, is the noblest attribute of 

man,” Lamar had said in his first speech to 

the Republic’s Congress in 1838. “It is the 

only dictator that freemen acknowledge and 

the only security which freemen desire.… Let 

me therefore urge it upon you, gentlemen, 

not to postpone this matter too long.” 

The matter was postponed, however, 

for nearly four decades. But when action 

finally was taken on Lamar’s eloquent observation 

on education, a soliloquy that generations 

of Texas students would be required to 

memorize, the city of Austin, as well as the 

free men—and women—of Texas would be 

the beneficiary. 

The University of Texas, like the new 

Capitol, was born of the 1876 Constitution. 

But the constitutional provision relating to a 

university for the state offered no silver spoon 

for the capital city. While Article VII, Section 

10 of the charter provided for establishment 

of “a University of the first class,” it left the 

location of this institution up to “a vote of the 

people of this State.” (The first draft of the

Constitution had stipulated that the university 

“be located at or near the city of Austin.”) 

Lawmakers did not take action on the 

Constitutional mandate until March 30, 1881 

when the Legislature passed the necessary 

enabling act. Governor Roberts set the election 

to pick a site for Texas’ institution of 

higher learning for September 6, 1881. 

Two other cities, Tyler and Waco, seriously 

vied for the university. Waco boosters paid for 

this ad: “Waco is free from the distracting 

scenes, corrupting influences and fevered 

excitement of a political capital, with its multitudinous 

temptations to allure the young 

into paths of vice.” 

Turnout was low on election day, but the 

people of Texas decided that the temptations of 

Austin were not as multitudinous as the good 

people of Waco feared. Austin got 30,913 

votes, with Tyler coming in second with 

18,974 votes. Waco got 9,799 votes. Thorp 

Spring, a small community in Hood County, 

received 2,930 votes. Galveston was chosen at 

the site of the University’s medical branch. 

With the electorate having settled the 

question of location, Governor Roberts 

appointed an eight-member board of regents 

(a ruling body later expanded to nine seats) 

headed by Dr. Ashbel Smith of Harris County, 

the former surgeon general of the Republic of 

Texas. The regents, moving much more 

quickly with the bricks-and-mortar aspects of 

a new university than the Capitol Board had, 

selected Austin architect Frederick Ernst 

Ruffini to design a building. 

On a forty-acre site about one mile north 

of the Capitol, the cornerstone for the first UT 

building—a structure that came to be called 

Old Main—was laid on November 17, 1882. 

The building would rise on College Hill at the 

center of a tract reserved for a university in 

the original Austin survey of 1839. 

“In ignorance lies the great danger, the 

chief enemy to the perpetuity of free institutions, 

to security for person and property, to 

the virtue and aggregate power of a people,” 

Smith, a graduate of Yale, said at the cornerstone 

laying. Three thousand people turned 

out for the event. 

With the initial phase of Old Main still 

under construction, the University’s first ses- 

sion had to be held downtown in the temporary 

Capitol. Classes began September 15, 

1883. Eight professors handpicked by Smith 

from “back East” undertook the education of 

more than one hundred students, with final 

enrollment that year reaching 221. 

The west wing of Old Main was completed 

in January 1884, followed by the center section 

in 1889. A decade passed before the east 

wing was added and the building took on its 

final form. 

Not all the new construction in town, 

however, was funded by the government. 

Colonel Jesse Lincoln Driskill, like many 

Texans of his day, learned most of what he 

knew from cattle. Coming to Texas from 

✧ 

Below: A souvenir card commemorates 

the dedication of the Capitol in May 1888. 


Bottom: The main building of the University 

in South Austin was constructed in stages. 


CHAPTER 

FIVE 

41

✧ 

Top: Jessie Lincoln Driskill, wealthy 

cattleman and honorary Confederate 

colonel, built an ornate four-story hotel 

on Brazos Street between Sixth and 

Seventh streets. 

Above: Ben Thompson, a gunman, gambler, 

and something of a dandy, was city marshal 

from 1880 to 1882. 



42 

Missouri, he settled in Bastrop in 1849. He 

sold beef to the Confederacy, earning the honorary 

title of “Colonel,” but he made his fortune 

trailing Texas cattle north to the railheads 

in Kansas. In 1870, he moved to Austin. 

Fourteen years later, Driskill decided 

Austin needed a first-class hotel and he was 

the man to build it. He paid $49,000 to buy 

up all but one lot of the half-block west of 

Brazos Street between Sixth and Seventh 

streets and would sink $400,000—including 

the cost of furnishings—into the hotel that 

went up on the site. His notion was to build 

“the finest hotel south of St. Louis.” 

By the time the cornerstone was laid, 

Austinites were getting pretty good at celebrating 

new construction projects in their 

city. More than 4,000 people listened to 

speeches and witnessed the placing of the 

stone, a gift to Colonel Driskill from the 

Austin business community. Those who had 

tickets then went to the Pearl House, where 

they found the tables laden with food and 

bottles of Mum’s extra dry. A lengthy round of 

toasts followed. 

“The Driskill Hotel,” began one. “The energy 

and enterprise of its projector, the artistic 

skill of its architect exhibited in the beauty 

and symmetry of its design, and the appropriateness 

of its appointments, give assurance of 

a hostelry for Austin unsurpassed by any in 

the State. May its cuisine always be as satisfactory 

as its external attraction.” 

Austin architect Jasper N. Preston, who 

had resigned an appointment as superintendent 

of the Capitol project prior to the beginning 

of construction, designed the ornate 

four-story Romanesque brick and limestone 

structure. Just to make sure folks knew it was 

his hotel, Driskill had a carved bust of himself 

put on a pedestal attached to the peaked 

gable on the Sixth Street side of the building. 

For good measure, the colonel had busts of 

his two sons installed on the other two gables. 

The opening of the hotel on December 20, 

1886 was the occasion of an even grander celebration 

than the cornerstone laying. The 

Austin Statesman published a special edition 

to mark the occasion. 

Though the cornerstones laid in Austin in 

the 1880s were the metaphorical cornerstones 

of the city’s economy as well, the 

Legislature came to town only every two years 

and the University of Texas was hardly a 

Southern Harvard. The Driskill’s rooms were 

not always filled. In fact, the hotel experienced 

financial difficulties and closed for several 

months in May 1887, reopening under 

new management. Three years after Colonel 

Driskill’s death in 1890, his brother-in-law 

sold the hotel on behalf of the estate. 

The Driskill’s difficulties were reflective of 

the city’s flat economy. Despite the new 

Capitol and new university, Austin was in an 

economic skid. Not only did it stop growing, 

it lost population. In a half century, Austin 

had grown from a village of less than 1,000 

people in 1840 to a city of fewer than 15,000. 

By comparison, cities like Dallas and Fort 

Worth were booming. 

Austin’s problems were aggravated by one 

of the worst droughts in Texas history, which 

was drying out the state. Cattlemen called 

1887, which came on the heels of one of the 

harshest winters in Texas history, the year of 

the Big Dry-up. Businesses, as well as thousands 

of cattle, went to their knees. Some did 

not get back up. 

As the drought wore on, the Colorado at 

Austin ran low and slow. Still, the river figured 

prominently in a developing line of 

thinking about the city’s future.

THE GREAT DAM 

New Year’s Day traditionally is a time to express optimism for the future, even if most of the resolutions 

made are destined not to last much longer than the hangovers that inspired them. But a 

lengthy essay in the Austin Daily Statesman for January 1, 1888 made it seem as if Austin, despite 

its permanent status as the seat of state government and the home of the state university, had 

missed the party altogether. 

Written by Yale-educated Alexander Penn Wooldridge, the man who had spearheaded Austin’s 

campaign to get voter approval on the University of Texas location issue, the essay pointed out 

that Austin was not a wealthy community. In fact, he said, “Our community is becoming poorer 

every day.” Worse yet, he continued, the residents of an “overdone and rather poor capital 

city…situated in the midst of a limited and unreliable agricultural region” appeared to be indifferent 

to the problem. 

What Austin needed, Wooldridge wrote, was industry. But industry, like Texas’ rain-starved 

croplands, needed water. The Colorado was not enough, at least not during times of normal flow. 

The river’s water could, however, be detained in its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Wooldridge’s 

answer to the problem would touch off one of Austin’s first big internal political fights, a tradition 

that would endure well beyond the 1880s. His proposal was to build a dam across one of the most 

notoriously flood-prone rivers in Texas. 

✧ 

Frequent devastating floods along the 

Colorado River made it necessary to 

construct some means of control. 

Austin’s leading men argued in favor 

of a dam. Excavation of the site began in 

November 1890. The final block of granite 

was set in place on May 2, 1893. 


CHAPTER 

SIX 

43

✧ 

Above: Alexander Penn Wooldridge deserves 

credit for his foresight of Austin’s need for 

a dam across the Colorado River. He also 

organized the Austin public school system 

in 1880. 


This was not the first time someone had 

suggested damming the Colorado. Austin 

Mayor John W. Glenn broached the idea in 

1871, as had former Land Commissioner and 

local businessman William C. Walsh in 1887, 

but Wooldridge was offering the best constructed 

argument in behalf of the idea. In 

addition to a dam above the city, Wooldridge 

endorsed the notion (again, one proposed 

earlier) of a canal from the lake that would be 

formed by the dam to allow water flow to 

near the source of Shoal Creek, north of the 

city. He envisioned factories springing up 

along the creek like so many rain lilies. Once 

used to provide power for these factories, the 

water coursing down Shoal Creek would 

return to the river, where it could be used 

below Austin for farm irrigation. 

Many “objections,” which Wooldridge 

seemed to use as a synonym for obstacle, had 

to be overcome. That would be easy, he went 

on, but for “the great indifference and lack of 

enterprise of our people.” 

“To the weak and timid all things are truly 

impossible, and to them there is always a lion 

in the way; but I venture to believe that this 

lion must be scared off from the path if this 

town ever desires to advance itself to success 

and prosperity.” 

Wooldridge’s proposal, delivered orally to 

the Board of Trade a few days after its publication, 

generated moderate interest. But any real 

civic enthusiasm for the idea soon was washed 

away by drought-busting spring rains. 

With the Board of Trade—the forerunner 

of the Austin Chamber of Commerce—and 

the Statesman solidly behind him, Wooldridge 

continued his advocacy of a dam across the 

Colorado. His thinking on how such a structure 

could be paid for evolved from depending 

on private enterprise to the concept of the 

city itself raising capital through the sale of 

bonds. When the dam was completed, the 

city would go into the utility business, paying 

off the bonds with profit from the sale of 

water and electricity. 


44

Naturally, the privately-owned Austin 

Water, Light and Power Company opposed 

the idea. So did Austin’s mayor, Joseph Nalle, 

who also happened to be president of the 

power company. Wooldridge’s idea was pie in 

the sky, Nalle believed. Austin’s government 

should stick to the fundamentals. With no 

support from City Hall, the pro-dam element 

decided to run a candidate against Nalle in 

the upcoming election. 

Water, in a way, is what had brought Nalle to 

Austin. The Virginia-born Nalle, a Confederate 

veteran, came to Texas’ capital city in 1869 after 

a flood in Helena, Arkansas wiped out his business. 

He worked a short time as a bookkeeper 

for a lumber yard, then went into business for 

himself again, opening a lumber yard he called 

Nalle and Company. Less than a decade after 

arriving in Austin, Nalle was elected to the city 

board of aldermen. 

In the spring of 1878, Nalle got into a 

heated argument with another alderman, T. J. 

Markley, in the office of the Daily Statesman. 

The issue was whether the city should build a 

market house. Markley accused Nalle of 

cooking up a deal, in concert with the mayor, 

that would personally profit him to the extent 

of $10,000. Nalle hurled an ink stand and 

then a large pair of scissors at Markley. 

Statesman editor John Cardwell, a big man, 

pulled the two men apart, and both men were 

escorted from the newspaper office—in different 

directions. 

A couple of hours later, Nalle and Markley 

met again outside the Palace Saloon on 

Congress Avenue. After a brief scuffle, 

Markley staggered into the saloon and collapsed 

with two knife wounds in his heart. 

Nalle, still holding a bloody Bowie knife in 

his hand, walked up the Avenue and surrendered 

to the city marshal. Nalle was charged 

with murder but spent only one night in jail 

before posting bond. 

Two years later, in a trial moved to 

Georgetown on a change of venue motion, a 

jury heard the evidence. Nalle’s lawyer argued 

that Nalle had acted in self-defense, Markley 

having outweighed the 119-pound accused 

by forty-three pounds. The jury voted for 

acquittal and Nalle was a free man. 

In 1887, Austin voters had no qualms 

about promoting to the office of mayor an 

alderman who had proven himself handy 

with a knife. Up for re-election in 1889, Nalle 

soon found himself in another fight. This 

time, the only weapons either party resorted 

to were sharp words. 

Nalle’s opponent was building contractor 

John McDonald, a “dam man.” Born in New 

York State in 1834, McDonald grew up in 

Ohio. He managed to stay out of the military 

during the Civil War, though, like Abraham 

✧ 

Top, right: John McDonald, mayor of Austin 

from 1889 to 1895, was pro-dam. Lake 

McDonald (later Lake Austin) was named 

for him. 

Bottom, right: Hydroelectric power from the 

Austin dam served the city and the public 

and kept the street cars running most of the 

time. 

Opposite, bottom: Based on Augustus Koch’s 

second map of Austin, 1887, this “Partial 

View of Austin, Texas,” put out by the 

Austin Rapid Transit Railway Co. and the 

Board of Trade, hails the city as “The most 

beautiful and wealthiest city of its size in the 

United States” and predicts it will be “The 

Coming Great Manufacturing Center of the 

South.” Note the Capitol, University of 

Texas, Hyde Park subdivision, and wide 

new East Avenue. 


CHAPTER 

SIX 

45

✧ 

Above, left: An artist’s sketch in about 1889 

provides an idealized view of City Dam with 

electric streetcars, and Lake Austin with docks, 

sailboats, and steamers. 

Above, right: The musical “H.M.S. Pinafore” was 

put on in 1893 during the dedication ceremonies 

of Lake McDonald. The boat in the foreground 

served as the stage while the Ben Hur—a 

sidewheel steamboat—was one of the wings. 

Below: Looking across the dam from the hills 

west of Austin. 



46 

Lincoln, he was a Republican. Also like 

Lincoln, McDonald was over six feet tall. 

Coming to Paris, Texas in 1874, he settled in 

Austin a year later. A master machinist, he 

soon built a successful business. 

McDonald was swept into the mayor’s 

office on a tidal wave of pro-dam boosterism. 

That he was a Republican running in a 

Democratic town in a Democratic state made 

no difference to Austin’s electorate. He 

received three-fifths of the vote and proponents 

of the dam took eight of the ten aldermen 

seats. 

Taking office on December 7, 1889, 

McDonald and the pro-dam aldermen moved 

quickly. Boston civil engineer Joseph P. Frizell 

was retained to put together a plan for the 

dam. Appearing before a standing room only 

crowd at Millett’s Opera House on March 26, 

1890, Frizell reported his plan to the city 

council and citizens of Austin. The council 

approved the plan, created a public works 

board to supervise construction of the dam, 

and set a bond election for May 5. 

On election day, 1,354 voters approved the 

issuance of $1.4 million in bonds by a city 

government with annual revenues of 

$100,000. Only fifty people voted against the 

bond issue. 

By October a Kansas City construction 

contractor had been hired. Excavation at the 

site selected for the dam, a tract three-andhalf 

miles above Congress Avenue donated by 

George W. Brackenridge, began on November 

5, 1890. The project, undertaken with a combination 

of old and new technology—men 

with picks and chisels, mule-drawn graders, 

and state-of-the-art steam-powered equipment—was 

not an easy one. As had been the 

case during the building of the Capitol, a rail 

line had to be laid to the site to provide for 

delivery of the necessary granite and other 

construction materials. Rises in the river 

caused delays. Finally, the last stone in the 

dam was laid on May 2, 1893. 

Even with the dam finished, Nalle continued 

to fight against it, challenging in court 

the legality of the bonds. On May 25, the 

Texas Supreme Court ruled in the city’s 

behalf, ending Nalle’s hopes of blocking the 

project with an attack on its funding. 

The dam was 1150 feet long and 60 feet 

high. Built of limestone rubble and concrete

with a granite block exterior, it was 66 feet 

wide at its base, 16 feet wide at its top. Twelve 

days after the dam’s completion, water was 

flowing over its crest and the lake was full. 

Finishing the powerhouse would take 

another two years, but the massive structure, 

at the time the largest overflow dam ever built 

on a previously untamed river, also created 

the largest man-made lake in the world. 

Named in honor of the mayor who had seen 

the project through, Lake McDonald 

stretched nearly thirty miles upriver. 

Late in 1894, Mayor McDonald submitted 

his annual report to the city council. 

“Notwithstanding the general business 

depression that has prevailed throughout the 

country our city has been prosperous,” he 

wrote. “Business has greatly improved and 

many new business houses and homes have 

been built.” 

That was saying a lot. In the summer of 

1893, the price of silver had dropped to seventy-seven 

cents an ounce and the stock market 

declined to the point of virtual collapse. 

The nation fell into what would be a four-year 

economic depression. 

No matter the national situation, the 

mayor predicted that when the city began 

selling electrical power “the bonded debt and 

taxation will be yearly reduced until we will 

be a city almost without taxation.” 

While work still was under way on the 

powerhouse, where water held back by the 

dam would generate electricity as it poured 

through four turbines, a lake built by a 

city to stimulate industrial development 

had also created a beautiful recreational 

area. Austinites and people from across 

the state and nation took to the lake in 

everything from homemade wooden rowboats 

to the Ben Hur, a three-deck, two-funnel 

steam-powered sidewheeler built on the 

bank of the Colorado while the dam was 

under construction. 

An association launched an international 

regatta with a $5,000 purse that attracted 

oarsmen from around the world. The world 

champion sculler came to Austin from 

Australia to race on Lake McDonald. 

As a poet rhapsodized in the Daily 

Statesman in 1895: 

The great regatta now is o’er 

The final races run. 

Old England proved the champions 

And our good money won. 

The strangers came into our town 

To see the Austin dam. 

But now the great event is o’er, 

The strangers have gone home. 

Some to other Texas towns, 

Some to far England’s shores. 

They will tell the story of our town, 

Our dam, and our buildings, too. 

They’ll tell of our lovely homes, 

And [the] Colorado’s wondrous views. 

✧ 

Below: At one time Jacob Stern operated 

G. T. Rabb’s grist mill on Barton Springs. 

Stern started a grain company. 

Bottom: Rabb built and operated his grist 

mill on Barton Springs in 1871. The spring 

and dam furnished power for the first ice 

manufactured in Austin. Rabb sent to 

France for the ice making machine. 


CHAPTER 

SIX 

47

✧ 

Above: Wooded Mount Bonnell provided a 

spectacular view of the Colorado River. 


Above, right: The Colorado River rarely 

froze solidly enough to permit ice skaters, 

but it did in 1899. 


Below, left: Austinites were justifiably proud 

of their artificial moonlight towers. 

Below, right: An old but undated photo 

shows the San Jacinto steamboat, one of 

several cruising on Lake McDonald. 


The more prosaic benefits of the dam 

became available in the spring of 1895. 

Turbine-powered pumps began drawing 

water from the lake and pushing it into the 

city’s mains at noon on March 7. Hydraulic 

electrical generation began on May 6, the first 

voltage illuminating lights atop 30 tall metal 

towers across the city. Erected by the Fort 

Wayne Electric Company in 1894 at a cost of 

$1,500 each, the towers were of varying 

height, depending on the terrain. The lights 

were on the same plane, bright enough for 

someone to read a pocket watch up to 1,500 

feet from a tower, but not so intense as to 

interfere with chickens laying their eggs, as 

some Austinites had feared. Like the dam that 

provided the power for their lights, the towers 

were unique in the nation. (Contrary to 

myth, the towers were not arranged in the 

shape of a Texas-sized star, and there were an 

even 30 of them, not 31 as is often written.) 

Electricity for Austin homes and businesses 

was available from the city on July 4. 

At night, the towers powered by the 

city-owned generators in the brick building 

adjacent to the dam bathed a Victorian city 

of some 26,000 residents in artificial moonlight. 

Meanwhile, the dam and the lake it 

created cast a glow of prosperity on Austin. 

Surely, city fathers and business leaders 

believed, great things figuratively loomed 

just upstream. 

“Central Texas is now entering a new 

industrial era,” engineer J. T. Fanning report- 

ed. Fanning had been hired to come to Austin 

and mediate a difference in opinion among 

engineers on the location of the powerhouse 

and the most effective way to use the water 

power created by the dam. “If the citizens of 

Austin follow this beginning with wise investments 

and encouragements of judicious manufacturing 

enterprises,” Fanning continued, 

“there can be no doubt as to the great advantages 

that will accrue to the city.” 

In Austin, the decade lived up to its subsequent 

nickname, the Gay Nineties. 

One of the men who shaped the city in the 

1890s was Monroe Martin Shipe, who came 

to the capital in 1889 from Abilene, Kansas. 

With only $850, he secured a franchise from 

the city to build an electric streetcar line from 

downtown to a 206.5-acre tract of land north 

of town that he had purchased as president of 

the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Land and 

Town Company. The property—which 

included an old grandstand, a three-story 


48

ing pointed out that payments of 

$1.50 to $2 a month amounted to 

only “a five cent glass of beer a day.” 

If paid off in a year, the balance on 

a lot was interest free. 

“Everything is bustling at Hyde 

Park,” the Statesman reported on 

September 11, 1892. “Four gangs of 

carpenters are busy.” 

One of the people buying property 

in the new subdivision was 

German-born sculptress Elisabet 

Ney and her husband, Dr. Edmund 

✧ 

Top, left: The Texas National Guard held 

annual summer encampments at Hyde Park 

Camp on the grounds of the Asylum (State 

Hospital). 

PHOTO COURTESY OF AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER. 

gazebo and horse racing track on a site that 

from 1875 to 1886 had been the first home of 

the State Fair of Texas—would be Austin’s 

first planned subdivision, Hyde Park. 

Shipe’s first trolley clanged to the end 

of the line in Hyde Park at 4 p.m. on February 

26, 1891. Soon he began laying out five miles 

of streets and lining them with double rows 

of hackberry trees. In 1892, at 3816 Avenue 

G, near the intersection of two of the streets 

he graded, Shipe built a two-story house 

using lumber from the old grandstand on 

the fairgrounds. 

Touting the availability of city utilities and 

gas, fire hydrants, mail delivery, rapid transportation, 

and the city’s first moonlight tower 

(at 41st and Speedway), Shipe sold lots ranging 

in price from $100 to $200. His advertis- 

Above: In the exclusive new Hyde Park 

subdivision, a well-dressed Victorian woman 

feeds a young whitetail buck in the enclosed 

private park near Crystal Springs and 

Gem Lake. 

Left: Before the city took over the function, 

volunteers provided fire protection using 

horse-drawn equipment. Posing here is the 

Protection Hose Company, No. 1. 


CHAPTER 

SIX 

49

✧ 

Above: Hyde Park, Austin’s first planned 

suburban neighborhood, offered electric 

streetcar service, utilities, a racetrack, a 

park and pavilion, and a private lake. 

Below: Crawford’s Hyde Park Grocery Store 

stood at the corner of what would become 

Guadalupe and 41st streets. 

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER 

Montgomery. Sponsored by former Governor 

Roberts, Ney had won a commission to carve 

marble statues of Stephen Austin and Sam 

Houston for exhibition at the 1893 

Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The 

eccentric artist left her husband in charge of 

Liendo, their plantation near Hempstead, and 

came to Austin. She camped in a tent on her 

Hyde Park property until workers completed 

her masonry studio-house, which she named 

Formosa. The structure, with a large north 

window to provide natural lighting for her 

studio, was the first building erected in Texas 

Top, right: Bohn Brothers, a dry goods store at 517-519 Congress Avenue, opened in 1887. A photograph dated 

December 9, 1912 shows the interior. 

Middle, right: Labor Day in Austin in 1910 called for celebration, parades, and picnics. The Bohn Department Store 

entry featured three of the Bohn daughters posed atop an elaborate, horse-drawn float 


specifically designed for artistic purposes. In 

1902, Ney added a second story to the building, 

giving it a castle-like appearance. 

In addition to the one- and two-story 

Victorian houses sprouting up across the subdivision, 

an 800-seat wooden pavilion went 

up in the southwestern quadrant of the development. 

Shipe also oversaw excavation for a 

small lake suitable for rowing. Until Lake 

McDonald filled, the pavilion and its adjacent 

lake was the prime recreation location in the 

city. From balloon ascensions to summer theater 

to dances, Hyde Park offered, as one of 

Shipe’s advertisements put it, “entertainments 

of a high grade…at a trifling cost.” 

The notion of low-cost entertainment 

particularly appealed to William Sydney 

Porter, who had come to the capital city in 

1884. A young man with a taste for good 

stories and cold beer, he held a couple of 

jobs before going to work at the General 

Land Office as a draftsman in 1887. Later 

that year, he was married to Athol Estes, a 

young woman he had met at a dance celebrating 

the laying of the Capitol cornerstone. 

Following the election of a new land 

commissioner, Porter left the state payroll 


50

and went to work as a teller at First National 

Bank. On the side, he published a weekly 

humor sheet, The Rolling Stone. 

As writer and editor of his own publication, 

he poked fun at Austin, a city with “one 

soap factory, one electric light works, one 

cemetery, one dam, one race track, two beer 

gardens, one capitol, two city councils, one 

cocaine factory, and [which] will probably 

some day have a newspaper.” 

Porter left the bank in December 1894. A 

short time later, a federal bank examiner 

turned up a shortage in Porter’s accounts. 

The Rolling Stone, meanwhile, gathered no 

moss and very little money. Porter put out his 

last issue in April 1895 and six months later 

moved to Houston, where he began writing 

for the Houston Post. After being indicted in 

federal district court on four counts of 

embezzlement, Porter left Houston, ostensibly 

to face his legal problems in Austin. He 

went instead to Honduras, via New Orleans. 

Returning to Austin in 1897 after learning 

his wife was gravely ill with tuberculosis (she 

died on July 25), he stood trial in February 

1898 and was convicted. He served thirtynine 

months of a five-year sentence in 

the state penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, 

which had a contract to house federal prisoners. 

Though he never returned to Austin after 

leaving prison, Porter became a successful 

short story writer, under the pen name of O. 

Henry, until his death in New York in 1910. 

Many of his stories, still in print in numerous 

anthologies, were set in Texas, some of them 

in Austin. 

Before he married, Porter served for a time 

in the Austin Greys, a local militia company. 

When it disbanded in 1885, the Texas Rifles 

took over its equipment. The company was a 

unit of the Texas Volunteer Guard, forerunner 

of the Texas National Guard. Porter traveled 

with the unit to Lampasas for training and on 

another occasion to Fort Worth to guard the 

train station during a rail strike. While Austin 

was the headquarters for the state guard, 

which was under the Adjutant General’s 

Department, the location of the annual summer 

training encampment for all guard units 

varied from place to place across the state. 

In 1891, the encampment was held at the 

✧ 

Top: Headquarters building, Camp Mabry. 


Left: The Avenue Hotel opened in 1860 

and offered rooms for $2. The gallery of 

photographer H. B Hillyer was across 

the street. 


CHAPTER 

SIX 

51

✧ 

Above: The first streetcar across the newly 

completed Congress Avenue bridge (January 

10 or 11, 1911) was a cause of civic pride. 

Middle: The State Cemetery, established 

before the Civil War, is the final resting 

place of many Texas pioneers. 

Below: Picnic in 1899 at the site of 

Chamber's Mill on the Colorado River, 

about where the present-day bridge on 

Pleasant Valley Road stands. 


old fairgrounds north of town on the property 

soon to be developed as Hyde Park. That 

gave local boosters an idea. A “public minded 

and patriotic committee of citizens” (as an 

Adjutant General’s report later put it) found a 

site overlooking the Colorado three miles 

northwest of the Capitol that could become a 

permanent home for the summer training 

encampment. Prominent businessmen helped 

underwrite the purchase of 90 acres and then 

deeded the land to the state. Improvements 

were soon made and by 1892, the camp was 

ready to receive the state’s citizen-soldiers. 

Following the 1893 summer encampment, 

which featured so-called sham battles open to 

the public, the Statesman pronounced the 

annual training a success. “The military conducted 

themselves well during the encampment 

and their gentlemanly and soldierly 

conduct has been most highly commended,” 

the newspaper said. “The week was one of 

profit and pleasure and the gallant boys went 

home well satisfied.” 

Over the next several years, the campground 

was expanded by purchasing additional 

land with funds raised in a unique way: 

By charging admission to the noisy, smoky 

summer sham battles. When Adjutant 

General W. H. Mabry died of malaria in Cuba 

four months after the Spanish-American War, 

the training camp outside Austin was named 

in his honor. 

With the American victory over Spain, the 

century was winding down with a new sense of 

national optimism. In Austin, business leaders 

thought the city’s prosperity was assured by its 

seven-year-old dam. But it was not generating as 

much electricity as expected. Sometimes, when 

the water was low, it generated none at all. As a 

consequence, sufficient revenue was not available 

to handle payments on the city’s bonded 

indebtedness. Taxpayers were having to make 

up the difference, even though their artificial 

moonlight towers, just like the real moon, were 

dark for extended periods and their electric 

streetcars had to be retrofitted for mule power. 

The last and most spectacular forewarning 

of disaster was a five-inch rain and brilliant 

lighting display the night of April 6, 1900. By 

that point, nothing could have been done to 

avert that disaster short of draining the lake and 


52

undertaking a virtual reconstruction. The problem 

with the dam was as fundamental as the 

baserock the engineers thought their structure 

rested on: Water slowly was undermining portions 

of it, something an extended concrete 

apron could have prevented, and it should have 

been built with floodgates. On top of that, by 

the end of its life, the depth of the lake had 

been cut in half by sediment. All it would take 

to take sweep away the dam was a full lake and 

a lot of rain. Still, though the dam had been 

doomed since the day the last granite block was 

laid in place, what happened the day after the 

rain came as a surprise to the people of Austin. 

The sky was blue on Saturday morning, 

April 7, but the foamy water flowing down 

the Colorado was the color of chocolate 

milk and rising three feet an hour. By 10 a.m., 

the dam was ten feet under water. A large 

crowd had come out to the dam to watch the 

raging water, but none expected what happened 

at 11:20 a.m. 

“Suddenly and without warning,” that 

day’s newspaper later reported, “a break 

occurred near the center of the dam and a 

stretch of the masonry work about 500 feet 

long swung around to the left. 

“The great bank [repository] of water, Lake 

McDonald…instantly leaped into this wide 

opening and with a roar that was heard for 

several miles the flood tore down into the valley 

below.” 

✧ 

Top, left and right, and below: Floods were 

a serious problem in Austin before the 

damming of the Colorado River. 

Bottom, left: Seiders’ Spring, settled in the 

1850s by Edwin Seiders, quickly became a 

popular recreational area. It was located 

between present-day 34th and 38th streets. 



53

✧ 

Above: The Austin dam broke near noon 

on April 7, 1900. Flood waters crushed 

a quarter of the dam, swept away the 

City Power Plant, and rushed south. 

Right: Barton Springs in its limestone bed 

was the site of early Indian camps and 

possibly a Spanish mission before white 

settlers came to the area. To the left is a 

mill. Note the split-rail fence and horse and 

buggy in the background. 


CHAPTER 

54 

SIX

Within twenty minutes, the Colorado 

River was running one mile wide and sixty 

feet deep just below downtown Austin. 

Eight persons drowned inside the power 

house as the surging water inundated it. One 

other person was swept away when the flood 

crest hit Austin. Counting victims drowned 

as the torrent continued down the river to 

the Gulf of Mexico, the flood killed fortyseven 

people. 

“Well I suppose you have done heard of the 

great calamity that has befell Austin,” Mrs. 

Mary Gordon wrote her uncle on April 11, four 

days later. “The city is now without power, 

lights and water…. The river was higher than 

it had ever bin befour the great wave came that 

washed away the dam. It was an awful sight. A 

good many people were drowned and several 

houses were washed away…. I never want to 

experience another such a time.” 

As word spread that the dam had given 

way, she continued, “couriers were sent all 

over the low flats of the city for the people all 

to flee for their lives to the hills. You never 

saw such a stampede—men, women and children 

all going as fast as they could and crying 

and praying.” 

The Gordon family, which lived at 1401 

Willow in the lower part of the city then 

called the flats, “dropped everything and flew 

with the crowd.” 

Safely on higher ground, Mrs. Gordon 

“saw three houses go down the river…. As 

good luck would have it the water did not 

quite reach us and our things are all right…. 

I can’t begin to tell you in a letter what an 

awful time was hear, but you can maby think 

how it was. It was a repitition [sic] of the 

Johnstown [Ohio] Flood.” 

When word reached the University of 

Texas campus that the dam had broken, a 

young man named Roy Bedichek, like most of 

the other students, soon was on his way to see 

what was left of the dam. 

“A huge section of the granite dam had 

been lifted from its center as if by the hand of 

a giant and deposited whole a hundred yards 

downstream,” Bedichek later recalled. “There, 

standing erect, it remained for many, many 

years as if the genius of the flood had left it as 

a memorial and as a warning—a warning 

which man with his usual and usually disastrous 

contempt for nature failed to heed.” 

In addition to the loss of life and property, 

the destruction of the dam was a fiscal catastrophe 

for Austin. The city’s assessed tax valuation 

dropped by twenty-five percent, from $12 million 

in 1900 to $9 million the following year. 

Despite this, the city still owed nearly a million 

dollars for something it no longer had. 

As Walter Long later wrote, “Austin went 

back to mule street cars and kerosene lamps. 

The Era of Frustration set in.” 

✧ 

Top: Ice man holds a block of ice with tongs 

outside the office at 207 Colorado. The ice 

company’s capacity was 125 tons a day. 

Above: The main plant of the Lone Star Ice 

and Coal Company, established in 1885. 

Photo shows horse- or mule-drawn wagon 

and cart. On the far left is the Colorado 

Machine Shop. 


CHAPTER 

SIX 

55

✧ 

Above: St. Edward's University, on a hill in South Austin with a view of the city, began in 1872. 

Below, right: Dressed in the latest fashions of the turn of the century, a couple seated under shady old pecan trees enjoys the flowing waters of Barton Springs. 


Below, left: Located on West Sixth Street, this limestone building served as Austin’s main post office for decades. 



56

THE ERA OF FRUSTRATION 

“There he comes!” someone yelled. “There he comes!” All eyes looked to the north. “Oh, that’s 

just a buzzard!” someone else answered. 

An estimated 3,000 people gathered north of Austin on October 20, 1911 in an open field near 

what would become the intersection of 45th and Duval Streets, straining to catch the first glimpse 

of the Vin Fiz. 

Finally, a sharp-eyed spectator spotted something in the sky that did not have feathers. Only 

forty years before, well within the memory of many Austinites, the first train rolled into Austin. 

Now the first airplane ever to visit the city was approaching. 

Named in honor of a new grape soda being promoted by meat packer J. Ogden Armour, the 

“aeroplane” was piloted by young Calbraith Perry “Cal” Rodgers. With financial backing from 

Armour, Rodgers hoped to be the first person to fly from coast to coast within thirty days. If he 

made it to Pasadena, California in time, he would collect a $50,000 prize from newspaper publisher 

William Randolph Hearst. 

In consideration of $150 offered by Austin land developer Will Caswell, Rodgers had agreed to 

land at the capital city on property north of town that Caswell had subdivided and named 

Ridgetop. Lots were $50 each and could be bought for $1 down and $1 a week. 

The pioneer aviator’s last stop had been Waco. Flying at 70 miles an hour at 500 feet, he 

made it to Austin in one hour and forty-five minutes. The crowd broke into a cheer when 

✧ 

The Vin Fiz, piloted by “Cal” Rogers, 

was the first plane to land at Austin. 


CHAPTER 

SEVEN 

57

Rodgers stepped out of the bi-plane after a 

bumpy landing. 

“He got out of the thing and he had a big 

old duster with a cap and a pair of goggles,” 

Austinite Charles Tew recalled years later. “A 

scarf was tied over the top of his hat and 

under his chin.” 

The aviator was not overly chatty and 

spent most of his time refilling his oil tank 

and tightening guy wires on the cloth-winged 

biplane, Tew remembered. 

Ninety minutes after it landed, the Vin Fiz 

was back in the air. The plane headed toward 

the Capitol, and, to the delight of 14-year-old 

Lewis Walker and others who had climbed the 

steep stairs to reach the balcony that was the 

highest vantage point in the city, circled the 

dome twice. Then Rodgers flew south down 

Congress Avenue toward his next scheduled 

stop, San Antonio. But at Buda, his engine 

sputtered out and he had to glide to a landing. 

Rodgers completed the flight to the West 

Coast in his Burgess-Wright flying machine, 

but not in time to collect the prize money 

from Hearst. Armour, however, paid him $5 

per mile (the rate dropped for the miles 

across Texas and the Southwest because of the 

sparser population) for his promotion of the 

new soft drink, which fell a little short of 

becoming the next Coca-Cola. Four months 

later, Rodgers died in the crash of another 

plane after flying into flock of seagulls. 

The crowd that turned out to see the first 

airplane land at Austin that crisp October 

afternoon amounted to nearly ten percent of 

the city’s population. In 1910, federal enumerators 

found 29,860 residents in a city that 

had not annexed any new land since before 

the turn of the century. Austin covered only 

16.5 square miles. Still, the population at the 

end of the new century’s first decade did 

reflect a modest growth of more than 6,000 

new residents. 

The loss of the dam had not turned Austin 

into a ghost town, but aside from the appearance 

of the first automobile, the arrival of the 

Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad (soon 

known as the “Katy”) in 1904, and the 1905 

paving of Congress Avenue with heavy red 

bricks made at the coal mining town of 

Thurber in North Texas, the Daily Statesman 

had few city-shaping events to chronicle. 

✧ 

Top: Travis County sheriff George Matthews (left) with 

deputies Andrew Townsend (center) and C. White (standing), 

August 1908. 

PHOTO COURESTY OF THE AUTHOR. 

Bottom: The Crystal Saloon, 601 Congress Avenue, advertised 

liquors, wines, cigars, and a restaurant in connection with the 

saloon. Also shown are the Iron Front Saloon, 605 Congress, a 

barber shop, and the Driskill Hotel. 



58

Austin’s problem, the Dallas Morning News 

observed, was the very fact that it was a capital 

city. “Does any one think that Austin 

would not have been as great a town as any in 

Texas if it had not been for the location of the 

seat of government at that place?…. The people 

of Austin, like the people of all capitals, 

have been accustomed to getting their ready 

cash…from the revenues of government.” 

Reprinting the Dallas newspaper’s comments, 

a short-lived Austin publication called 

The Current Issue agreed on July 2, 1905 with 

the editorial’s basic premise. But pointing to 

Little Rock, Atlanta, Richmond, Denver, and 

Salt Lake City as examples of state capitals not 

wholly dependent on government, the magazine 

suggested that the mission of the newlycreated 

Austin Business League was “to lift 

Austin out of the rut of inertia.” 

The paving of Congress Avenue and a portion 

of Sixth Street, the writer continued, was 

a first step. “Keep on stepping,” the writer 

urged. “After a little we will catch the step 

with Dallas and Houston and San Antonio 

and Fort Worth. Then the Dallas News…will 

apologize to Austin and set her, with loving 

hand, among the great cities.” 

By the latter part of the decade, Austin was 

doing some stepping. Two events were seminal: 

In December 1908, voters approved a 

new form of government for their city, doing 

away with the aldermanic system, which fostered 

ward politics, in favor of a four-member 

commission, presided over by the mayor. 

Elected at large, each commissioner had 

responsibility for certain municipal functions, 

such as public works or public safety. Four 

months after Austin voters changed their 

form of government, A. P. Wooldridge, the 

man who helped bring Austin its university 

and ill-fated dam, was elected mayor. 

In September 1909, the same year 

Wooldridge took office, a young man named 

Walter Prescott Webb arrived in Austin on 

“the Katy” to attend the University. 

✧ 

Above: Early aerial view of the 

Colorado River. 

Below, left: The Littlefield House, corner 

of Whitis Avenue and 24th Street, 

now part of the UT campus. 

Below, right: The remains of Lake 

McDonald after the 1900 flood washed 

away the dam. From the Walter Long 

collection. 


CHAPTER 

SEVEN 

59

✧ 

Above: Portrait of George Washington 

Littlefield, 1842-1920. 



Below: Photo taken outside the Smith and 

Bulian blacksmith shop about 1911. Charles 

Bulian wears a leather apron. A Mrs. Barber 

is shown seated in a covered wagon, knitting. 



60 

“Day was breaking and the first thing 

I noticed was some strange lights high in 

the heaven, so high that one wondered how 

their rays reached the ground,” Webb, who 

became a nationally-known professor of history, 

remembered years later. “A man was selling 

newspapers.” 

Webb got his trunk loaded in a hack for 

delivery to the University, then went across 

Congress Avenue to have breakfast at a 

restaurant owned by a Chinese family. 

“The clomping home of milk wagon horses 

was the main sound on the street,” he continued. 

“As I went to catch the first streetcar I 

had ever ridden, I noted that the street was 

paved with brick. Each brick had a triangular 

indentation, and the name Thurber lettered 

on it.” 

The 20th century was well under way, but 

Austin still was in transition from horses and 

wagons to automobiles and trucks, from 

small town to city. In 1910, the Congress 

Avenue bridge, the structure the Statesman 

had predicted would stand “as long as time 

lasts,” was replaced with a sturdier $210,000 

concrete span. 

Ten years to the day after the dam disaster, 

the Statesman was crowing over the voter 

approval, by a margin of 57 to 1, of a bond 

issue to fund rebuilding of the dam. A parade 

and speech by Governor Tom Campbell highlighted 

a day of celebration. 

“Never in the history of the city has there 

been such universal rejoicing,” the Statesman 

reported. “Austinites are united on the dam 

proposition, and it is expected that in the 

future there will be concerted action on all 

big things that will be to the interest of the 

capital city of Texas.” 

In addition to big things, Mayor 

Wooldridge worked hard for better things, 

particularly parks, city beautification, funding 

for a city hospital, and the shutting down 

of the city’s long-time red-light district. A former 

trash dump on Guadalupe between 

Ninth and Tenth streets was transformed into 

the city’s first landscaped public park and 

named in the mayor’s honor. 

“Austin is important as the center of the 

State’s government, but more important as a 

virile business center and a city of beautiful 

homes and cultured environments, and with 

profitable industries that are augmenting 

their growth annually and a progressive territory 

all about it,” declared (with understandable 

exaggeration) a souvenir promotional 

piece prepared by the home-owned Southern 

National Insurance Company “and its big 

friend,” the Hamburg-Bremen Fire Insurance 

Company of Hamburg, Germany. 

Someone named Paul mailed one of the 

souvenirs to his friend Clyde Brown in the 

Williamson County community of Florence 

in 1912. The sixteen images, including a 

montage of the five buildings that then constituted 

the University of Texas, showcased a 

city that, despite the claims of “profitable 

industries,” still depended mainly on its governmental-educational 

cornerstones. 

In addition to the requisite view of 

the Capitol, the souvenir featured views 

of two new neo-classical buildings, Austin’s 

first downtown skyscrapers. Both had gone 

up at the city’s key intersection, Sixth 

and Congress. 

The more ambitious of these buildings was 

the new home of George W. Littlefield’s 

American National Bank, an institution chartered 

with an initial capitalization of 

$100,000 at the height of pre-dam optimism 

in 1890. The Littlefield Building would rise 

seven floors. But before work could begin, 

several early-day structures had to be razed,

including one of Austin’s first rock buildings. 

Nine businesses would be displaced by the 

new building. 

Even though Austin was only seven 

decades old, as work was about to start on the 

project in January 1910, the Statesman waxed 

nostalgically about the doomed buildings, 

particularly in regard to two saloons, the 

Crystal and the Iron Front. The two watering 

holes were separated by a long-time tobacco 

shop “whose very walls must have taken on 

the flavor of tobacco.” 

The Iron Front, a grocery store before its 

transformation to a saloon, had been a favorite 

hangout of gambler-gunslinger Ben 

Thompson. A dandy with a mean streak and a 

weakness for intoxicating beverages, 

Thompson nevertheless provided exemplary 

service as Austin’s City Marshal in 1881-1882. 

Two years after he resigned his office, he was 

shot to death in San Antonio. The Iron Front 

and the Crystal, the Statesman observed, “are 

dear to the hearts of the older residents of 

Austin, for they have been the scene of pleasures, 

sports and grief…occasional altercations 

more or less violent in their character.” 

But soon, the newspaper continued, “a 

great building will arise to mark the progress 

the city of Austin has made in keeping with 

the onward march of progress going on 

throughout the world.” 

With Corinthian pilasters and a mixture of 

Renaissance and Gothic touches, the brick, 

granite, and marble structure, complete with 

its own electrical generating plant and water 

well (very practical considerations in light of 

the dam disaster), was Austin’s most impressive 

commercial building. For a brief time, it 

stood as the tallest office building between 

New Orleans and San Francisco. Its two elevators 

raced between floors, the Statesman 

noted, at 400 feet a minute. Gracing the main 

entrance to the street-level bank lobby were 

heavy bronze Tiffany doors featuring cattle 

range scenes by sculptor H. Daniel Webster. 

Littlefield’s financial institution offered “every 

convenience and luxury known to modern 

banking,” including “a lady teller for the 

accommodation of the lady patrons.” 

A roof garden restaurant intended for “the 

family trade,” as the newspaper put it, opened 

June 6, 1912. A five-mile long beam thrown 

by a searchlight atop the building played 

across the night sky as Austinites attending 

the grand opening enjoyed orchestra music, a 

cello solo and a two-reel “moving picture.” 

Any of the women who turned out for the 

gala that night in new dresses may have done 

their shopping at Scarborough and Hicks, the 

department store putting up a new eightstory 

building on the southwest corner of 

✧ 

Below: Promotional brochure from the 

early 1900s. 


Bottom: Austin’s telephone office began 

operating on June 1, 1881 with five 

customers. Early switchboards were 

operated by women. 


CHAPTER 

SEVEN 

61

✧ 

Above: Sampling of World War I posters. 

Below, left: World War I tanks parked near 

the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad freight 

depot in 1916. 

Below, right: World War I military vehicle, 

which was later converted to a commissary 

truck. 


Sixth and Congress, diagonally across 

the street from Littlefield’s bank. The store 

had been in business in Austin since 1893. 

The new building, patterned after Chicago 

high-rises, would rise on a two-story base of 

Doric piers. 

Littlefield, reflective of his competitive 

nature, in 1915 closed in the rooftop restaurant 

and added another floor to make his 

building nine stories tall, one floor higher 

than the Scarborough Building. 

As Austin’s skyline changed, workmen 

west of town were busy rebuilding the dam. 

Once again the city had aspirations of industrial 

development. This time, the city had a 

contract with a private company to build the 

dam for $100,000, payable on completion 

and acceptance by the city. The city then 

would pay $64,800 a year for twenty-five 

years for electrical power. After that, the dam 

would become city property. Work progressed 

through 1914. In the summer of 

1915, as the city and the contractor continued 

in a dispute over whether the project was 

complete, flood waters destroyed most of the 

wooden spillway gates and caused other 

damage. A flood in September further damaged 

the gates. 

Amid the legal wrangling that followed, 

the company that built the dam went out of 

business. Despite a lot of talk, committee 

meetings, and report writing, Austin would 

not have a functioning dam for years to come. 

The city soon faced another crisis. 

Newspaper extras broke the news to Austin 

on April 2, 1917. Congress, responding to 

President Woodrow Wilson’s admonition that 

“the world must be made safe for democracy,” 

declared war on Germany. The nation had 

finally become embroiled in the conflict that 

had been raging in Europe since 1914. 

Not all the big news in Austin was coming 

from Washington and Europe, however. 

On August 25, 1917, Lieutenant Governor 

William P. Hobby became Governor following 

the removal from office of James E. Ferguson. 

First elected in 1914, and re-elected two 

years later, Governor Ferguson was 

impeached shortly after his second inauguration. 

The state Senate found him guilty of ten 

charges of corruption, but his biggest offense 

had been political: He had tried to veto the 

University’s appropriation. 


62

Meanwhile, scores of young Austin men 

enlisted in the Army, Navy, and Marines. 

Women organized to do sewing and make 

bandages for the Red Cross. Austin became 

something of an Army town with the establishment 

of three training facilities operated 

in association with the University. In the old 

School for the Blind on East Eighteenth 

Street, the Army opened a ground school for 

pilots. At Camp Mabry, it set up an automobile 

mechanics school, and near St. Edward’s 

University in South Austin, a radio school. By 

the end of the war in 1918, 15,000 men had 

completed at least eight weeks of training in 

Austin. Forty University faculty members had 

taken leaves of absence to work for the government. 

In addition, 2,000 University students 

had gone “Over There,” some never to 

return. Forty-five Austin military men and 

one woman, nurse Mary Cardwell, died during 

the war, most from disease. Only five died 

as a result of wounds or gas in combat. 

At 6 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the 

Austin American put out a four-page extra 

with every word printed in red ink: An 

armistice had been signed and the war was 

over. “From early morn, when the whistles 

blew and the bells rang out the glad armistice 

tidings…till the end of a perfect day of rejoicing, 

Austin smiled its victory smile and came 

to Congress Avenue to celebrate,” the afternoon 

Statesman reported later that day. 

Jubilation over the end of the war was tempered 

by a world-wide influenza epidemic 

that hit Austin hard. The month before the 

armistice, 216 Austinites died of the flu. The 

incidence of the disease did not begin to wane 

until the spring of 1919. 

The following year, when federal census 

workers began knocking on doors in 1920, 

they found Austin had 34,876 residents. That 

count, a growth of only 16.8 percent in a 

decade, dropped Austin to the state’s tenth 

largest city. Forty years before, it had been 

fourth most populous in Texas. 

The University was doing a little better. By 

1920, with some 4,000 students, it was the 

largest university in the South. But it was not 

a wealthy institution. It depended on income 

from grazing rights on its vast land holdings 

in West Texas—public land set aside by the 

Constitution and legislative act to support the 

school—and sometimes meager legislative 

appropriations. The land-generated income 

went into the Permanent University Fund 

with only the interest available for spending. 

The University may not have been awash 

in cash, but other cities still wanted the 

school in their town. Though the 

Constitution said Austin should be the university’s 

home, the Chamber of Commerce 

had to fight down a serious effort in the 

Legislature to move the school out to the 

Brackenridge Tract on the river or even to 

some other city. The Chamber facilitated the 

inexpensive purchase of 132 acres contiguous 

to the original 40-acre tract and, as the man 

who was manager of the Chamber later wrote, 

“this ended the constant threat of removing 

the University of Texas from Austin.” 

Since its opening in 1886, the Driskill had 

remained Austin’s best and largest hotel. But 

the city did not have enough rooms to 

accommodate all the visitors who came in for 

events at UT (as the school came to be 

referred to) and legislative sessions. The 

Chamber of Commerce tried for years to promote 

construction of another large hotel, but 

an assortment of projects failed and investors 

were skittish. Finally, the Chamber sold 

$600,000 worth of bonds to finance the 

Stephen F. Austin, a hotel that would honor 

the city’s namesake. Construction of the 

✧ 

Top, left: Stephen F. Austin Hotel in the final 

stages of construction, ca. 1924. 

Below, top to bottom: 

As early as 1865, Wesley Chapel M.E. 

(Methodist-Episcopal) became Austin's first 

formally organized church for the African- 

American community. 

The German Methodist Episcopal Church 

“as seen from my window.” H. B. Hillyer, 

photographer, 303 E. Ash (Ninth) Street. 

Our Lady of Guadalupe opened in 1907 to 

serve the needs of the Mexican community. 


CHAPTER 

SEVEN 

63

✧ 

Above: View of Sixth Street with electric 

streetcars. “You can’t drive your automobile out 

of your own garage for the price of a streetcar 

ride,” the company advertised. 

Top, right: Hats were big in the early 1900s, 

as these ladies show, posing by a new building 

under construction on the UT campus. 

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 

Below: Quality Mills was one of Austin’s few 

industries in the 1920s. 



64 

eleven-story hotel (four stories would be 

added later) began in 1923. 

That same year, one of the most important 

developments in Austin’s history happened 

300 miles to the west. On May 28, 1923, an 

oil well blew in near Big Lake in Reagan 

County. The well, Santa Rita Number 1, was 

the beginning of the West Texas oil boom. 

That boom was a boon for that part of the 

state, but the Santa Rita and many of the 

other wells soon drilled had something in 

common that was even more significant for 

Austin: They were on University land and UT 

had the mineral rights. 

Back in Austin, business leaders were 

pushing for a new form of municipal government, 

the council-manager system. On August 

9, 1924, by a scant margin of twenty votes, 

Austinites approved a new city charter. No 

matter the wish of the electorate, it took two 

years to convert to the new system in which a 

non-paid city council would establish policy 

and enact ordinances while a professional city 

manager ran the city on a day-to-day basis. 

The stormy transition to a new form of 

municipal government, delayed and legally 

challenged by the salaried commissioners, 

made for a bouncy political football, but the 

spectator sport most Austinites preferred featured 

the more traditional sort of pigskin. In 

February 1924, the University began collecting 

donations for a football stadium. 

Students, alumni, anyone wanting to memorialize 

the 5,000 Texans who died during the 

war were asked to contribute money in a 

campaign with the slogan of “For Texas, I 

Will.” In a matter of weeks, some 10,000 people 

had raised $465,000. By April, construction 

was under way. UT football already was 

in its thirty-second season when fans gathered 

for the first time at the newly constructed 

Memorial Stadium, a 27,000-seat concrete 

and steel structure the student newspaper 

heralded as “the South’s greatest athletic 

field.” Texas lost to Baylor University 28-10 in 

the first game ever played in the stadium, but 

a couple of weeks later, following the formal 

dedication on Thanksgiving Day, UT beat 

Texas A&M 7-0. 

The Twenties roared in Austin like the 

gridiron fans who packed the city’s new football 

stadium every other Saturday during the 

fall, but within a few years the prosperity that 

had made it a simple proposition to build a 

large sports facility with donations would 

topple like an opponent’s goal posts after a 

big game. But the occasion would be no cause 

for celebration.

“THE NEW DEAL 

WAS A GOOD DEAL” 

The future lay ahead for University of Texas student Jake Pickle that fall of 1932, but it did not 

look good. 

Pickle’s father ran a country store in Big Spring, out in West Texas. Most of his customers were 

ranchers and farmers, and he gladly extended them credit. 

“When the farmers couldn’t pay, my father was left with a stack of IOUs which haven’t been paid 

yet,” Pickle recalled years later. “And not because people wanted to beat him out of the bill, but 

because they didn’t have any money.” 

Since the stock market crash on October 29, 1929—“Black Tuesday”—the nation’s economy 

had been slowly settling. By 1932, the year Pickle graduated from high school and decided to come 

to the University of Texas, the situation was grim. Nationally, 12 million people were out of work, 

a quarter of the entire work force. 

“Somehow my father scraped together about $65, gave it to me, shook hands with me and said 

he hoped I could make it,” Pickle said. “Twenty-five dollars went to register, $25 went for the first 

semester room and $15 was for books.” 

When Pickle enrolled at UT, Austin was a city of 59,000, the seventh largest in Texas. It had more 

than 14,000 houses, forty-six churches, five hotels, and nine theaters. Travis County had a new five- 

✧ 

Civilian Conservation Corps workers 

built bridges and made many other 

improvements in Austin during the Depression. 


CHAPTER 

EIGHT 

65

✧ 

No banks failed in Austin during the 

Depression, but Republic Bank & Trust 

Company had to be restructured. 



66 

story limestone courthouse of the Modernistic 

architectural style at Eleventh and Guadalupe. 

The state took over the old courthouse on 

Congress Avenue for use as a state office building 

and renamed it for long-time Austin attorney 

William Martin (Buck) Walton. 

The effect of the stock crash had not been 

immediate in Texas’ capital. A drought in the 

summer of 1930 had hurt the economy worse 

than the chaos on Wall Street. “As Austin 

opens a new year, it can look forward, with 

optimism and take satisfaction in showing a 

stable financial, building and improvements 

era in the last 12 months,” the Austin 

American said on January 2, 1931. 

By 1933, however, retail sales in the city 

were declining sharply. University, state, and 

municipal salaries were being cut. UT slashed 

its payroll by twenty-five percent. More than 

2,000 Austinites were out of work. Several 

construction jobs were nearly finished, 

dooming more jobs. Five thousand heads of 

families in Austin were on relief, when a lack 

of money caused all but 1,164 of them to be 

dropped from the welfare rolls, forcing them 

somehow to fend for themselves. 

Earlier during the Depression, before the 

number of unemployed grew too large for the 

Statesman to focus on only one family, it ran 

what amounted to a want ad in its news 

columns: L. B. Harris, “an Austin man, young, 

able-bodied and intelligent,” trained as a 

locomotive engineer, had not had work for 

two months. “More than anything else he 

wants a chance to work and a chance to support 

his wife and their 19-months-old baby,” 

the newspaper said. “The Austin Statesman 

asks that anyone knowing of work call him at 

4807. Harris lives in Ridgetop. By giving 

Harris a job, you will be helping three Austin 

people to remain independent citizens.” 

At least prices were low. A restaurant near 

the university campus offered a Sunday lunch 

of turkey, dressing, vegetables and dessert for 

only fifty cents. Those wanting to do their 

own cooking could get choice steak at twenty-five 

cents a pound. At Scarbrough’s department 

store, a fine men’s suit cost less than 

thirty dollars. 

On March 4, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt 

was sworn in as President. Before his election, 

in accepting the Democratic party’s nomination, 

he had declared: “I pledge myself to a 

new deal for the American people.” 

The next day’s newspaper headlines heralded 

Roosevelt’s ascension to the White 

House as the beginning of the New Deal. For 

the people of Austin and the rest of the 

nation, it was more than the birth of a catchy 

phrase, it was the beginning of a state 

of mind. The next seven years saw a tremendous 

influx of federal money, and when the 

decade was over, Austin was a different—and 

better—city. 

As President Roosevelt set out to improve 

the country’s economy, Jake Pickle set out to 

improve his own. Pickle started a milk delivery 

business at his Little Campus dormitory. 

He got up at 5:30 a.m. daily to pick up fresh 

milk at Myer’s Creamery at 310 W. Sixth 

Street and then leave the cold bottles outside 

customers’ dorm room doors.

“I’d make a penny on a pint of milk and I’d 

make a penny and a half, maybe two pennies, 

on a quart,” Pickle said. “I’d make twenty-five 

cents or so a day, if the fellows wouldn’t throw 

away the bottles or break ‘em.” 

Soon he had enough money to buy an 89 

cent alarm clock. 

“I named it Old Roosevelt, because he was 

our hero,” Pickle said. “Roosevelt was starting 

the New Deal, and that alarm clock would get 

me up and get me going, just like Roosevelt 

was trying to do for America.” 

While Jake Pickle was delivering milk to 

support himself as a University student, 

Charles Ballard had gone broke. Married and 

with a family, Ballard moved to Austin from 

Bryan in 1933. 

“I got a basement room on Tenth Street 

for $2.50 a week,” he later recalled. “We had 

one room and a kerosene stove, but it was 

all right.” 

Ballard had one pair of old boots, the soles 

tied together with baling wire. His faded 

overalls, which he paid six bits for, drew up 

when they were washed. 

“We didn’t have everything we wanted, but 

we managed to eat,” he said. 

One of the many so-called 

Alphabet Agencies quickly 

pushed through Congress by 

Roosevelt was the Public Works 

Administration, which in April 

1935 became the Works 

Progress Administration. 

“I had a WPA job working 

on the San Antonio highway,” 

Ballard recalled. “I got $2 a day 

as a teamster, using four mules 

to haul a dump wagon. They 

gave me the worst mules, 

because I knew something 

about mules. I had a friend 

who got a job saying that he 

knew something about mules, and the first 

thing he did was try to put the collar on a 

mule upside down. He needed a job.” 

Later, Ballard got a WPA-funded job doing 

iron work on several bridges being constructed 

across Shoal Creek, including the 24th 

Street bridge, WPA Texas Project 2072-2-F. 

“I made $11 a week, every other week. The 

week we didn’t get money, we got groceries… 

hams, bacon and canned goods. The New 

Deal was a good deal.” 

✧ 

Above: UT football schedule for 1935. 


Left: Civilian Conservation Corps men 

worked hard, but managed to find a little 

time for fun. 


CHAPTER 

EIGHT 

67

✧ 

Above: Austin Municipal Airport in the 

1930s had an office building, a weather 

station, gasoline—and plenty of parking 

space right at the gate. 


Below: Braniff Airways was one of the 

earliest airlines to serve Austin. 



68 

Money was scarce in Austin during the 

Depression, though none of the city’s banks 

failed. But two financial institutions, Texas 

Bank and Trust and Republic Bank and Trust, 

did have serious problems. Both banks had 

too many uncollectible farm loans, and a 

merger and some federal Reconstruction 

Finance Corporation capital led to the creation 

of Capital National Bank. 

“No one lost any money,” later recalled 

Eddie Cravens, who had been president of the 

Chamber of Commerce the year before the 

stock market crash. 

“The University and the state capital being 

here were the two big factors in pulling 

Austin through the Depression,” he said. 

“And there was a fine spirit in Austin.” 

Indeed, a popular slogan of the day was, 

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” 

One man with that vision was Tom Miller. 

A big man as comfortable in quoting 

Shakespeare as he was engaging in fisticuffs, 

Miller was born in Austin in 1893. He graduated 

from Austin High School and managed 

to attend UT for three semesters before his 

father’s death forced him to abandon higher 

education in favor of keeping the family produce 

business running. 

In 1933, Miller was elected mayor. The 

people of Austin would return him to office 

every two years throughout the Depression 

and for most of the 1940s. 

“Tom Miller was a product of East Austin, 

the old Tenth Ward,” Pickle said. “The little 

folks believed in him. He was a dominating 

figure…willing to listen and take action. He 

could bring the council together and the city 

would follow. Mayor Tom just looked the part 

of the city mayor…rotund, powerful, a little 

vain, a sense of humor.” 

Walter Long, manager of the Chamber 

of Commerce since its creation in 1914, 

worked with Miller in getting federal money 

for Austin, as did bankers H.A. Wroe and 

Ed Bartholomew. 

Some $6 million in federal money paved 

streets, built bridges and parks, and refurbished 

Barton Springs Pool. The springs and a 

sizable tract of adjoining land had been donated 

to the city in 1918 by Andrew Zilker for 

use as a park. In addition to these projects, a 

new Federal Building was constructed. 

WPA money also went to pave the runways 

at Austin’s Robert Mueller Airport, which had 

been dedicated on October 14, 1930. The airport 

(early newspaper articles about it sometimes 

referred to it as the “airport station”) 

was located four miles northeast of downtown 

on 340 acres of land formerly used for 

growing cotton. Aviation had come a long 

way in Austin since the arrival of the Vin-Fiz 

in 1911, moving from a novelty to an important 

transportation system for passengers and 

mail. By 1935, three airlines were serving the 

capital city. 

Not all the money being spent in Austin 

and Central Texas was federal. The University, 

flush with oil money, embarked on an ambitious 

building program. Temporary wooden 

structures dating back to World War I and 

before, a style of architecture some wag 

referred to as “shack-o-tecture,” were 

torn down to make room for permanent facilities 

paid for with interest earned by 

the Permanent Fund. Texas voters had 

approved a Constitutional amendment to 

make it possible to borrow from the fund to 

erect needed buildings. 

Nine new limestone buildings with red tile 

roofs, based on a campus master plan prepared 

by Philadelphia architect Paul P. Cret,

were dedicated in 1933, the fiftieth anniversary 

of the University. 

A year later, construction started on what 

would be the most visible University structure, 

a new library and administration building 

that would rise twenty-seven stories. The 

307-foot Tower, as it soon became known, 

would replace Old Main, the University’s first 

building. Not everyone at the University was 

pleased with the new $3 million building. 

Writer-professor J. Frank Dobie was critical, 

carping that the building should have been 

laid on its side and given a long porch. Nearly 

twenty years after the Tower’s completion, 

Dobie’s friend and former fellow faculty member 

Walter Prescott Webb, still had not grown 

✧ 

Views of the Colorado River during the 1935 

flood and some of the damage it caused. 

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR. 

Bottom, left: Austin had an airport, but 

trains remained the principal mode of 

transportation until after World War II. 


CHAPTER 

EIGHT 

69

✧ 

Above: UT Tower under construction. 

Top, middle: UT Tower. 

Top, right: Aerial view of Austin, ca. 1934, 

shows Old Main building on the UT campus 

without the Tower. 

Below: As a young Congressman, LBJ helped 

UT negotiate a contract to purchase the old 

magnesium plant. It became the Balcones 

Research Center in 1953, and was renamed 

J. J. Pickle Research Center in 1994. 



70 

fond of the Tower. He called it “the greatest 

mistake ever perpetrated by a Northern architect 

operating in a Southern climate.” 

Nature was as much a problem for Austin 

during the Depression as the economy. In 

June 1935, heavy rains over the Llano River 

watershed sent flood waters pouring into the 

Colorado River. On Saturday, June 15, the 

river at Austin crested higher than it had since 

1869. Nearly a mile wide, the river covered 

the Congress Avenue bridge and washed away 

the Montopolis bridge. By the time the flood 

crest reached Webberville, the raging river 

was three miles wide. 

The story of the final taming of the Colorado 

is as long and winding as the river itself, but its 

essential elements would fit in a glass of water: 

Despite years of talk and faltering private and 

local government-funded attempts, the successful 

damming of the Colorado took good 

engineering and the kind of money only the 

federal government could provide. 

Federal money channeled through the 

Lower Colorado River Authority, created in 

1934, paid for six dams that put an end to 

disastrous flooding along the river and gave 

Central Texas a series of highland lakes. 

Though some of the lakes would provide 

hydroelectric power, they generated an economic 

power as well—the lakes became 

recreation destinations. 

All of the lakes constructed by the LCRA 

were critical in finally taming the river, but 

the most important dams from Austin’s perspective 

were the huge structure that went up 

at the old Marshall Ford crossing in western 

Travis County, which created 65-mile long 

Lake Travis, and a dam on the site of the two 

failed dams immediately west of the city. 

With $14 million in WPA funds, construction 

started on the Austin dam on July 5, 

1938. The dam was finished less than two 

years later on February 16, 1940. It was dedicated 

on April 6 that year and, contrary to 

federal rules, was named in honor of a living 

person, Mayor Tom Miller. But the mayor 

who had pushed through the first dam project, 

John McDonald, was forgotten in the 

naming of the new lake, which became simply 

Lake Austin. 

Twenty miles upriver from Austin, work 

was under way on the Marshall Ford dam, a 

structure that would be a mile wide and 266 

feet high. The LCRA began power generation 

at the dam on January 27, 1941 and a month 

later named the structure in honor of U.S. 

Representative J. J. Mansfield. The dam was 

completed sixteen months later. 

Austin had finally won its war with the 

Colorado, but another conflict lay ahead.

“WIN THE WAR FIRST” 

In the fall of 1941, teenagers living in and around the small farming town of Del Valle, including 

seventeen-year-old Harvey Gann, jokingly referred to their quiet community as “Dull” Valle. 

Seven miles southeast of downtown Austin, Del Valle had a population of only a hundred or so. 

That was just enough people to modestly support Jim Johnson’s grocery store and Clarence Burch’s 

mercantile along with a post office, a justice of the peace office, a school, a cotton gin, and the 

blacksmith’s shop Gann’s father owned. 

A visit to Del Valle by a group of Army officers looking for land for an air field stirred up some 

talk, but most folks were more animated in discussing the price a bale of cotton brought than the 

war going on in Europe or any interest the Army might have in the area around Del Valle. As a high 

school senior, Gann was more interested in getting a ride into Austin to catch a movie at the 

Paramount, followed by a cold soda at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel drug store and fountain. The 

war in Europe dominated the Fox Movietone News that preceded each movie, but the black-andwhite 

images of destruction featured on the news reel had no real bearing on Gann’s life—or any- 

✧ 

A photo display of Austin’s servicemen 

urged civilians to buy Defense Stamps 

and Bonds. 


CHAPTER 

NINE 

71

✧ 

Above: Streetcar service ended on February 

7, 1940, and workmen took up the tracks. 

Above, right: The last streetcar in Austin. 


Below: In early 1942, Austinites feared 

the possibility of air raids and practiced 

holding blackouts. 


one else’s in the Austin area—until December 

7, 1941. 

That Sunday was unseasonably warm. 

Gann had gone over to a friend’s house that 

afternoon. One of their buddies was outside, 

listening to music on a car radio when the 

announcer broke in with a news bulletin: The 

Japanese had bombed the U.S. Navy base at 

Pearl Harbor. 

No one knew it at the time, but an 

Austinite was among the many victims of 

that first day of war, killed when the Japanese 

struck Clark Army Air Field in the 

Philippines at the same time they hit Pearl 

Harbor. Because the Philippines were across 

the international date line from Hawaii, 

the date of his death was recorded as 

December 8. The man’s name was John A. E. 

Bergstrom. A reserve captain, he had left his 

job at Austin National Bank and gone on 

active duty in October. 

The war that Congress officially declared 

the day after Bergstrom’s death changed the 

world. The impact on Austin was immediate 

and long-lasting. Within weeks, city officials 

had conducted Austin’s first blackout. 

Schools were issued instructions on what 

actions to take to protect students in the event 

of an air raid. For the first time since the Civil 

War, Austin felt vulnerable to military attack. 

Voters had no problem with a $600,000 

bond issue enabling the City of Austin to pay 

for the 3,000 acres of land at Del Valle the 

Army had inspected only a week before Pearl 

Harbor. When the land was purchased by the 

city, it was leased to the Army for one dollar a 

year. Cotton fields and most of the modest 

structures in Del Valle were bulldozed to 

make way for Del Valle Army Air Base. After 

only four months of construction, the air field 

was opened on September 19, 1942. The 

same month, Harvey Gann was inducted into 

the Air Corps. 

Realizing that military spending anywhere 

in Central Texas was still good for Austin and 

Travis County, elected officials from mayor to 

U.S. Congressman, along with the Chamber 

of Commerce, actively courted the federal 

government. The work paid off. 

Camp Swift, an even larger military facility 

than the air base at Del Valle, was constructed 

by the Army thirty-eight miles east of 

Austin in Bastrop County. The effect on the 

capital city was enormous. Soon more than 

40,000 soldiers were undergoing training at 

the sprawling camp in the pine trees, and it 

was not unusual for half of them to show up 

in Austin on the weekends. Thirty miles 


72

south of Austin at San Marcos, the Army 

opened another air base, Camp Gary. Sixtyfive 

miles to the northwest, the Army established 

a tank training facility near the small 

town of Killeen. The post was named Camp 

Hood in honor of Confederate General John 

Bell Hood. 

The war brought prosperity as well as the 

need to sacrifice. American military progress 

soon dimmed the possibility of any enemy 

attack on America, but Austinites had to contend 

with war shortages and rationing of 

everything from sugar to tires. The city put in 

a municipal vegetable garden on 72.5 acres of 

city land on two tracts along the Colorado 

River off Barton Springs Road. In the summer 

of 1943, the garden yielded enough corn, 

sweet potatoes, green beans, onions, and tomatoes 

to keep the city-owned Brackenridge 

Hospital supplied for months, with 35,000 jars 

put up in reserve. Austinites were urged to cultivate 

their own gardens as well. They also collected 

scrap metal for recycling into war material 

and saved their kitchen grease for production 

of glycerine. 

Production of another ingredient of war, 

the light metal magnesium, began on October 

31, 1942 at a $23 million plant constructed 

on a tract of land adjacent to the railroad 

tracks eight miles north of Austin. Again, the 

Chamber of Commerce—which in the Walter 

Long era amounted to Austin’s second governing 

body—had put together a deal to provide 

the land at a low cost, winning the plant 

for Austin despite stiff competition. 

The ongoing world war was not stopping 

Austin’s business leaders from thinking about 

the future. On March 12, 1944, the Austin 

American-Statesman published 44,000 copies 

of an eight-page tabloid, “Inventory of Some 

Present and Future Needs for Austin and Its 

Territory.” Prepared by the Chamber of 

Commerce, the publication was a wish list— 

the Chamber was careful to say it was not a 

plan—based on interviews with 11,700 citizens 

begun in 1943. “From this inventory,” 

the text on the front page explained, “necessary 

projects for immediate attention when 

the war is over, other projects for a five- or 

✧ 

Top: During World War II, civilians pitched 

aluminum cans into a collection bin near 

the Capitol. 


Above: Even before the war began, Austinites 

were lending a hand to Great Britain. 


Bottom, left: Three Women’s Army Corps 

members pay a visit to a pond on the 

Capitol grounds. 

Middle, left: Women’s Volunteer Services 

helped out on the home front while men 

served in the armed forces. Here they are 

delivering Austin’s 1942 telephone directories. 


Left. Austin inductees are sworn in. 


CHAPTER 

NINE 

73

✧ 

Above: Portrait of Walter Long, a major 

figure in the economic development of the 

Capital City. 

Top, right: With the victory over Japan 

(V-J Day, August 9, 1945), spontaneous 

celebrations sprang up all over Austin, like 

this one in the rotunda of the Capitol. 

Below: Four decades after the dam broke, 

Austin finally got a lake on the Colorado. 



74 

ten-year period after the war, and projects for 

long-range achievement, may be sorted into 

appropriate categories.” 

The inventory listed ideas in nineteen categories, 

from agriculture to preparedness 

(“The inventive genius of men which has 

evolved explosives, death-dealing gases, and 

rocket planes—can result in the subjugation 

of all civilized nations to barbaric rule if the 

Christian nations of the world lapse into a 

condition of unpreparedness”). 

Some of the ideas were particular to the 

times, others quite visionary. Under the 

health category was a suggestion that male 

cedar trees around Austin be destroyed and 

replaced “with suitable trees as determined by 

research in types of vegetation” in an effort to 

curb asthma, a term the report used to 

include allergies. A suggestion that landing 

spaces for helicopters be located “throughout 

the city” evokes a Jetsons-like image of average 

folks whirling around town in flying helicars, 

but most of the ideas were solid: Use 

Bergstrom field for international air transportation; 

build a low dam to create a shallow 

lake in downtown Austin and beautify it; 

build a “Super Highway” to provide for north 

and south “interregional transportation;” and 

build more parks, schools, and better roads. 

Still, the report stressed, it was necessary to 

“Win the War First.” 

One of the ideas set forth in the inventory, 

though it never materialized, had to do

with a facility that would play a crucial role 

in Austin’s future development: the magnesium 

plant. 

“No community is well-balanced in its 

civic or commercial life without a reasonable 

number of properly located industrial plants,” 

the Chamber’s report said. Listed under 

industrial projects was this suggestion: 

“Stimulate the greater use of magnesium in 

post-war production of utensils, implements, 

vehicles and other everyday necessities 

requiring metal.” 

Coming up with additional uses for magnesium, 

which was produced at the plant from 

dolomite mined in the Hill Country, would 

lead to the opening of additional factories, the 

report reasoned. With the increased demand 

for the metal, the magnesium plant would be 

able to stay in operation after the war. 

But even before the war ended shortly after 

the use of two atomic bombs on Japan in the 

summer of 1945, the magnesium plant had 

been shut down. For a time, its twenty-eight 

buildings stood vacant. 

Soon, enrollment at the University was 

soaring as returning veterans sought higher 

education under the GI Bill. Jake Pickle, back 

from service in the Navy, started a new 

Austin radio station with several other 

investors, including future Governor John B. 

Connally. They sought and received from the 

Federal Communications Commission the 

call letters KVET, the VET for veterans. 

Overwhelmed by the surge in enrollment, 

the University cast its eyes on the 393-acre 

magnesium plant property as a place to house 

students. Rethinking that idea, the University 

decided that the plant would make a perfect 

place for research projects. The students 

could live in a small city of converted Army 

barracks moved to the University-owned 

Brackenridge tract in West Austin. 

In 1946, the former magnesium plant was 

leased to the University by the federal War 

Assets Administration for one dollar a year. 

Three years later, with help from freshman 

U.S. Senator Lyndon Johnson, a deal was 

struck enabling UT to buy the property for 

$1.5 million from the federal government in 

exchange for providing educational benefits 

over a twenty-year period. 

The Balcones Research Center was still 

well outside Austin. The city limits ended at 

✧ 

Top, left: Magnesium plant under 

construction. Magnesium production 

was vital to the U.S. war effort. 

Above: The plant produced its first 

magnesium ingot on October 31, 1942. 

Below: W. Sixth Street, looking east from 

Guadalupe after the streetcar tracks were 

removed. The U. S. flag flies over the old 

Federal Building at 124 W. Sixth Street. 


CHAPTER 

NINE 

75

✧ 

Above: 1940 view of Austin looking 

northeast from Calcasieu Lumber Company. 


Below, right: The Chamber of Commerce 

touted Austin’s post-war educational, 

industrial, and recreational opportunities. 


45th Street on the north, and only a small 

part of the city was south of the river. 

Highway 81, the route used to drive from San 

Antonio to Dallas, cut through Austin via 

Congress Avenue, Eleventh Street, 

Guadalupe, and Lamar Boulevard. 

Voters in 1946 approved a $940,000 

bond issue to fund development of an 

Interregional Highway, one of the suggestions 

made by the Chamber two years earlier. 

During the debate preceding the election, 

Mayor Miller said if Austinites voted for the 

highway, the city would finally benefit from 

“the great thoroughfare prophesied by the 

people who founded Austin in 1839.” The 

highway would connect with Highway 81 in 

South Austin and extend up East Avenue to 

55th Street, part of the route of the old 

Chisholm Trail. 

While the city voted bonds to build a better 

highway, an older mode of transportation 

still serving Austin continued to fund its construction 

itself. The Missouri Pacific Lines 

“News Reel,” the company’s twice-a-month 

newsletter, reported on August 1, 1949 that 

its new passenger station in Austin would 

open on August 8. “Paid for,” the newsletter 

added, “entirely out of railroad funds…no 

subsidy from the government…. That’s the 

American Way.” The Katy and the Southern 

Pacific (the successor, through buyouts, of the 

old Houston and Texas Central) continued to 

use Austin’s aged passenger terminal at Third 

and Congress. 

By 1950, Austin’s population had finally 

broken the 100,000 mark, with 32,459 resi- 


76

dents to spare. The city covered 

37.87 square miles, an increase of 

only 4.74 square miles in a decade. 

Enrollment at the University had 

passed the 20,000 mark. Austin now 

had three major hospitals, more than 

one million books in its state, university, 

and city libraries, eight 

hotels, five drive-in movies, five 

banks, four radio stations, and, as of 

Thanksgiving Day 1952, its first television 

station, KTBC. 

Though downtown Austin 

remained the primary place to shop 

for more than another decade, stores 

and shops were beginning to establish 

branch locations on the fastgrowing 

edges of the city. Burnet 

Road, for years only a country lane, 

saw considerable commercial development 

during the 1950s. Shopping 

✧ 

The Driskill Hotel's World War II-era 

breakfast menu featured sumptuous 

selections, with most items costing less 

than $1.25. 


CHAPTER 

NINE 

77

✧ 

Above: Aerial view of Austin in the early 1950s. 

Below: Mayor “Tom” Miller at the October 

1960 opening of the Austin Public Library 

Howson Branch. 


centers developed on East Avenue, Lamar 

Boulevard, Exposition Boulevard and South 

Congress Avenue. 

One of the businesses moving to the suburbs 

was the Night Hawk restaurant chain, 

which opened the Frisco Shop on Burnet 

Road in 1952. Six years later, owner Harry 

Akin became the first Austin restaurateur 

to open his places of business 

to black customers. Racial integration 

came to Austin with relative quiet, 

at least compared with other cities in 

the south. 

The 1950s in Austin also saw the 

beginning of the Capitol Complex with 

the construction of the first major new 

state office building in two decades. A 

State Building Commission was created 

in 1954 to oversee construction of a 

new home for the Texas Supreme Court 

and develop a master plan for other 

state office buildings in the vicinity of 

the Capitol. 

The Supreme Court Building was 

dedicated in 1959 along with a building 

for the Texas Employment Commission 

and a third state office building named in 

honor of Sam Houston. All the buildings had 

granite facades to keep them architecturally 

compatible with the Capitol. 

By the end of the decade, planning was 

under way for a new Archives building, a 

facility that would get the state’s priceless historical 

records out of their makeshift home in 

a quonset hut at Camp Mabry. On Texas 

Independence Day in 1958, the Houston 

Chronicle reported that the State Library and 

Historical Commission was recommending 

that the archives be placed in a $2.5 million 

replica of the old limestone Capitol, the only 

difference being the addition of two wings. If 

the story had run on April 1 instead of March 

2, most Texans would have assumed it to 

be an April Fool’s joke. The plan died a justified 

death, but by the spring of 1962, Texas 

finally had a permanent home for its 

records—a granite building that matched the 

Capitol and others in the growing governmental 

complex. 

On April 30, 1962, an era ended with the 

death of Tom Miller, the man who served as 

mayor (1933-49;1955-61) longer than anyone 

in the city’s history. 

Miller, the Austin American said in its lead 

editorial the day after the former mayor’s 

death, “leaves behind him one of the truly 

great records of public service which adorn 

the pages of Texas history.” 


78

TOWARD THE 21ST CENTURY 

Sometimes history changes in a day. Most of the time, epochal transformations begin subtly, 

with little or no fanfare. 

When the first dam across the Colorado broke on April 7, 1900, Austin’s hopes for growth and 

prosperity in the early 20th Century washed downstream with the swirling floodwaters. Since the 

dam had been one of the largest structures of its type in the world, its failure was big news. What 

happened north of Austin nearly sixty-seven years later did not make bold headlines, but it marked 

the beginning of a new Austin. 

On February 27, 1967, Austin Statesman page-one columnist Wray Weddell, a journalist on the 

city’s daily since the mid-1950s, had this short item near the bottom of that day’s column: “Without 

groundbreaking fanfare, IBM has started construction on its $4 million plant on FM 1325 north of 

Balcones Research Center.” 

For decades, Austin had looked to its river as its key to industrial development, but that longtime 

goal had remained elusive. Until the IBM plant went into operation, one of Austin’s biggest 

✧ 

Austin boomed in the early 1980s as 

high-tech industries came to the city. 


CHAPTER 

TEN 

79

✧ 

Right: IBM, shown in this aerial view, 

opened its Austin plant in 1967. 

Below, right: Aerial view in 1961, looking 

north from Eighth Street to the University 

of Texas, with Congress Avenue and the 

Capitol in the center. 

Opposite, top left: Austin’s first library 

building is now home of the Austin History 

Center. 


Opposite, top right: Advertising brochure 

shows idealized image of suburban life in 

the early 1960s. 


Opposite, bottom right: Dignitaries gather 

for the dedication of a new state office 

building adjacent to the 1857 Land Office 

building near the Capitol. 



80

industries was a business that made chili. 

What would transform Austin, however, was 

not the Colorado, but the spinoff effect of 

the enterprise described with the last three 

words of Weddell’s column item: Balcones 

Research Center. 

The conversion of the war-time magnesium 

plant into an off-campus research center 

for the University was an event that changed 

the city’s history as surely as Mirabeau B. 

Lamar’s 1838 buffalo hunt and his vision of a 

future capital. In retrospect, development of 

the Balcones Research Center stands in significance 

second only to the election that made 

Austin the permanent home of the university. 

Knowledge—not water, not charcoal from 

cedar trees, not limestone, not precious minerals 

in the hills, not railroads, not superhighways, 

not air travel—in the end proved to be 

the force that finally turned Austin into an 

industrial city. 

That concept began dawning on civic leaders 

and the Chamber of Commerce in the late 

1940s, but it was not until the nation’s space 

program began gaining altitude in the early 

1960s that research began to be seriously 

regarded as an avenue to industrial development 

sans smokestacks. In the summer of 

1963, the Chamber-supported Austin 

Economic Development Council ran advertising 

in the Wall Street Journal touting Austin as 

“a fast growing community of R&D companies 

and space support manufacturers…. 

Won’t you consider joining them?” 

The Balcones Research Center, the 

Statesman said on September 24, 1963, “is the 

site of numerous important government 

research projects, such as probing into space 

and studying possible techniques for landing 

CHAPTER 

TEN 

81

✧ 

Right: The new Ausin Library building at 

8th and Guadalupe streets during the final 

stages of construction in 1979. 


Below, left: Night view of Austin’s 

mid-1970s skyline. 


Below, right: Hike and bike trails were 

developed along Town Lake in the 1970s. 

PHOTO BY MIKE COX. 

on the moon. From strategic metal [referring 

to the magnesium plant] to the stratosphere’s 

edge the chamber leads the way in helping to 

establish Austin as a research center.” 

The first tangible benefit to Austin from 

the Balcones Research Center had come in 

1955, when moonlighting work by scientists 

at the center evolved into the Texas Research 

Associates Corporation. In 1962, merging 

with another University-spawned group, 

Textran Corporation, the group became 

Tracor. Its specialty was acoustics and it soon 


82

egan picking up major federal Defense 

Department contracts. 

The Chamber in 1966 hired someone to 

concentrate specifically on economic development, 

selling Austin to industry by touting 

its university and a term destined to become 

a major political buzzword: quality of life. It 

did not take long for this pitch to produce 

results. Late that year IBM announced it 

would build a plant in Austin. 

Even after the groundbreaking at the IBM 

plant, the key word in Austin’s quest for 

industrial development was “research” not 

“computer.” And the term “high tech” had yet 

to enter the jargon. Research, however, was 

increasingly dependent on the computer. 

In 1958, the university opened its 

Computation Center with the purchase of a 

Control Data Corporation Model 1604. 

Austin had entered the computer age. Little 

attention, however, was paid to this development. 

Eight years later, UT paid $6 million 

for its first super computer, a Control Data 

Corporation Model 6600. 

When the IBM plant began operation, 

however, the huge company was not yet 

involved in computers. The first Austin-produced 

IBM product was called a Selectric 

Composer, a machine used in offset printing. 

Still, the new plant had begun a slow chain 

reaction that in less than two decades would 

heat to near fusion point. Two IBM-related 

companies had moved to Austin and two 

more were planned by the summer of 1967. 

Earlier that year, columnist Weddell had 

noted that the Chamber was “answering 

inquiries from ‘half a dozen’ industrial firms 

best described as IBM ‘allies’.” The count of 

allied business coming to Austin because of 

IBM had reached nine by 1968. 

In 1969, the same year man landed on 

the moon, the microprocessor—a silicon 

✧ 

Left: In the 1970s, demolition of 19th century 

houses, such as the 1872 Hunnicut house at 

405 W. Twelfth Street, became a political 

issue. This old home was razed in 1974. 

Below: The old fire station, Austin Hose 

Co. No. 6, on Guadalupe Street at 30th 

Street, was built to accommodate horsedrawn 

fire wagons. The building is now 

home to Ballet Austin. 

PHOTOS BY MIKE COX. 

CHAPTER 

TEN 

83

✧ 

Top, left: Some old Austin landmarks 

survived the wrecking balls of the 1970s and 

1980s, such as this Victorian mansion at 

Ninth and Lavaca streets. 


Right: Austinites flock to festivals like bats 

in pursuit of bugs. This is the Old Pecan 

Street Festival on Sixth Street. 


Below: The Austin music scene, personified 

by Willie Nelson, grew in the 1970s. 


Bottom right: As Austin boomed, the old and 

the new were more sharply contrasted 

than ever before. 


thought, were for big business, government, 

and the space program. Researchers and 

aspiring entrepreneurs, however, were beginning 

to see big possibilities for small chips. 

In 1971, Texas Instruments, which had 

opened a plant in Austin two years earlier, 

manufactured a hand-held electronic calculator, 

a device that would soon make the venerable 

slide rule a curious antique. In 1972, the 

University joined ARPANet, a governmentfunded 

datalink between computers that 

would later become known as the Internet. 

Motorola, a company known for its twoway 

radios, arrived in 1974. Within a decade 

it and several start-up companies would be 

manufacturing microprocessor chips. By 

1985, Motorola had become Austin’s largest 

private employer. 

Austinites John and Robert Burns had purchip 

containing miniaturized integrated circuits—was 

invented. This chip, the Intel 

4004, marked the beginning of a technological 

revolution that would profoundly affect 

the world. 

Throughout the 1970s, however, the 

development of the capital city as a high tech 

center progressed slowly, with little attention 

on the part of the general public or the mainstream 

news media. A third of all Austin 

workers were employed by government. IBM 

was still known as a company that made electric 

typewriters. Computers, most people 


84

Also in 1983, Austin won a nationwide 

competition and was selected as the site of the 

country’s first high-tech consortium, the 

Microelectronics and Computer Technology 

Corporation (MCC). 

Supported by twelve major firms in the 

booming computer industry, MCC was hailed 

by civic leaders as a milestone in the city’s hischased 

a kit in 1975 and put together what is 

believed to have been the first personal computer 

in the city. The Burns brothers went on 

to start Austin’s first computer hardware firm. 

In 1981, IBM brought out a personal computer, 

a desktop machine that would soon 

put the company out of the electric typewriter 

business. Two years later, the first personal 

computer with a hard-disk drive was introduced 

by the company. That same year, 1983, 

Apple Computer put a device called a 

“mouse” on the market. 

✧ 

Above: UT football teams won national 

championships in 1963 and 1969 under 

Coach Darrell K. Royal. 


Far left: Traffic flow has grown steadily on 

I-35, which only old-timers still call the 

“Interregional.” 


Left: View of the inside of the Capitol dome. 


CHAPTER 

TEN 

85

✧ 

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and 

Museum, constructed on the campus of 

The University of Texas, was completed 

on May 22, 1971. 



86 

tory, almost as important as the opening of 

the University. 

A year later, Michael Dell, a University 

dropout, started a company that soon was 

manufacturing IBM clones. Ten years later, 

having long since begun making his own 

product, Dell had become one of the richest 

men in America and his firm the Austin area’s 

second largest employer. 

Austin’s research-oriented talent pool 

helped attract high-tech industry, but so did 

another kind of pool—Barton Springs and the 

attractive environment it would come to symbolize. 

As new residents began flowing into

the city like runoff after a three-inch rain, the 

city’s quality of life was the common explanation 

of Austin’s lure to outsiders. 

Ironically, the exponential growth Austin 

first began experiencing in the 1970s set up 

what became one of the city’s fundamental 

local political issues—growth versus quality 

of life, a phrase that increasingly became the 

code term for no growth or controlled 

growth. Despite protests, the construction of 

new buildings generally took precedence over 

the preservation of any historic old homes or 

even older trees which happened to be in the 

proverbial path of progress. In time, however, 

even most of those pushing for growth found 

it politically expedient to pay at least nodding 

attention to controlled, environmentally, and 

culturally-sensitive growth. 

One of the best examples of Austin’s quality 

of life was the completion of a project talked 

about since at least the late 1930s—one more 

dam on the Colorado. Despite the series of 

Lower Colorado River Authority dams that created 

Lake Austin and a string of beautiful highland 

lakes above Austin, the Colorado below 

Tom Miller Dam still was just a river. While it 

no longer flooded without warning, it was not 

much to look at. Its banks continued in what 

passed for a natural state—urban neglect. 

The City of Austin built a dam across the 

river in 1960 at the rocky ford where the old 

Chisholm Trail once crossed. Fittingly, the 

structure was named Longhorn Dam. The 

name chosen for the new constant-level lake, 

which would provide cooling water for the 

city’s Holly Street electric plant in addition to 

✧ 

Heavy traffic necessitated the doubledecking 

of I-35 in the 1970s, seen here 

under construction. 


CHAPTER 

TEN 

87

✧ 

Above: By the late 1980s, air traffic at 

Austin’s Robert Mueller airport, seen here in 

an aerial view, had grown so large that 

plans were begun to build a new airport on 

the site of the former Bergstrom Air Force 

Base. 

Right: The National Wildflower Research 

Center opened on December 22, 1982, 

Lady Bird Johnson's 70th birthday. 



88 

improving the scenery downtown, was not so 

fitting. What to call the impoundment became 

a matter of controversy. Someone proposed 

Lake Tonkawa, but vocal critics claimed that 

the Tonkawas had not distinguished themselves 

as a culture. Austin judge Truman 

O’Quinn said the lake should be named in 

honor of Mirabeau B. Lamar. Other names, 

including Lake Longhorn, were suggested and 

debated. Two years after the lake filled, the 

city council opted for the generic Town Lake, 

non-offensive aside from its dullness. 

How the lake would be used was a matter 

of nearly as much contention as what it 

would be called. Motorboats were banned 

and the emphasis was placed on development 

of the lake as a park, not another place to ski. 

A couple of years after President Lyndon 

Johnson left office in 1969, Lady Bird 

Johnson, the former First Lady, made the 

beautification of Town Lake a major cause. 

Soon hike-and-bike trails lined its banks and 

moved into the city up Shoal Creek like 

climbing ivy. The planning term “green belt” 

entered the popular vernacular. 

As Town Lake got spruced up, Austin’s cultural 

landscape was changing, too. Sixth

Street, which had gone from being the city’s 

second most important business artery to a 

semi-seedy street lined with bars, pawnshops 

and a few die-hard oldtime businesses, 

became a trendy district sporting upscale 

restaurants, bars, and walk-up apartments. 

One of the attractions was Austin’s emerging 

music scene, a distinctive blend of rock and 

country from longhairs in cowboy hats. 

Writers began referring to the “Austin sound.” 

Long time country-western singer and songwriter 

Willie Nelson reinvented himself and 

✧ 

Above: Fire on February 6, 1983 destroyed 

the apartment of Lt. Gov. William P. 

Hobby, Jr. in the east wing of the Capitol. 

Left: Numerous large office buildings 

sprouted south of the Capitol in the 1980s. 


CHAPTER 

TEN 

89

✧ 

Bergstrom Air Force Base. Aerial shot of the 

base built in 1942 on a large expanse of cotton 

fields and much of the original community of 

Del Valle. The closure of the base gave the city 

the opportunity for a new airport location. 



90 

became an international hit star. Artist Eddie 

Wilson went from mural painting to more 

involved entrepreneurial pursuits, opening 

his Armadillo World Headquarters, a popular 

music venue with a food menu. 

President Richard Nixon came to Austin on 

May 22, 1971 for the dedication of the $14 

million Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential 

Library and Museum on the eastern edge of the 

University campus. So did thousands of young 

people protesting the ongoing involvement of 

the U.S. in Vietnam, but Austin Police, Texas 

Department of Public Safety Troopers, and 

Texas Rangers held the angry crowd in check. 

The same year, construction began on a 

long discussed and often controversial West 

Austin expressway called MoPac because it 

alternately paralleled or straddled the 

Missouri-Pacific Railroad right-of-way. 

Neighborhood groups battled various proposed 

exits and won some of their fights, 

leaving the freeway harder to get on or off of 

in some parts of the city. 

Austin grew from a population of 251,808 

in 1970 to 345,890 people a decade later. 

Slowed only briefly by the collapse of the savings 

and loan industry and the 1985 bottoming 

out of the oil market in Texas, Austin really 

began booming. The city started developing a 

skyline, its once distinctive Capitol dome and 

University Tower overshadowed by other, taller 

buildings. Some wag suggested that the official 

city bird should be the construction crane. 

Thousands of people moved to Austin to 

take part in its laid-back lifestyle, but they 

found that living in a boom town was not 

without problems. Traffic grew heavier each 

year, forcing the double-decking of a long 

stretch of I-35 (only old-timers called it the 

Interregional any more) through the city. The 

City Council annexed new territory like a 

hungry amoeba.

Thanks to the dams along the Colorado, 

however, one problem most Austinites did 

not worry about was flooding. In fact, many 

Austinites had never seen a major flood on 

the order of the mile-wide rises in the mid- 

1930s. But on Memorial Day 1981, a torrential 

ten-inch rain falling in only two hours on 

the Shoal Creek watershed sent the West 

Austin creek on a devastating rampage. 

Thirteen people, more than any of Austin’s 

Colorado River floods ever claimed, died in 

the flash flood that Sunday night. Damage 

was estimated at $30 to $35 million. 

On another Sunday two years later, another 

disaster threatened Austin. Before dawn on 

February 6, 1983, fire broke out in the 

Capitol apartment of then Lieutenant 

Governor Bill Hobby and quickly spread 

through the east wing of the city’s landmark 

granite statehouse. The first fire company 

arrived to see black smoke pouring from the 

historic building and called for more help. 

History nearly repeated itself. The fire, 

which started in a television set, spread through 

the crawl space between floors, an area hard to 

get water on. At one point, acting Fire Chief 

Brady Pool warned Governor Mark White and 

Mayor Carol Keeton McClellan, who had 

joined hundreds of others gathered outside the 

building, that the fire might be beyond control. 

Pool suggested that state officials begin emptying 

the building of everything they could. 

Pool’s firefighters finally prevailed and 

brought the fire under control. Damage was 

extensive, but not severe enough to threaten 

the structural integrity of the massive building. 

Just as the 1881 Capitol fire had made a 

new building necessary a century before, the 

1983 fire became the catalyst for the most 

extensive renovation in the Capitol’s history. 

While they were at it, the Legislature also 

✧ 

Above: Another 19th century downtown 

structure, at the southeast corner of Tenth 

and Guadalupe streets, that did not survive 

the era of rapid growth in the last quarter 

of the 20th century. 

Left: The 1885 Henry Hirshfeld mansion, 

at 303 W. Ninth Street, survived and was 

restored by Texas A&M University for use 

as an Austin office. 

PHOTOS BY MIKE COX. 

CHAPTER 

TEN 

91

✧ 

This Civil War-era house, built 

at 115 W. Eighth Street by attorney 

William Alexander, was torn down in 1974. 


Opposite, top: Aerial view of downtown 

Austin before the beautification of Town 

Lake. 



92 

approved construction of an underground 

extension. Ground was broken on April 26, 

1990. Less than three years later, the extension 

opened to the public. The $200 million project 

was formally dedicated on April 21, 1995. 

While planning for the Capitol cleanup 

and expansion had been under way, Austin 

replicated its successful wooing of MCC with 

the landing in 1988 of Sematech, a semiconductor 

research consortium with a $250 million 

annual budget. Austin had competed 

with 135 cities across the nation for the high 

tech prize. 

In 1990, the census showed Austin had 

465,622 residents. Five years later, the city 

passed the half million mark and the Austin 

MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) exceeded 

one million in population. By 1996, Austin 

had surpassed Seattle in population and was 

the forty-third largest metropolitan area in 

the nation. 

As the growth of Austin took off, so did 

the number of passengers arriving and 

departing from Austin’s Robert Mueller 

Municipal Airport. The $1.3 million terminal, 

which won its designers a “Progressive 

Architecture” award, opened in 1961 and 

had been expanded over the years to accommodate 

sixteen gates. With more than one 

million passengers passing through the airport 

each year, the facility had come a long 

way since the early days of aviation in the 

city, when the manager of the airport had to 

spread a white canvas wagon sheet on the 

ground outside the original wooden terminal 

to signal an approaching commercial aircraft 

that someone in Austin had bought an airplane 

ticket. 

Realizing Austin needed a new, bigger airport, 

city planners at first focused on a site 

near Manor. Voters in 1987 endorsed a $728 

million bond issue to fund a new facility. 

Land speculation around Manor was almost 

as intense as it had been when Edwin Waller 

first laid out Austin in 1839. But Manor’s 

scheduled flight into a prosperous new century 

was canceled with the end of the Cold 

War and the down-sizing of the U.S. military. 

Austin’s half-century old Air Force Base 

found itself on the targeting radar of a cutback 

minded Congress in 1990. During 

Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, when the blueand-white 

Boeing 707 called Air Force One 

was a frequent sight at the air base, 

Bergstrom got world-wide attention. In 

1967, no one was particularly surprised 

when the Pentagon announced that 

Bergstrom would become the headquarters of 

the 12th Air Force. All Tactical Air Command 

operations west of the Mississippi would be 

directed from the two-story $2.7 million 

doughnut-shaped headquarters building that

went up at the base. With nearly $50 million 

invested in buildings and infrastructure at 

Bergstrom, Austin’s business and governmental 

leaders assumed the base would be a part 

of Austin and its economy forever. “The 

choice of the base as the site for the 12th 

headquarters assures that Bergstrom will 

remain active,” they had confidently reported 

on October 17, 1968. 

Despite the best efforts of local, state and 

national politicians, Congress in June 1991 

ordered the base closed. Austin city officials 

began planning to convert the base, which covered 

six square miles and had a 12,250-foot 

runway, into a new municipal airport. The long 

runway was left over from Bergstrom’s days as 

a home for B-52 bombers during its time as a 

Strategic Air Command facility. 

Federal funding was secured with major 

help from U.S. Congressman Jake Pickle, and 

Austin voters in 1994 approved a $400 million 

bond issue to pay for the city’s share of 

the airport’s cost. Construction of the 

500,000-square foot, twenty-gate terminal 

began on March 6, 1995. Cargo planes started 

using the new airport in the summer of 1997 

and passenger flights were expected to move 

from the old airport to the new Bergstrom 

International Airport in the spring of 1999. 

The last time Austin was at the threshold 

of a new century, its future looked promising. 

Then its dam broke and optimism dried 

up faster than the muddy river bottom that 

had been the city’s world-class lake and 

power source. The optimism eventually 

returned, and so, in time, did Austin’s lake. 

But rows of smokestacks never sprouted 

along the banks of its river and creeks. Later, 

a Chamber of Commerce report—produced 

as Austin first began seeking research-based 

industry—pondered what lay ahead for the 

city. Its conclusion is no less valid today than 

it was then: “The future—It’s as bright as we 

want to make it.” 

✧ 

Below: Portrait of U.S. Congressman 

J. J. “Jake” Pickle. 


CHAPTER 

TEN 

93

SHARING THE HERITAGE 

historic profiles of businesses 

and organizations that have contributed 

to the development and economic base 

of Austin 

PATRONS 

Centex Materials, Inc. 

Williams 

Communications, Inc. 

FRIENDS 

American Bank 

of Commerce 

Chase Bank of Texas 

Texas Municipal 

Retirement System 

The Whitley Company 

POSTCARDS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.

BUILDING A GREATER AUSTIN 

98 Temple-Inland Financial Services, Inc. 

100 Steiner Ranch 

102 Murfree Engineering Company, Inc. 

103 PageSoutherlandPage 

104 Faulkner Construction Company 

105 KLW, Inc. 

106 Macias & Associates, Inc. 

107 Harutunian Engineering, Incorporated 


TEMPLE-INLAND 

FINANCIAL 

SERVICES, INC. 

✧ 

Above: With more than 1,200 employees, 

Temple-Inland Financial Services is one of 

the largest employers in the Austin area. 

Below: 1300 South MoPac is headquarters 

for the company’s thriving banking, 

mortgage lending, insurance, and land 

development businesses. 


98 

Temple-Inland Financial Services, Inc., 

one of the largest financial services companies 

based in Texas, traces its roots to the 

piney woods of the eastern part of the Lone 

Star State. 

The company’s history begins in the 1890s 

with the founding of its parent company, 

Southern Pine Lumber Company, by T.L.L. 

Temple. Instead of following the “cut-out and 

get-out” logging philosophy of the time, Mr. 

Temple and his descendants visualized a company 

that could further capitalize on its forest 

resources. With Americans beginning to 

migrate from city confines to suburban neighborhoods, 

the company wisely diversified by 

turning its forest resources not only into lumber 

but also into building materials such as 

fiberboard, particleboard and plywood. 

During the mid-1950s, Lumbermen’s 

Investment Corporation 

was created to encourage 

homebuilding and to help 

people finance new houses. 

Southern Pine Lumber 

Company was renamed 

Temple Industries, and the 

“vertically integrated” forest 

products giant expanded 

into neighboring Arkansas, 

then Alabama and Georgia. 

The company’s success 

was further expanded when 

Temple Industries merged 

with communications conglomerate, 

Time, Inc., in 

1973. A decade later, when Time decided to 

focus solely on its media properties, Temple 

and Time’s Inland Container Corporation 

were combined and spun-off to the public as 

Temple-Inland, Inc. 

Temple Inland’s financial services expanded 

further with the acquisition of Guaranty 

Federal Bank in 1988. Even today, a century 

after its parent’s founding, the Austin-based 

company maintains ties to its forest industry 

heritage while engaged in banking, singlefamily 

home mortgages, insurance products 

and land development across the nation. 

Today, Temple-Inland is one of the nation’s 

largest producers of corrugated packaging, 

paper products, building materials and financial 

services with annual revenues exceeding 

$2.6 billion. Its subsidiary companies are 

located throughout North America, Canada, 

Mexico, Argentina and Chile. Temple-Inland 

controls approximately 2.2 million acres of 

forest land in four Southern states and is the 

largest corporate landowner in Texas. 

The financial services group started in 

1954 as an outgrowth of an association of 

lumber dealers based in Austin to lobby the 

Texas Legislature. Out of the association, 

Arthur Temple and other lumber dealers created 

Lumbermen’s Investment Corporation to 

finance homebuilding as a means to sell more 

lumber. By 1960, Temple had bought out the 

other dealers and began expanding the company’s 

financial services into banking, single 

family home mortgages and insurance. Today, 

Temple-Inland Financial Services consists of

Guaranty Federal Bank, Temple-Inland 

Mortgage Corporation, and Timberline 

Insurance Managers, as well as Lumbermen’s 

Investment Corporation. 

Guaranty Federal Bank is one of the state’s 

largest financial institutions owned by a 

Texas-based company. With $11 billion in 

assets and $7 billion in deposits, Guaranty 

has more than 140 banking centers throughout 

the state, with concentrations in Austin, 

Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio. 

In 1997, Guaranty acquired Stockton Savings 

Bank, giving it a major presence in the fastgrowing 

San Joaquin Valley in California. 

Guaranty is recognized nationally as one of 

the largest construction lenders to the commercial 

and residential real estate industry. 

The bank finances builders of apartments, 

single family homes, senior citizen housing, 

office, industrial, retail and other income-producing 

properties from coast to coast. 

Additionally, Guaranty’s mortgage finance 

group is one of the largest lenders to the 

mortgage banking industry in the country. 

Temple-Inland Mortgage Corporation is a 

major provider of single-family home mortgages. 

Servicing more than 250,000 homebuyers 

in all 50 states makes the company 

among the nation’s largest. With the acquisition 

of Western Cities Mortgage Company of 

California in 1996 and Knutson Mortgage in 

Minnesota in 1997, Temple-Inland’s total servicing 

portfolio grew to more than $26 billion. 

Timberline Insurance Managers, Inc., is 

the second largest insurance agency in Texas 

and ranks in the top 1% nationally. The company 

provides a full range of insurance products, 

including personal and commercial 

lines, annuities, life and health insurance, and 

risk advisory services. 

Today, Lumbermen’s Investment, from 

which the financial services group grew, concentrates 

on the development and sale of residential 

subdivisions and other income-producing 

properties. In Austin, the company 

was behind the development of the Westgate 

Building and the Radisson Hotel, as well as 

the Onion Creek, Buttercup Creek, Village at 

Western Oaks and Anderson Mill residential 

subdivisions. In addition to other Texas properties, 

Lumbermen’s has expanded its opera- 

tions to Colorado, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, 

Missouri, Tennessee and California. 

Temple-Inland Financial Services, with 

more than 1,200 employees, is one of the 

largest local employers. Its headquarters on 

MoPac Expressway, built in 1995, was the 

first to meet the city’s strict S.O.S. guidelines 

designed to protect the Barton Creek watershed. 

The facility is being doubled in size to 

accommodate the company’s growth. 

“Temple-Inland Financial Services is a people 

company. We touch people every day with 

what we do,” states Kenny Jastrow, Chairman 

and CEO. “Together with our parent company, 

we grow the trees, make the lumber, 

develop homesites, finance the builders, provide 

mortgages, insure homes and families, 

and provide places to bank,” he says. “We call 

it ‘From Seeds to Deeds.’” 

✧ 

Above: Temple-Inland Financial Services 

land development division, Lumbermen’s 

Investment Corporation, is one of the largest 

developers of single-family neighborhoods in 

Austin, while Temple-Inland Mortgage 

Corporation makes thousands of singlefamily 

loans each year. 

Below: Temple-Inland’s nationally famous 

Onion Creek Golf Course will be the host 

site for a 1999 L.P.G.A. event…the first in 

Austin. 

Sharing the Heritage | BUILDING A GREATER AUSTIN 

99

STEINER 

RANCH 

✧ 

Above: The Steiners prepare for rodeo. 

Below: The lakefront with boat docks. 

Many places lay claim to being God’s 

Country—not a few of them in Texas—giving 

rise to the notion that the same itinerant publicist 

worked for a lot of chambers of commerce. 

The folks at Steiner Ranch, those lucky and 

smart enough to live here, and the developers, 

don’t subscribe to that kind of hyperbole. 

They let the extravagance of nature speak 

for them, which it does with eloquence. 

It speaks of morning- misted hollows and 

the throaty chuckle of nesting quail. The hush 

of a sun-dappled trail broken by a rustling in 

the undergrowth; a parade of wild turkeys 

making their stately way home, oblivious to 

the cathedral of oaks and the honeyed spice 

of blooming mountain laurel. A deer barks. 

The solitary hiker slows, knows that just over 

there, yes, the same as yesterday, three of 

them, the youngsters learning to browse, the 

doe alert but unafraid. 

A freshet of breeze off the lake dances over 

and down the arroyos, showing its alchemic 

powers as it persuades knee-high sweetgrass to 

show its colors—now green-gold, now pewter. 

Off in the distance a new sound, faint and 

drifting in and out. A radio perhaps, playing a 

medley of old cowboy ballads in memory of a 

couple of authentic Saturday matinee heroes. 

You see, Gene Autry once passed this way 

and just the other day, he passed on to greener 

pastures. Earlier this year, another singing 

cowboy, Roy Rogers may also have taken one 

last ride through Steiner Ranch. He and Dale 

Evans and Gene visited here a few decades 

ago when the land was still in the hands of 

T.C. “Buck” Steiner, the last of four generations 

of the family to work this stunningly 

beautiful Hill Country spread. 

“Buck” was a rodeo livestock contractor, a 

member of the Cowboy Hall of Fame, whose 

ill-tempered critters once made life either 

painful or rewarding for cowboys from 

Crockett to Calgary. 

So if you happen on a fragment of dessicated 

leather girdling a Mesquite trunk, or 

kick a stone aside to reveal a pitted, nickelsilver 

concho, it’s perfectly o.k. to let a fanciful 

notion take hold for a spell. 


100

Imagination is a wondrous thing, manifesting 

itself in countless ways through different 

people; the muse of children, artists and 

inventors, a gifted architect or engineer, the 

speaker whose insights rock old beliefs. 

Imagine the individual and collective exercise 

of imagination, foresight and flexibility it 

took to carve out today’s version of Steiner 

Ranch and we gain a new appreciation for the 

validity of changes that yield multi-facted 

people-oriented benefits. 

Once allowed to languish and since 

acquired from earlier owners, Steiner Ranch 

has quickly regained its deserved status as the 

premiere community of its type and dimensions 

in this region. 

Gerald Kucera is the president and managing 

partner of MK Development, the day-today 

asset management entity for Steiner 

Ranch owners, T.H.L. Ranch, Ltd. Mr. Kucera 

is the general partner of THL and has been a 

respected real estate financier and developer 

here since 1976. 

The broader vision of Kucera and the MK 

Development team—James Plasek, Robert 

Long, Leroy Kraatz, and Frank Oberlin—is 

best expressed in their core goal: to make 

Steiner Ranch the best place for families to 

live in Austin. 

To that end, the developers are keeping 

faith with a master plan for this “land 

between the lakes” that prioritizes the natural, 

outdoors lifestyle the Hill Country promotes. 

It also respects the sense of social responsibility 

that typifies Austin. 

Miles of linked hiking and biking trails, 

vast stretches of greenbelt, parks and playing 

fields, and fully four miles of Lake Austin 

shoreline are woven into a tapestry of individual 

neighborhoods. 

Austin’s better builders, carefully selected 

for their skills and integrity, are providing an 

array of home selections in price tiers ranging 

from entry level to executive. 

Architectural covenants ensure that a balanced 

townscape is achieved and homeowner 

association bylaws provide for maintenance 

standards and common areas upkeep. 

While Steiner Ranch is a mixed-use development, 

the characteristics of the land provide 

natural barriers so that future commercial 

entities will blend unobtrusively, 

rather than encroach upon residential 

neighborhoods. 

Steiner Ranch is the embodiment 

of the reasons more and more discerning 

families prefer the master-planned 

community. 

Homeowners here enjoy a comparatively 

low tax rate. Thoughtful 

amenities are everywhere and plentiful, 

including a Junior Olympic 

pool, lighted tennis courts, patios and 

gazebos, even a private lake club 

for boaters. 

Leander Independent School District is 

one of the most progressive in the state and 

Steiner Ranch Elementary has already earned 

an “exemplary” rating from the state. 

Situated as it is on RM 620 between 

RM 2222 and Mansfield dam, Steiner Ranch 

is convenient to a significant number of 

city’s major employers, churches, restaurants 

and shopping. 

But the best of Steiner Ranch living centers 

on the subtle sensory events that seemingly 

never end. Things like the tang of 

woodsmoke on a crisp autumn night are fairly 

obvious; less apparent perhaps, but more 

important is the sense of community Steiner 

Ranch evokes...like the fond embrace of an 

old friend. 

✧ 

Above: Steiner Ranch offers amenities, 

including a Junior Olympic-sized pool, that 

are attractive to families with children. 

Below: Deer roaming the property of 

Steiner Ranch. 


101

✧ 

Above: (from left to right) Jerry Fults, 

President of Capital Surveying, David 

Malish, Vice President of Murfee 

Engineering, and George Murfee, President 

of Murfee Engineering. The GPS satellite 

surveying equipment currently being utilized 

by Capital Surveying is in the foreground. 

Below: Circle C Ranch, a 4,500-acre master 

planned community. 

MURFEE 

ENGINEERING 

COMPANY, INC. 


102 

Few companies have left their 

mark on the anatomy of presentday 

Austin as much as Murfee 

Engineering. One of the largest 

consulting engineering companies 

in Central Texas, Murfee 

Engineering has supported the 

growth of Austin for 20 years with 

environmental engineering, 

design, and surveying services for 

a diverse group of public and private-sector 

clients, whose projects 

have included subdivisions, special 

districts, roads and highways, 

as well as schools and churches. 

Specialists in municipal utility 

districts, regional water and 

wastewater planning, and 

stormwater management, the private, 

locally owned company has 

designed the underpinnings of 

some of the largest residential, 

commercial, and transportation 

projects in the region. 

George Murfee launched his 

company in 1978 as an independent 

consulting engineer just before a period of 

tremendous growth in Austin. He expanded 

his one-man firm in 1982 by hiring a staff to 

undertake the design and planning of water 

and wastewater infrastructure for a pioneering 

new 1,500-acre residential community, 

Rob Roy, in the hills west of Austin. The company 

incorporated in 1983, the same year 

Murfee created an affiliate, Capital Surveying 

Company, Inc. Over the next several years, 

the two companies undertook environmental 

planning for Circle C Ranch, a 4,500-acre 

master planned community also on the outskirts 

of the city. 

“Land development was the driving engine 

of the company,” says Murfee. 

In 1987, he pioneered the use of the U.S. 

Department of Defense’s Global Positioning 

Satellite (GPS) network in the company’s surveying 

jobs, which attracted such clients as 

the Texas Department of Transportation, 

Lower Colorado River Authority, and City of 

Austin. “We were probably the first company 

in Austin to use satellite surveying,” says 

Murfee. “We were third in the state at that 

time.” The company weathered an economic 

downturn that began that year by doing engineering 

and surveying work on major road 

improvements and key capital projects in the 

southwest quadrant of Travis County that 

included the veloway at Circle C, the 10-mile 

Slaughter Lane expansion, the southern 

extension of MoPac (Loop 1), and State 

Highway 45. 

Expertise with large-scale development 

projects has led the company into utility 

engineering in other fast-growing areas. “This 

is the growth end of the industry right now,” 

says Murfee. In 1995, the company became 

involved in utility planning for El Paso’s east 

side. One year later it undertook the infrastructure 

design work for New Mexico’s first 

and only border crossing into Mexico. The 

company also is involved in the design of 

municipal utility districts for a 1,000-acre 

multi-use development in Brownsville. 

“We have an advantage in that the state 

regulatory agencies are here in Austin,” says 

Murfee. “That is part of the reason we 

expanded in this area.”

Every morning on the Today Show, weatherman 

Willard Scott celebrates the birthdays 

of America’s centenarians. It’s left for the 

nation’s companies who achieve that milestone 

to trumpet their own longevity; many 

do so, often at great expense. 

PageSoutherlandPage is Texas’ most enduring 

and prolific architectural practice, yet the firm 

chooses to mark their 1898-1998 anniversary 

with barely a nod to an eventful past. The gesture 

is respectful—a brochure that plays back and 

forth between yesterday and now—but at midyear 

it was overdue to the printer. This is not surprising, 

however, as PageSoutherlandPage has 

always been more concerned with the future 

rather than the past. 

The 1904 World’s Fair celebrated the industrial 

revolution; its visionary theme was exemplified 

in the Texas Pavilion. It was the first public architecture 

project for founding partners Charles 

Henry, Jr. and Louis Charles Page, and it came to 

life just five years after the brothers opened shop 

as Page Brothers Architects in downtown Austin. 

The brothers were also designers of the Beaux- 

Arts Littlefield Building at 6th Street and 

Congress, another early success, along with The 

Austin National Bank, securing their reputation in 

the commercial arena. 

Many schools and courthouses, the Travis 

County Courthouse being one of dozens of examples, 

bear the Page Brothers imprimatur, and their 

heritage endures at PageSoutherlandPage. Today, 

the company’s school portfolio includes learning 

places that are engaging, flexible, economical, and 

support student success. 

Yesterday’s notable landmarks include the 

U.S. Courthouse, the Austin Municipal Building, 

Palmer Auditorium, and the University of Texas 

Art Museum. All were designed during the period 

1930-1960. 

The firm’s present name derives from the period 

of 1937-38 when Louis Southerland and Louis 

Page, Jr. joined forces. A year later, the pair are 

joined by Page’s brother, George. The first of their 

early triumphs was to be the downtown Tribune 

Building, and the firms first venture into healthcare 

design, the original Brackenridge Hospital. 

Today, PageSoutherlandPage is a world leader in 

that highly specialized architectural genre. 

The firm is also recognized as a world leader 

in the design of technology-intensive facilities, 

complex research and fabrication campuses, 

and medical laboratories, drawing on an integrated 

disciplinary heritage begun in 1942 

when PageSoutherlandPage became one of the 

nation’s first to merge architecture and engineering 

into one organization. 

Today, PageSoutherlandPage has a staff of 

more than 200 design professionals spanning 

the disciplines of architecture, engineering, 

interior design, and strategic planning. Full 

service offices are located in Austin, Dallas, 

Houston, and Washington, D.C., with international 

affiliate branches in Rome and Singapore. 

Consistently ranked among the top 500 

design firms in the nation, PageSoutherlandPage 

occupies 22nd place in size nationally and is the 

third largest design firm based in Texas. 

As to the future, one need only look at two of 

the firm’s recent commissions, the new $50 million 

Austin Convention Center and the new $100 

million Barbara Jordan passenger terminal at 

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. 

PAGESOUTHERLANDPAGE 

✧ 

Above: The Austin Convention Center. 

Below: The Littlefield Building in Austin, 

1910. 


103

FAULKNER 

CONSTRUCTION 

COMPANY 

✧ 

Top: Austin Public Library, 

Main Branch (1978). 

Middle: Riverbend Church’s auditorium 

completed in 1998 . 


104 

After 36 years in business 

Faulkner Construction Company is 

today one of the most successful 

commercial construction companies 

in Texas and the largest locally owned 

commercial builder in Austin. 

Consistently recognized by the 

industry as one of the top 400 contractors 

in the United States, it provides 

general contracting, construction 

management, and design/build 

services to a distinguished list of 

clients that reads like a Who’s Who 

in Texas business. In the hightechnology 

arena, Faulkner has 

built facilities for Advanced Micro 

Devices, Applied Materials, Motorola, 

Samsung, and others. But the company 

has always been a strong player 

in local Central Texas market 

for schools, hospitals, churches, 

and industrial facilities, as well as 

commercial office buildings and retail 

developments, and its client list in 

these venues is equally impressive. 

The company was founded in 1962 by 

Royce Faulkner, who continues to play an 

active role in its management and direction as 

Chairman of the Board of Directors. Early 

successes included contracts for moderatesized 

projects for the University of Texas and 

for private clients in and around Austin. 

Notable among these was The Brown Schools’ 

Rehabilitation Center, for which Faulkner 

built facilities in Austin and San Marcos. As 

the semiconductor industry began its rise in 

Austin, Faulkner developed the expertise and 

knowledge necessary to become a major competitor 

in this market. By 1979, the company 

had projects under way for Advanced Micro 

Devices and Motorola, two of Austin’s hightech 

pioneers. 

Throughout the 1980s, Faulkner continued 

to expand its services geographically and to 

diversify its skills for emerging and developing 

technologies. With projects as far-flung as El 

Paso, McAllen, Northeast Texas, Oklahoma, 

Arkansas, and Mexico, the company now 

maintains communications and operating procedures 

utilizing the latest in automated business 

technologies. Faulkner employees are 

encouraged to continue their education in 

changing business systems and technologies, 

and the company provides both in-house and 

outsource training on a multitude of subjects. 

Civic involvement is also valued highly by the 

company’s management. Faulkner employees 

can be found on many professional and nonprofit 

boards of directors, as well as on city 

boards and commissions. 

With annual revenues that place it in the 

top tier of the commercial construction industry, 

Faulkner’s recent job list has included 

Motorola’s BAT-1 Facility, Riverbend Church’s 

new 2,500-seat auditorium, Samsung’s U-Fab 

clean room manufacturing space, two new elementary 

schools for Austin Independent 

School District, and the Village at Westlake 

Shopping Center. Projects currently under 

construction or under contract include the 

Heart Hospital of Austin, AISD’s new Charles 

Akins High School in South Austin, a hospital 

expansion in Greenville, Texas, a movie theater 

complex in Mission, ongoing work at 

Motorola and Applied Materials, and major 

new office projects for The Kucera Company 

and Lincoln Property Company.

The savings and loan debacle was on full 

boil. Many of the state’s premier commercial 

real estate players, and those in attendance, 

architects and engineers, were filing for whatever 

chapter of the U.S. Bankruptcy code best 

covered their respective situations. Hapless 

professionals from every discipline had ‘tax 

sheltered’ themselves into grave circumstances. 

The Texas economy, from the oil patch to 

agriculture was in retreat, back to the ice ages. 

This was the spring of 1986, when any 

sane businessperson worthy of the name was 

staying home in bed with the electric blanket 

turned up to 9. 

Then along comes Ms. Rosoline Craig, P.E., 

who, admitting to “not knowing any better,” 

tossed over a paying job with a Houston 

petrochemical company, moved to Austin, 

and blithely hung out her KLW, Inc. shingle. 

And, although she arrived with a young 

family, no capital, little in the way of solid 

prospects, and a disdain for pursuing the 

myriad affirmative action small business ‘leg 

ups’ available to minority entrepreneurs, she 

has not only survived, but appears to be more 

than holding her own in a so-called man’s 

world and profession. 

Ms. Craig’s modest engineering firm, now 

staffed by her eldest daughter, four additional 

engineers and support staff, is fast gaining a 

reputation as one of Central Texas’ better 

small shops. 

“I think that’s because we’ve trimmed the 

fat, stayed on top of the latest and greatest 

ways of providing full service and value, and 

we’ve managed to gain and cultivate a loyal 

clientele,” Craig says. 

Craig, a 1973 graduate of 

Prairie View A&M University, is 

a registered professional engineer 

with the finely tuned 

instincts of a clever MBA. 

Following early, lucrative successes 

on some large area projects, 

she saw KLW grow to an 

unmanageable size.“ We were up 

to 25 people, many of whom 

were very well compensated, 

with revenues totaling about 

$3.5 million,” she related. But 

the level of personal satisfaction 

was being frustrated by that growth, Craig said, 

prompting her to scale the operation down to a 

more manageable and “professionally rewarding” 

size. 

Future expansion plans call for KLW to 

formalize and act on its desire to joint venture 

with a philosophically like-minded general 

contractor to facilitate a move into the 

design/build arena of commercial and institutional 

development. 

“We’re working on the model and business 

plans now, and hope to take the next steps in 

that direction before long,” Craig said. 

Meanwhile, KLW, Inc. continues to provide 

mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering 

services, as well as construction oversight 

on a variety of projects. 

Austin area projects in the company’s portfolio 

include those for Advanced Micro 

Devices, Austin Independent School District, 

the State Capitol, Austin Convention Center, 

and Austin Community College. 

KLW, INC. 


105

✧ 

MACIAS & 

ASSOCIATES, 

INC. 

Above: (left to right) Dolores Macias, 

Carmelo L. Macias and Henry A. Dufeau. 

Below: Dolores and Carmelo L. Macias. 

Founders of Macias and Associates, Inc. 


106 

Dolores and Carmelo L. Macias 

founded Macias and Associates, 

Inc. in 1986. It was in the interest 

of entrepreneurial spirit that they 

managed to gather enough 

courage to venture into Land 

Surveying and Mapping. 

Having both had parents who 

were independent contractors, 

Dolores and Carmelo had a burning 

desire to be independent business 

owners, a desire instilled by 

their parents. 

Dolores’ father was a master 

masonry contractor in San 

Antonio. Her mother became the 

support that is essential to a family 

business, which was eventually 

carried on by their sons. 

Carmelo’s father was a master 

carpenter who constructed homes 

in the San Antonio area; his mother 

helped in the family wine business 

in southern Italy before coming 

to America. Dolores and 

Carmelo’s children, Gino and 

Angela continue to help with the 

business today. 

When they began the firm in 1986, they 

knew that there was a need for their services 

in the City of Austin that they could fulfill. 

They knew that the firm would 

be theirs, and could produce 

the quality of services they were 

accustomed to. 

Henry A. Dufeau, a teacher 

and mentor of many, and a 

Registered Professional 

Surveyor, joined the firm in 

1993. Their signature projects 

range from the new City of 

Austin Convention Center and 

the Austin-Bergstrom International 

Airport, where they pioneered 

the computer-assisted 

drafting layering process in land 

surveying on large municipal 

projects. The convention center 

and the new Austin-Bergstrom 

Inter-national Airport stand as 

monuments to their efforts. 

In 1993, Macias and Associates was chosen 

to provide the design surveys and quality control 

services for land surveying for the New 

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. This 

$700 million project became the most important 

and the most expensive municipal project 

in the history of the City of Austin and Henry 

Dufeau led the surveying effort. 

Macias and Associates was selected to provide 

design surveys for the new Texas 

Historical Museum and the Texas Peace 

Officers Memorial Monument, and the State 

Capitol improvements. The firm was named 

to provide surveying services for the Texas 

Department of Transportation. The firm has 

also been the surveyor of record for many 

projects in the private sector such as new residential 

subdivisions, shopping centers, hill 

country developments and environmentally 

hazardous sites. 

Macias and Associates, Inc. is proud to be 

an integral part of the modern day history in 

the building of the City of Austin.

Built on the foundation of quality and 

attention to detail, Harutunian Engineering 

Incorporated (HEI) is an Engineering and 

Environmental Consulting firm that has 

raised the City of Austin’s engineering standards 

and expectations. 

Despite their considerable reputation for 

excellence and the influence earned through 

their first ten years, HEI chooses to be a quiet 

company. In an age where most companies 

relentlessly pursue publicity, HEI prefers to let 

its work product and the principled attitudes 

that govern their efforts speak for themselves. 

Although the firm is growth-minded, they 

are protective of their reputation for quality. 

“There is a chemistry here…an ethic of high 

standards and client satisfaction driven by 

a team who believes in hard work, honesty, 

and quality.” 

Today, the firm is home to a team of talented 

engineers, technicians, and staff, with creative 

skills ranging from industrial systems 

design to the design of software systems. The 

services offered by HEI include electrical engineering, 

mechanical engineering, and environmental 

services. 

While HEI projects span the globe, their 

engineering contributions run deep into 

the roots of Austin. HEI has provided extensive 

services for the development of Austin’s entire 

water and wastewater infrastructure, the City’s 

Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, and 

the new Austin-Bergstrom International 

Airport. HEI has also provided elaborate 

design services for the University of Texas, 

Austin Independent School District, Travis 

County, State of Texas, and many of Austin’s 

high-tech companies. 

As HEI continues to win its share of design 

and design-build projects, its reputation for 

elegant, in-depth solutions to large and complex 

projects has made them the “go-to” firm 

in Austin. 

HEI is not one to “rehash” old designs. 

Their talents grow with the times. As new engineering 

solutions are brought to the market 

place, HEI openly embraces state-of-the-art, 

user-friendly technology and provides a 

knowledgeable path for their Clients to follow. 

“This,” a spokesperson said, “is the kind of 

work we’ve trained and educated ourselves for. 

It underscores the reputation we’ve tried so 

hard to build.” 

“We owe the starting and success of HEI to 

our true founders-our parents, Mr. Ardash 

Harutunian and Mrs. Ossanna Harutunian,” 

HEI’s CEO said. They raised their children, 

today’s leaders of HEI, to conduct themselves 

with high moral ethics. And that’s how the 

company is run. “Sure, it’s difficult at times to 

follow such impeccable moral practices in 

today’s cut-throat world. But, we hold to our 

foundations…knowing that we will wake-up 

the next morning honestly happy and proud of 

who we are and with a guilt-free conscience.” 

HEI’s dedication to quality also extends to 

the community’s quality of life. For a decade 

now, the firm has made Austin its home and 

has been actively involved in community outreach 

programs. 

The firm is proud to make Austin its 

Headquarters. The City of Austin has been 

respectful and appreciative of the company’s 

efforts. In the words of the HEI Team, “The 

respect and trust of our clients is all the recognition 

we need. This underscores the integrity 

and reputation of our firm.” 

HARUTUNIAN 

ENGINEERING 

INCORPORATED 

Ms. Takoohy A. Harutunian 

CEO/President 

Mr. Kegham A. Harutunian 

Vice President 

Mr. Hagob A. Harutunian 

Vice President 


107

MANUFACTURING, INDUSTRY & TECHNOLOGY 

110 Solectron Texas 

112 Micro-Media Solutions, Inc. 

114 Capital Printing Co., Inc. 

116 Alliance Mechanical Systems 

117 Glastron Boat Company 

118 MagRabbit, Inc. 

119 IntelliQuest 


SOLECTRON 

TEXAS 

Founded in 1977, Solectron Corporation 

(www.solectron.com) is a worldwide provider 

of pre-manufacturing, manufacturing and postmanufacturing 

services to leading electronics 

original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). 

Solectron offers a broad range of design, 

manufacturing, and support solutions to optimize 

their customers’ manufacturing supply 

chain, allowing them to focus on their own 

core competencies, such as research and 

development, sales and marketing. 

Solectron has more than 22,000 employees 

in 21 manufacturing facilities around the 

world. The corporation is publicly traded on 

the New York Stock Exchange (SLR) with revenues 

of $3.7 billion ending August 31, 1997. 

Solectron offers its customers competitive 

outsourcing advantages, such as access to 

advanced manufacturing technologies, shortened 

product time-to-market, reduced cost of 

production and more effective asset utilization. 

Over the last six years the company has 

grown rapidly, averaging 55% growth per 

year, and has received more than 140 quality 

and service awards from its Customers, in 

addition to the 1997 and 1991 Malcolm 

Baldrige National Quality Awards. 

Solectron provides engineering and manufacturing 

services to the electronics industry 

worldwide. Solectron was acquired from 

Texas Instruments in 1996. The TI Custom 

Manufacturing Services business was started 


110

up in 1988, which makes Solectron one of the 

most experienced operations in 

the Electronics Manufacturing Services 

(EMS) industry. 

The growing trend for original equipment 

manufacturers to outsource more of their electronics 

functions to partners like Solectron is 

causing rapid expansion for our operation. 

Solectron is adding 230,000 square feet to 

its current 450,000 square foot facility to 

keep up with demand. 

Solectron is committed to operating with 

the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Processes, as 

evidenced by its winning both the 

Austin and Texas Quality Awards. We are 

committed to strong strategic alliances with 

key customers to continue our growth in the 

Austin area. 

Sharing the Heritage | MANUFACTURING, INDUSTRY & TECHNOLOGY 

111

MICRO-MEDIA 

SOLUTIONS, 

INC. 

Jose Chavez, President/CEO of Micro-Media 

Solutions, Inc. 


112 

There are any number of garage-to-garden 

office success stories in the heady, grow-andgo 

electronics technology industry. 

Typical are tales of software geeks who 

develop a whiz bang product, cruise to a 

Nasdaq listing and become obscenely rich in 

less time than it takes to boot up a TRS-80. 

The story of Austin’s Micro-Media 

Solutions, Inc. (MSI) is every bit as compelling, 

dealing mostly with a man, a vision, 

drive, energy, smarts, and savvy colleagues. 

MSI President and Chief Executive Officer 

Jose Chavez had already enjoyed a successful 

career with Hughes Aircraft and CompuAdd 

Corp before launching the MSI venture 

in June, 1993. An engineer by training, he 

had hands-on experience in the corporate 

world and absorbed what was useful, discarding 

the rest. 

Chavez commandeered the laundry room 

at home as his first base of operations, the 

garage being otherwise occupied. It was here 

that Chavez summoned a former CompuAdd 

colleague, Mitch Kettrick. Together, they set 

in motion what is today a company to be 

reckoned with amongst Austin’s dynamic 

high-tech community. 

MSI made its presence known almost 

immediately when, within two months of 

startup, the company secured a nearly $4 million 

contract to setup the computer system 

for the Texas Department of Health. 

Needing capital to perform, Chavez tapped 

into the resources available to him as the principal 

of a minority-owned, historically underutilized 

business (HUB). Funding was forthcoming 

from the Austin Community 

Development Corporation, Bank One, and the 

City of Austin. The jump start elevated MSI to 

a higher visibility almost immediately and the 

founder’s determination to become the leading 

computer networking services provider in the 

central U.S. (primarily for institutional customers) 

began to seem achievable. 

By 1995, the company was riding a wave 

of success that necessitated physical plant 

expansion, and Chavez once again demonstrated 

a penchant for going against conventional 

wisdom. 

Instead of joining the high-tech herd along 

Loop 360 or the city’s northwest corridor 

doing the image thing, Micro-Media Solutions 

opted to reclaim a disused warehouse in a disadvantaged 

near-eastside neighborhood. 

“We did this purposely,” said Chavez, 

“because we wanted to introduce a non-traditional 

form of business to the area, and make 

a contribution.” 

In so doing, Chavez has also introduced a 

number of previously untrained and underemployed 

neighborhood residents to a life they 

could only have imagined a few short years 

ago—many are now building a career instead 

of marking time in a job. At least a third of 

MSI’s workforce, which today numbers 100, 

call east Austin home, and all have benefited 

from the company’s investment in training - 

nearly $200,000 in 1997, which is in addition 

to donations of time and materials. The company 

also invests in local schools to advance 

technology training at the grass roots level. 

The revitalization of the company’s 36,000 

square foot facility and the attendant sense of 

pride and participation that has become 

evident in the neighborhood are only a beginning 

for Chavez and his company’s leadership. 

High on Chavez’s wish list for the nottoo-distant 

future is realization of a mixed use 

development for his neighborhood. 

Prominent in his office is an architect’s 

rendering and scale models depicting a storybook 

ideal—whitewashed, red tile roofed 

dwellings, pedestrian plazas, shops and

an 85,000 square-foot expansion in three 

stories to house MSI offices, and top floor 

condominiums. 

Accolades and recognition for the company’s 

altruistic citizenship endeavors are on 

pace with honors for business achievement. 

Texas Monthly featured the company in 

its June, 1997 issue, scant months after 

Chavez was tapped for an Adelante Award 

bestowed by equally prestigious Hispanic 

Magazine and NationsBank. 

Among beneficiaries of MSI’s seemingly 

boundless largess are Amigos en Azul, the 

Red Cross, Capital Area Training Foundation, 

Charitech, Metz Elementary, Austin 

Firefighters, LULAC, Christopher House, 

Adopt-A-School, and Austin Cleanup 2000. 

Today, MSI’s core business of communications 

services provides turnkey solutions for 

high speed Internet connectivity, communications 

infrastructure design and installation, 

and network/systems integration. 

MSI is also the OEM of the TelaVista, a 

comparatively low-cost computer for both 

network and stand-alone usage that supports 

up to 200 MHz CPU’s. 

A short list of company clients includes 

GTE, Seimens Nixdorf, Inc., Texas 

Department of Transportation, City of Austin, 

Southwestern Bell, CompUSA, the University 

of Texas, LCRA, Radiant Systems, 

Southwestern Bell, Transactive, and the 

Lower Colorado River Authority. 

Listed as one of the top 100 Hispanicowned 

companies in the nation and 7th 

among the 13 Hispanic-controlled public 

companies, MSI is also involved in sales partnership 

agreements with industry majors 

Hewlett Packard, IBM, Cisco, and Tektronix. 

Milestone achievements for the company 

include going public in 1997; stock is currently 

traded on the OTC Electronic Bulletin Board 

under the symbol “MSIA,” and the company is 

exploring the possibility of a Nasdaq listing as 

this profile was being written. 

At mid-year, MSI announced a partnership 

agreement with Siemens Nixdorf, Inc.(SNI) 

retail systems division. 

And in a dramatic development that will 

have far-reaching effects, the company 

revealed a new alliance with telecommunications 

giant GTE. The agreement, which 

broadens MSI’s data communications and 

Internet solutions, enables the company to 

market high-speed access to the Internet 

through collocation services. “MSI realizes 

that the only way for companies to access the 

tremendous resources available on the 

Internet, or through other venues, is to have 

a reliable network,” Chavez said. 

Collocation is especially beneficial to 

organizations with heavy multimedia utilization, 

such as webcasting, Real Video, and 

videoconferencing. 

As the company ended Quarter 2 of its fiscal 

year 1999, its future was looking especially 

strong, with contracts in hand potentially 

valued at more than $100 million. 

As to the long term, Chavez and the company 

he founded less than a decade ago, 

appear to be on target for the dominant, leadership 

role they seek and work toward. 


113

✧ 

Above: The oak tree which shades the 

Capital Printing’s entrance. 

Below: Barkley Edwards working for 

Capital Printing in the 1950s. 

CAPITAL 

PRINTING 

CO., INC. 


114 

The ancient, stately oak 

that shades the entrance 

speaks to longevity, and its 

presence underscores the fact 

that Capital Printing Co.is the 

oldest commercial print shop 

still operating in Austin. 

The modern, life-size ironwork 

sculpture that stands on 

its own patio just south of the 

entry, conveys messages that 

resonate on a couple of levels. 

This particular piece of 

environmental ornament, not 

quite an abstract, suggests 

that the folks in charge 

accept, even celebrate the 

dominant universal constant: 

the inevitability of change. 

What’s new is good or can be shaped in 

that direction. 

Capital Printing’s president, Barkley 

Edwards, and his wife Faye, majority owner, 

applaud most of the changes that have 

occurred in the printing industry, although 

Barkley regrets the passing of the day when 

you could take a handshake to the bank. 

In at least one respect, those days are with 

us still. 

That sculpture is a good example. It exists 

because Capital Printing employees anted up 

a significant part of its cost as a housewarming 

gift to the owners when 

the plant moved to its present 

southeast Austin location. Its 

theme is one of mutual 

respect. The two figures face 

each other, one representing 

management the other, 

employees; together they hold 

a press sheet. They could be 

looking at flaws. 

But that is only a remote 

possibility. It’s more likely the 

figures are congratulating each 

other for a job well done. 

Capital Printing seems to 

fly in the face of conventional 

corporate attitudes about 

those in their employ. It is 

highly doubtful that there is a 

Human Resources handbook that refers to a 

person as an asset. Less likely there will ever 

be one so long as the Edwards’ are driving the 

bus. Even now, when the printing business is 

driven by technological advances, and nearly 

everyone involved in the process is computerliterate, 

Capital Printing employees are considered 

skilled artisans, worthy of respect and 

a stake in his or her own future. 

“Everyone here is part of our family,” says 

Faye Edwards, and you know she’s not just 

mouthing some public relations platitude. 

Her husband, a plainspoken man whose 

weathered features suggest a love of the outdoors, 

seconds the notion, saying that had it 

not been for a rash of retirements in recent 

years, the average tenure of employees would 

be well into double digits. 

As it is, most of Capital Printing’s 56 

employees have been on the job here for 6-to- 

9 years on average. 

Barkley Edwards began an apprenticeship 

with the company in 1958. By then the firm 

was on the cusp of being 30 years old, tracing 

its beginnings to 1929 when it was bought 

and operated as Capital Printing Company by 

Mr. and Mrs. E.R. Harrell. Prior to that time, 

the shop had been known as Numbers 

Printing Company. 

Barkley Edwards and Bill Raby, who would 

later become partners in a buyout of the firm, 

did what all apprentices had been expected to

do since the days of the crafts guilds that flourished 

during the industrial revolution, which is 

to say, everything. At first it was all the heavy 

lifting, then graduation to pre-press chores, 

hand finishing and binding, and later on learning 

how to outfox an eccentric letterpress. Days 

on days when the phrase ink-stained wretch 

was all too real, and you had to love it. The heat 

and noise, the pungent aromas of ink and solvents, 

a ration of minor burns and paper cuts, 

and the relentless tyranny of deadlines. 

Today, every surface, every piece of equipment 

shines like it’s on parade. There’s a busy 

hum to the place, but not the infernal racket 

of old; its as clean and efficient as a NASA 

clean room. 

Nothing about deadlines has changed, 

however, and in order to keep pace with the 

challenges of the digital age, Capital Printing 

invests heavily in cutting edge technology 

and the people who make it work. 

There is a new kind of artisan, no less 

committed than his predecessors, whose 

involvement in new technology notwithstanding, 

is engaged in the time-honored 

craftsmanship required to produce a finished 

product that gives life to a designers ideas. 

The tools have changed, but the pursuit of 

perfection remains. 

Dominating the main production bay of 

this large facility is a new Heidelberg 

Speedmaster eight-color, high speed press, 

the first of its kind in North America. It’s a 

sheet fed press that is capable of printing four 

colors, two-sided, or two colors over six colors 

in one pass at a rate of 24,000 combined 

impressions per hour at full speed. 

Extra capacity and dozens of other 

time/money savings features will enable 

Capital Printing to handle many of the longer 

press runs traditionally limited to web press 

operations. Another five-color Heidelberg 

press has been modified to complement the 

new addition. 

New presses, state-of-the-art finishing 

capabilities and the latest in digital pre-press 

equipment and software, enable Capital 

Printing Co. to keep pace with the growing 

demands of the information age. 

In 1974, the Edwards’ and the Raby’s 

decided to pursue the professional associa- 

tions’ printing business, a niche market they 

now dominate in the region. 

Many organizations rely on Capital 

Printing Co. for their periodicals publishing; 

notable among them, the Texas Restaurant 

Association which has been a client for more 

than 50 years. 

But fine, or commercial 

printing is also a staple of 

the business and Capital 

will happily quote even 

the smallest job. 

Capital Printing is often 

the favored choice of graphics 

designers, particularly 

when the printer is called 

upon to provide “off-themenu” 

printing solutions to 

keep faith with or even 

enhance a creative idea. 

“We will always keep 

abreast of the changes,” 

says Barkley Edwards, “but 

we’ll never lose sight of the 

fact that ours is a business 

of bringing ideas to 

life…with ink on paper.” 

✧ 

Above: The ironwork sculpture which was 

purchased by employees for the owners of 

Capital Printing in 1983. 

Below: Barkley and Faye Edwards. 


115

ALLIANCE 

MECHANICAL 

SYSTEMS 

✧ 

Above: Company principals Donny Reeves 

(standing) and Patrick Baker 

Below: Sheet metal fabrication area of 

Alliance’s eastside plant 


116 

Despite the robust and seemingly endless 

boom economy of the late 1990s, Donny 

Reeves is all too familiar with the conventional 

wisdom that a downturn lurks somewhere 

beyond the glowing horizon. And that just 

over the edge, dark specters wait to snatch 

fickle fortune from the unwary or the unlucky. 

Reeves, president of the remarkable and 

flourishing Alliance Mechanical Systems of 

Austin, has been to the edge, as so many did, 

during the go-go early 1980s. As so many 

did, he stumbled and fell. 

“I thought I was going to corner the 

market on duplexes in South and Central 

Texas,” Reeves said with spare, rueful smile. 

He doesn’t elaborate, just matter-of-factly 

admits to going broke. 

“And”, he adds, “it’s someplace I will never 

go again.” Although he says this quietly, one 

can sense the steely conviction, the intensity 

of feeling and unshakable belief. 

Reeves is in his early 50s but could pass for 

40. His partner of two years, Patrick Baker is 

somewhat younger, and together they’ve 

forged a formidable alliance and a commercial 

enterprise that they believe will weather the 

next, inevitable regional or local downturn 

regardless of the degree of severity. 

“Our focus,” says Baker, “is to be as diverse 

as possible within the logical parameters of 

our business segment.” 

“And,” adds Reeves, “we’re doing it without 

fear.” 

Baker is the on-paper professional of the 

team, bringing an engineering degree and 21 

years experience in the field of commercial 

refrigeration to the table. Prior to the merger 

of Baker’s PRB Mechanical and Reeves’ 

Alliance Mechanical Systems in 1992, each 

had worked for the same mechanical contractor 

and Reeves had specialized in the retail 

end of the spectrum. 

It was while working for the “other guy” 

that each realized that a fearful approach to 

the marketplace was jeopardizing their 

futures. “We saw that a ‘maintain at all costs’ 

attitude was inhibiting real growth, and we 

vowed to never fall into that trap if and when 

the opportunity arose for us,” Reeves said. 

Taking lessons learned to heart and adopting 

a more aggressive approach, Alliance 

Mechanical Systems has doubled its gross 

sales each year since the partnership formed 

with revenues of about $12 million in 1997. 

Located in east Austin in a light industrial 

area, Alliance provides steady work for 

upwards of 135 skilled and semi-skilled 

employees, operating from a fabrication plant 

encompassing about 15,000 square feet. 

Landmark or notable projects include the 

refrigeration plant sustaining the 194,000- 

square foot Texas Natural Resources Control 

Commission building; Sears at Lakeline Mall; 

projects from El Paso to Corpus Christi for 

Wal-Mart, Mervyns, and Target stores; more 

than 3,600 apartment units in the Greater 

Austin area. 

In addition, Alliance Mechanical Systems 

has completed projects for St. David’s and 

Georgetown hospitals and their attendant 

office structures and is in-progress on a $3 

million contract for Round Rock High School.

Lyndon Johnson had one. So did Aristotle 

Onassis. The British royal family posed with 

theirs for a Christmas card. In 1973, a stuntdouble 

for James Bond ramped one airborne, 

establishing a world flight record for a boat of 

110 feet. From the first prototype in 1956, 

landing from high places at speed, as in the 

movie Live and Let Die, underscored what 

every owner came to know: Glastron served up 

one tough boat. 

Now manufactured in Little Falls, 

Minnesota, the spiritual home remains Austin 

where Robert Hammond, Bob Shoop, 

William Gaston, and Guy Woodard formed 

what was to become the world’s leading producer 

of pleasure boats. Much of Glastron’s 

success was due to the synergy attributed to 

the founders’ blend of interest and backgrounds. 

Gaston brought a sales background 

to the table, having owned an Austin marine 

dealership and achieved success selling a 

California-made “glass” boat. Shoop, who 

owned Capitol Casket, had considerable business 

and organization skills. 

Hammond was production manager and 

designer for the fiberglass division of an aluminum 

boat company and had dreamed of 

starting a company employing advanced 

design. Woodard owned a raw material company 

in Fort Worth, knew both Hammond 

and Shoop and arranged a meeting at 

Hammond’s Arlington, Texas home in the 

spring of 1956 to discuss the venture. 

An agreement was reached where Hammond 

rented a garage and built molds and a prototype 

during evenings and weekends. Gaston 

and Shoop returned for a demonstration 

in the fall and the decision was made 

to proceed. 

The investor group raised a little over 

$20,000 cash, found a 4000 square-foot 

building to rent in Austin where Gaston 

and Shoop lived and Hammond felt 

labor conditions were more favorable. 

Bettye Hammond coined the Glastron 

name and in October Hammond moved 

to Austin and started production. 

Gaston took to the road in his pickup 

and sold all the company could turn out 

in two months—24 boats that translated 

into sales of $12,262. The then “radical” 

design of the 15’ Fireflite, with its monohedron 

hull, tailfins and side spears, proved 

popular with the boating press and public. By 

1958, three models were in production and 

sales passed $2 million. 

During the succeeding decade, manufacturing, 

process and design innovations continued 

and Glastron milestones came faster. In 1960, 

the company went public through 

a stock and debenture underwriting 

by a New York brokerage firm, 

a move to larger space and in 1961 

Gaston came aboard full time as 

Executive Vice President. 

In 1964, Glastron directors 

sold San Antonio oilman Hugh 

Halff, Jr. a half interest in the company 

as it broke the $5 million 

mark. In 1967, Glastron 

exchanged stock with Halff’s 

Conroy holding company. 

At its peak during the 1970s, 

Glastron achieved sales of 

$36,000,000. The Austin plant 

encompassed 623,000 square 

feet, employed 1,200, built 

22,000 boats and sent them out 

to 1,000 dealers here and in 50 

countries around the world. 

Both active in association affairs, 

Gaston served as Chairman of 

Boating Industry Association 

and Hammond was inducted 

into the Hall of Fame in 1998. 

They have gone on to other ventures 

and Shoop has retired but 

all still reside in Austin. 

GLASTRON 

BOAT 

COMPANY 

✧ 

Top: An aerial view of the Glastron Boat’s 

Austin manufacturing plant. 

Middle: Glastron Boat Company’s latest 

revolutionary design, the SX 195. 

Below: William Gaston and Robert 

Hammond standing next to a restored 

original Glastron prototype in 1964. 


117

✧ 

MAGRABBIT, 

INC. 

Valued employees of MagRabbit: (left to 

right) Luc Ho Dinh, Gary Pankonien, 

Tom Vu, Thao Pham, Anne Marie Nguyen, 

Pat Brooks, Anne Dooley, Sonny Pham, 

Thanh-Ha Hodinh, Audrey Aateaga, 

Tommy Hodinh, and Aaron Hodinh 


118 

MagRabbit is one of the fastest-growing 

companies in the Austin area and was recently 

recognized as one of the top 50 companies 

with the highest growth rate. Based in the 

satellite city of Round Rock, MagRabbit provides 

a variety of support services for the burgeoning 

computer industry in the area, and it 

has grown and prospered as high-technology 

companies increasingly outsource their technical 

support needs. MagRabbit provides 

manufacturing, distribution, order management, 

technical support, and electronic commerce 

services for large companies. 

“One of the main reasons we’re successful 

is our employees. Their hard work, ethics, and 

dedication to the company create our core 

strength,” says Thanh “Tommy” Hodinh, 

Chairman and CEO, who has created not only 

a successful company but also an opportunity 

for dozens of his compatriots, like Anne Marie 

Nguyen, Vice President of Client Services; 

Thao Pham, Distribution Manager; Tom Vu, 

Information Technology Director; Todd Le 

and Tuyen Bui, both Account Managers. 

Born and raised in South Vietnam, the 

hard-working, scholarly Hodinh won a government-sponsored 

scholarship as a young 

man that allowed him to study in the United 

States. He learned English at the same time he 

was working his way through Lincoln 

University in San Francisco. Hodinh transferred 

to the University of Texas at El Paso for 

its lower tuition and strong engineering program. 

Upon graduation in 1976, he went to 

work for IBM as a design and manufacturing 

engineer in Austin, and advanced through the 

ranks before starting MagRabbit. 

In 1990, Hodinh co-founded MagRabbit 

Inc. as a small diskette duplication and fulfillment 

company. Hodinh’s brother Luc and 

brother-in-law, Sonny Pham, joined him as 

partners, bringing their expertise in manufacturing 

processes. Through his family, Hodinh 

recruited friends and veterans from Vietnam to 

work at the fledgling company. Their common 

background, culture, and war-time experiences 

made them an unusually dedicated and 

loyal workforce. 

Within four years MagRabbit had 125 

employees and was earning $5 million in 

annual revenues. By 1995 it had expanded 

to include a call center, electronic commerce, 

and related software development services. 

In 1998, MagRabbit doubled in size with 

an additional distribution center, which 

ships hundreds of thousands of products 

each month. 

MagRabbit diversified again in 1998 when 

Hodinh recruited Compaq Computer veteran 

and entrepreneur Gary Pankonien to be his 

major partner. Pankonien founded 

several companies and brings strong 

business management skills to the 

company. Today MagRabbit is one of 

the largest fulfillment and distribution 

centers in Austin. 

Hodinh is married to Thanh-Ha, 

a software engineer, and has two 

sons, Aaron and Arlen. Aaron is in 

college and works part-time at 

MagRabbit while Arlen is a freshman 

at the University of Texas at Austin 

majoring in computer engineering. 

Hodinh is also very active in the 

community. He is the chairmanelect 

and on the board of the Texas 

Asian Chamber of Commerce and a 

board member of the Austin 

Children’s Museum and the Central 

and South Texas Minority Supply 

Development Council.

HELPING TECHNOLOGY 

COMPANIES MARKET SMARTER 

In the fast-paced and dynamic high-tech 

arena, tech marketers’ success depends often 

on the in-depth knowledge of one’s market, 

customers and competitors. 

So, if the brainchild that R&D is so proud 

of is due to ship six months hence, the marketing 

department in your organization 

should already be talking to IntelliQuest. 

A whimsical example to be sure, but technology 

marketers who need statistically valid 

market input-across a wide range of product 

categories and on a global basis-should turn 

to this Austin-based firm. 

In fact, if that information is needed stat 

and on an on-going basis, IntelliQuest may be 

the only player with the expertise and technical 

resources to get the job done. 

IntelliQuest (www.intelliquest.com) was 

founded in 1985 to address a wide array of 

technology marketing information needs. 

Recognizing that traditional marketing 

information gathering (i.e., focus group 

input, direct observation of market trends via 

specialty publications, and limited customer 

interviews) often lacked statistical accuracy, 

IntelliQuest developed quantitative proprietary 

and syndicated research services. 

In the market and brand tracking realm, 

the company’s IntelliTrack IQ is considered 

the best vehicle yet devised for tracking critical 

market metrics and brand performance 

with respect to hundreds of competing technology 

brands. 

For media buyers charged with selecting 

the most effective means of disseminating 

product or services information to target 

audiences, IntelliQuest provides its Computer 

Industry Media Study (CIMS) service, which 

measures readership, viewership, and the 

buying habits of those who control computer 

and related purchases. 

Other syndicated services offered by 

IntelliQuest include a comprehensive Internet 

tracking study as well as an e-commerce 

tracking study. 

Utilizing the latest technology including 

the Internet, IntelliQuest has developed 

cutting edge electronic product registration 

services, that in combination with comprehensive 

database marketing solutions, allow 

technology clients to maintain customer 

retention and repurchase rates that drive 

increased profitability. 

IntelliQuest’s proprietary research division 

provides technology marketers with statistically 

valid market input into virtually any significant 

marketing decision. These include 

product design, market assessment, customer 

segmentation and targeting, pricing, copy 

testing, distribution tracking and customer 

satisfaction measurements. 

IntelliQuest’s wholly-owned subsidiary, 

Zona Research confines its activities to indepth 

analysis and assessments of the 

Internet and intranet markets. Daily market 

assessments, conducted by respected analysts, 

are available to clients via subscription. 

Another valuable resource provided by 

IntelliQuest centers on its online Technology 

Panel, comprised of thousands of pre-recruited 

and profiled technology users and buyers 

who provide instant research feedback. 

IntelliQuest, with offices in Atlanta, New 

York, London, and Silicon Valley, is led by 

President and CEO Brian Sharples. The 

Founder and Chairman is Dr. Peter Zandan. 

The company, which a PC Magazine writer 

admitted provides the market research numbers 

“I trust the most,” employs 400 professionals and 

support staff, 210 of whom are based in Austin. 

INTELLIQUEST 

✧ 

Above, left: Brian Sharples, 

President and Chief Executive Officer 

Above, right: Marianne Grogan, 

President, Research Group 


119

THE MARKETPLACE 

122 Clark, Thomas & Winters, A Professional Corporation 

124 LBJ Holding Company 

126 University Co-operative Society 

128 Austin Forex International, Inc. 

130 Vintage Villas 

131 La Reyna Mexican Restaurant 

132 Austin Executive Lodging/The Inn at Pearl Street 

133 Granite House 

134 Texas Kiln Products 

135 Austin Business Furniture 

136 Lakeway Inn 

137 Home Gate Studios & Suites 


✧ 

Above: Don Thomas in 1964. 

PHOTO COURTESY OF AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER, 

AUSTIN PUBLIC LIBRARY. 

Below: Attorney Edward Clark and 

influential friends in 1940. Left to right: 

Clark, E. H. “Commodore” Perry, Herman 

Brown, Lyndon B. Johnson and Austin 

Mayor Tom Miller. 

CLARK, 

THOMAS & 

WINTERS, 

A PROFESSIONAL 

CORPORATION 

PHOTO COURTESY OF NEAL DOUGLASS. 


122 

For 60 years, Austin’s largest law firm— 

Clark, Thomas & Winters, a Professional 

Corporation—has built a reputation on using 

its legal expertise to help shape the future of 

the city, the state and the nation itself. 

The firm’s roots reach deep into Texas soil. 

During the 1930s, Texas Attorney General 

James V. Allred assembled an amazing group of 

assistants, including future U.S. Senator Ralph 

Yarborough, future U.S. Supreme Court Justice 

Tom Clark, and Robert Anderson, Secretary of 

the Treasury during the Eisenhower administration. 

Great things also lay in store for two 

other assistants of the time, Everett Looney and 

Edward Clark, founders of the firm. 

Born in 1900, Looney graduated from the 

University of Texas School of Law in 1922, and 

developed a reputation during the ‘30s prosecuting 

antitrust cases in the Attorney General’s 

office. His work enhanced Allred’s reputation 

as a progressive trust buster and helped catapult 

Allred into the Governor’s Mansion. 

Looney was described as part of the governor’s 

“brain trust” during Allred’s administration. 

Clark, born in 1906 and a 1928 graduate of 

the UT law school, took an active role in state 

politics and was elected county attorney of 

San Augustine. He accepted an appointment 

as assistant attorney general in 1932, and 

enforced the state’s oil and gas conservation 

laws in the burgeoning East Texas Oil Field. 

When Allred was elected governor in 1935, 

he appointed Clark his right-hand man—his 

first secretary. Clark rapidly became known in 

Austin and throughout the state as one of the 

most influential men in government. After a 

constitutional amendment was passed in 1936 

strengthening the position of 

secretary of state, Allred 

appointed Clark to that position. 

As noted by Robert A. 

Caro in his book The Years of 

Lyndon Johnson: The Path to 

Power: “Of all the men 

Johnson met in Austin, Ed 

Clark was the one who over 

the long years to come, would 

acquire and hold the most 

power.” 

When Congressman Buck 

Buchanan died in 1937, 

Johnson announced for the position. Although 

Govenor Allred officially adopted a position of 

neutrality in the race, he detailed Clark to 

work on the campaign and Clark became one 

of Johnson’s significant fund-raisers. 

After Allred was appointed to the U.S. 

District Court bench by Franklin Roosevelt in 

1938, he counseled Looney and Clark to begin 

a law firm, believing each had talents that 

would complement the other. They agreed and 

the partnership of Looney & Clark began in 

December 1938. The firm’s first client was 

Herman Brown, a founder of Brown & Root, 

Inc. and owner of the recently completed 

Brown Building. Brown agreed to pay the law 

firm a monthly retainer—equal to the monthly 

rent—if it would locate in the new building. 

For the remainder of their lives, Looney 

and Clark participated in all Johnson campaigns. 

Clark served as a senior adviser and 

fund-raiser, Looney made speeches and 

worked as legal counsel. Looney also handled 

legal matters associated with the varied business 

interests of the Johnson family. Attorney 

Don Thomas, who joined the firm in 1944, 

developed a close personal friendship with 

Johnson and, when Looney suffered a stroke 

in 1958, succeeded Looney in overseeing 

Johnson legal matters. Subsequently, Thomas 

became more than the family’s business attorney 

by serving as president of the LBJ 

Company until his retirement in 1990. 

Clark continued his political association 

with Johnson through the presidential years, 

serving as Ambassador to Australia from 1965 

to 1968, U.S. Commissioner to Hemisfair in

1968, and Executive Director of the Inter- 

American Bank the same year. 

Other notable attorneys joined the firm 

during the ’40s. Martin Harris, a UT law 

school graduate, came on board in 1947. He 

would become one of the state’s leading attorneys 

in water rights. The following year, Dean 

Moorhead, who had graduated from 

Columbia Law School with the highest grade 

point average on record at the time and was a 

recipient of all three awards given to graduating 

seniors, left the Attorney General’s office 

to join the firm, which was then renamed 

Looney, Clark & Moorhead. Frank Denius, 

one of the most highly decorated soldiers 

during World War II, was hired in 1949. 

In the ’50s, Charles Mathews joined the 

firm. He had been the first assistant attorney 

general at the time administrative law was in 

its infancy. He participated in its development 

and achieved a then-unparalleled degree of 

expertise. As the practice of law became more 

specialized, he concentrated on transportation 

law, ultimately leaving the firm to 

become president of Red Ball Motor Freight. 

He subsequently became a state district judge 

until retirement. 

In 1955, Mary Joe Carroll became the first 

woman hired to practice law full-time by a 

major firm in Texas. Carroll, who scored 

highest in the state the year she took her bar 

exam, worked with Looney in the firm’s 

appellate practice. She also served as parliamentarian 

for Lt. Governor Ben Ramsey in 

the Texas Senate. This experience, in part, 

caused her to be selected to draft legislation 

for clients, including both the Open Meetings 

Act and the Open Records Act. 

Sam Winters, current chairman of the 

board of governors of the U.S. Postal Service, 

joined the firm in 1958. He, Clark and Harris 

handled legislative matters for clients. 

Winters also continued the firm’s tradition of 

political engagement, serving as both local 

and statewide manager of campaigns. 

Looney died in 1962, Clark in 1992. Had 

Looney lived as long as Clark, he would have 

been amazed at the growth and specialization 

that occurred at the firm. Charles Mathews 

called Looney “the last complete lawyer.” By 

the 1960s, the ever-increasing complexity of 

the law and rapidly growing areas of specialization 

had made it impossible for any one 

person to maintain competence in every category 

of law. Looney had continued to achieve 

this capability until retirement. 

Clark remained at the firm until his death 

at age 86. Still a force in politics, he continued 

fund-raising in his later years with a 

greater emphasis on philanthropic matters. 

He also maintained his banking interests as a 

member of the board of directors of several 

banks, and his interest in educational and historical 

endeavors, including his service on the 

boards of Southwestern University, the 

University of Texas and the Texas State 

Historical Association. 

The firm that began as Looney & Clark 

became Clark, Thomas & Winters, a 

Professional Corporation, in 1993. As of 1998, 

the firm has more than 80 attorneys on staff 

and a total of 220 employees, 

providing quality comprehensive 

legal services to its clients. 

The firm’s legal specializations 

include antitrust, appellate, 

banking, business law (corporate, 

federal tax, securities and 

intellectual property), employment 

and labor law, energy 

and telecommunications, 

health law, insurance, legislative 

affairs, product liability 

defense, state taxation, and 

wills and estates. 

✧ 

Above: Mary Joe Carroll joined the firm in 

September1955, becoming the first woman 

in Texas to practice law full-time with a 

major law firm. 

Below: Sam Winters introducing new U.S. 

Postmaster General Bill Henderson in 1998. 

Sharing the Heritage | THE MARKETPLACE 

123

✧ 

Luci Baines Johnson, chairman of the 

LBJ Holding Company, and her husband 

Ian Turpin, who serves as the company’s 

president. 

PHOTO COURESTY OF SUNG PARK. 

LBJ 

HOLDING 

COMPANY 

Lyndon Baines Johnson’s contribution to 

this state’s heritage is immeasurable, from his 

days as a congressman up through his years as 

President. His influence still is felt today, as is 

the influence of the family and family business 

that bear the initials L.B.J. 

The family business, The LBJ Holding 

Company, is a multi-million dollar, diversified 

corporation which controls five radio stations, 

numerous investment interests and real 

estate ventures dedicated to preserving 

Austin’s past while providing for its future. 

The business began in 1943, when Claudia 

Taylor Johnson (better known as “Lady Bird”) 

used $17,500 her mother had left her to buy 

a tiny, 250-watt AM radio station in Austin. 

KTBC had been losing money at the rate of 

$600 a month, but under Lady Bird’s leadership—she 

did everything from hiring staff 

and selling air time to scrubbing the floors— 

the station soon became a profitable business 

and supplied Central Texas a much-needed 

link to the world. 

“My mother’s great affection for this community 

began when she was a student at the 

University of Texas. Like many other people, 

she fell in love with Austin during her college 

days,” says Luci Baines Johnson, chairman of 

The LBJ Holding Company. “And, of course, 

mother had a journalism degree. You take 

those two loves—love of her community and 

love of communication—and you put them 

together, a broadcasting interest is a very natural 

investment.” 

While Lyndon Johnson’s influence certainly 

benefited the station, Lady Bird took a 

hands-on approach to its operation. “She took 

to it with the kind of enthusiasm and commitment 

to community that she’s exhibited 

over her lifetime,” Luci Johnson says. “My 

father really had his hands full as a U.S. congressman 

and later senator representing the 

people of Texas. Somehow, my mother managed 

to excel as a congressional wife, mother 

and business woman.” 

The Johnson family broke new ground in 

broadcasting when KTBC-TV, Austin’s first 

television station, took to the air in 1952. An 

FM radio station later was added along with 

part ownership of a cable television system. 

Federal regulations required the family to sell 

its television station in 1972. Changes in 

those regulations, however, have since 

allowed the LBJ Company to purchase more 


124

adio stations. Today LBJS Broadcasting 

Company, a partnership between the LBJ 

Company and Virginia-based Sinclair 

Communications, owns Austin’s top radio stations: 

KLBJ-AM and FM (which had broadcast 

under the KTBC call letters until the early 

’70s), KGSR-FM, KROX-FM and KLNC-FM. 

Over the years, The LBJ Holding 

Company’s holdings grew to include part 

interest in a TV station in Waco, various real 

estate parcels and banks. The family fortunes 

took a hit during the ’80s, so Luci Johnson 

and her husband, Ian Turpin, moved to 

Austin in 1992 to take a more active role in 

running the family business. Luci’s sister 

Lynda’s interest in the company was bought 

out. (Lynda’s home is in Virginia with her 

husband, U.S. Senator Charles Robb.) Today, 

Turpin is president of The LBJ Holding 

Company, but ownership remains in the 

hands of Lady Bird and Luci Johnson, and 

Luci’s children: Nicole Nugent Covert, 

Rebekah Johnson Nugent, Claudia Taylor 

Nugent and Patrick Lyndon Nugent. “The 

investment my mother’s mother made possible 

remains primarily in the hands of female 

ownership,” Luci Johnson says. 

While Luci Johnson and her husband were 

living in Toronto, Canada, they enjoyed being 

able to work and shop within walking distance 

of their home. The LBJ Holding 

Company is converting two of Austin’s historic 

downtown high rises, the Brown Building and 

Norwood Tower, into a combination of 

office/residential space that will allow people 

to live and work in downtown Austin. 

“My father always said, ‘The best fertilizer 

for a man’s land is the footsteps of its owner,’” 

Luci Johnson says. “My husband and I are trying 

to encourage people to come downtown 

and live at the Brown Building. We felt that we 

needed to put our actions where our mouths 

were, so we’re in the process right now of 

returning the top two floors of the Norwood 

Tower to its original status as an apartment. 

We are moving downtown, too! We will be, so 

to speak, living above the store.” 

It is Johnson’s hope that residents who live 

and work in these historic buildings will 

return this community’s focus to downtown. 

“For nearly half a century, the Brown Building 

was the home to some of Austin’s and Texas’ 

greatest movers and shakers,” she says. “It was 

home to an entire generation of people who 

made Texas what it is. [These buildings] are 

not just being preserved as relics of the past. 

They will be the homes of a future generation 

of Austin citizens who will make a profound 

contribution to the next millennium.” 

The LBJ Company, with its professional 

management team, now makes investments in 

other private businesses in Austin and the 

Southwest. The company uses its capital and 

expertise to assist other growth businesses in 

the area. Both the corporation and the family 

continues to donate time and money to many 

of the same causes Lyndon and Lady Bird 

championed for over 50 years. Public television, 

Seton Medical Center, Habitat for 

Humanity, St. Edwards University, University 

of Texas, Believe in Me, and the Lady Bird 

Johnson Wildflower Center are just a few of 

the causes the family supports. 

“What is my dream for the future for The 

LBJ Holding Company? To grow the company 

and be a credit to it and to be a credit to the 

heritage that my mother built and this community 

provided,” Luci Johnson says. “The LBJ 

Holding Company and the LBJ family have 

been blessed to be a part of a very precious 

heritage, both in our business and as citizens 

for this community. And so our desire is to give 

back to and reflect well upon that heritage.” 

✧ 

Luci Baines Johnson and Ian Turpin on the 

roof of the Brown Building, a historic 

downtown highrise that is currently being 

renovated by the LBJ Holding Company. 

The goal of the project is to turn the Brown 

Building into residential lofts that will allow 

people to live as well as work in downtown 

Austin and to return the community’s focus 

to the downtown area. 

PHOTO COURESTY OF SUNG PARK. 


125

UNIVERSITY 

CO-OPERATIVE 

SOCIETY 

✧ 

Top, left: George H. Mitchell, President, 

University Co-operative Society from May 

1987 to present. 

Top, right: Dr. Robert Hamilton, Chairman 

of the Board, University Co-operative 

Society from 1989 to present. 

Opposite, top: Co-op East, located at 26th 

Street and Medical Arts, was built to service 

the nursing, law school and LBJ School of 

Public Affairs. 

Opposite, bottom: The Dabny House 


126 

For more than 102 years the University 

Co-op has been providing students, faculty, 

alumni, and staff at the University of Texas 

with reasonably priced materials for academic 

life. Patterned after the student bookstore 

at Harvard, the UT Co-op is a nonprofit corporation 

owned by its members—the students, 

faculty, and staff of the university—and 

governed by a board of directors. It calls itself 

“a college department store serving the university 

community” and specializes in textbooks 

(for the university as well as Austin 

Community College), school supplies, computer 

software, and photographic supplies 

along with a wide variety of University of 

Texas–licensed merchandise and apparel. 

“Last year almost $600,000 was given back to 

students in rebates,” says George Mitchell, 

Co-op president. “All our profits go to the 

university. Nearly $500,000 was given as gifts 

last year.” 

The Co-op was founded in 1896 by Dr. 

William J. Battle, a professor of the Greek language 

who later served as president of the 

university from 1914 to 1916. Disappointed 

with the services and high book prices 

charged by a privately owned bookstore on 

campus, Dr. Battle organized support for creating 

a bookstore like the Harvard Co-op that 

was an association owned by students, faculty, 

and staff to furnish books, supplies, and 

clothing at discounted prices to its members. 

The original store opened on campus—it was 

located in the university’s Main Building— 

with books, stationery, and athletic goods and 

the intent to sell its products to students at 

the lowest possible prices. 

Twenty-two years later (1918) the Co-op 

moved off campus to a one-story building 

across from the Student Union Center on 

Guadalupe and started selling merchandise to 

local citizens as well. With rising profits in 

the 1920s, the Co-op contributed to a fund 

drive to build a new athletic stadium and 

enlarge the campus from its original 40 acres. 

By 1935, the Co-op had to expand to meet 

the needs of a growing student body. “There 

were new additions to the building about 

every ten years,” says Mitchell. 

In 1972, the Co-op purchased the Dabney- 

Horne House located at 23rd Street and 

Nueces. This historical house was built 

in 1884 by Robert Dabney, who was not 

only one of the founders of the Austin 

Theological Seminary but also a professor at 

the university. Subsequently, this building 

was restored and used as office space as the 

Co-op expanded. 

Over the last ten years Professor Robert W. 

Hamilton, the chairperson of the University 

Co-op Board of Directors and the Minerva 

House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law at the 

University of Texas School of Law, and Mr. 

George Mitchell, president of the Co-op since

UNIVERSITY CO-OPERATIVE 

SOCIETY BOARD MEMBERS 

(1998–99): 

Dr. Mark A. Lemley 

Faculty Director 

1987, have guided the Co-op through a substantial 

period of growth. 

After experimenting with the sale of different 

products and services, the Co-op has 

focused on being a bookstore. No other store 

in the country sells as many used textbooks 

as the University Co-op. In fact, it is the 

largest college bookstore in the southwestern 

United States. 

To service the LBJ School of Public Affairs, 

UT Law School, and Nursing School on the 

opposite side of campus, in 1994 the Co-op 

built Co-op East on the corner of Medical 

Arts Parkway and 26th Street. Two years 

later, the Co-op bought the adjacent space 

on Guadalupe from its long-time neighbor, 

Wallace’s College Book Company, and then 

leased its main store to Barnes & Noble, 

the nation’s largest bookstore chain, for the 

sale of tradebooks. 

“We are continuing our tradition of selling 

textbooks, UT apparel, and school supplies 

from a location convenient to the students 

and university community,” says Mitchell. 

Dr. Michael G. Hall 


Dr. Michael H. Granof 


Professor Martha F. Hilley 


Emily Boon 

Student Director 

Matt Grayson 


Stacy Hays 


Ryan Runkle 



127

AUSTIN 

FOREX 

INTERNATIONAL, 

INC. 

✧ 

Austin Forex International founder and 

CEO Russell Erxleben. 


128 

People worry about money. Questions 

about money matters, like “do I have 

enough?” or “how can I make more?” can 

plague the average person several times a day. 

To alleviate such financial stress and strain, 

a formidable array of institutions and experts 

stand ready, willing, and able to help anyone 

understand (and hopefully profit from) its 

transactional fluidity. 

For the prudent and solvent individual 

armed with the right information, investing is 

habitual, commonplace, and not terribly 

risky. However, one arena average investors 

rarely venture by conscious choice is the 

realm of foreign currency exchange. 

While nearly everyone is peripherally 

involved in foreign exchange through mortgages, 

bank accounts, or other dollar-driven 

investments, only individuals with a yen for 

active participation in currency trading actually 

do so. 

Russell Erxleben, the University of Texas at 

Austin football legend and founder of Austin 

Forex International, is such an individual. 

Following an impressive career as a Texas 

Longhorn and 3-time All-American, Erxleben 

spent 8 years in the National Football League 

as a field goal kicker, arguably the most 

stressful position to play. It’s easy to see that 

his ability to succeed and thrive under enormous 

pressure on the field contributes to his 

growing status as a major player in the highly 

volatile currency trading environment. 

After retiring from professional football in 

1988, Erxleben, 41, dabbled in real estate 

investments. He devoted attention to business 

ventures like telecommunications, but 

became intrigued by the foreign exchange 

market in 1993, after a broker friend persuaded 

him to invest some of his own money. 

At first, Erxleben experienced some 

uncomfortable losses while scaling the learning 

curve. In time, he not only learned, but 

managed to excel in the foreign currency 

exchange business that was once the sole 

province of major financial institutions. 

The foreign currency market moves the 

astronomical sum of $2.5 trillion around the 

globe every day; however, less than 20 percent 

is generated through this country. “It is 

intriguing how much money flows through 

this market daily,” Erxleben explains, “it

would take a total of 90 days in the U.S. stock 

market to equal the amount of money invested 

daily in foreign currency trading.” 

Before the creation of Austin Forex 

International in 1996, investors had few 

options available to them in the foreign currency 

market. Virtually shut out of the market, 

private investors had nowhere to go. 

Now, with as little as $20,000 to speculate, 

and Austin Forex International’s guidance, 

investors can take advantage of a market that 

yields significantly higher returns in a shorter 

time frame than even the most aggressive traditional 

investment vehicles. 

Since opening for business with fewer than 

a dozen active clients and a trading volume of 

about $500,000, Austin Forex International 

has become one of the leaders in its field. “We 

want to become the top foreign currency trading 

company in America,” Erxleben says, 

adding, “I feel we are on the right track.” 

Still, foreign currency trading is not for the 

timid. Erxleben’s style and trading philosophy, 

however, are cautious. These attributes 

and a depth of knowledge he insists on 

among his broker associates, appear to be 

paying dividends for everyone involved. 

Along with technical expertise, there are 

fundamental values at play at Austin Forex 

International, including high integrity, 

frequent communication between broker 

and client, and rational objectives that 

remain consistent with prudent stewardship 

of client funds. 

Much of what happens with an Austin 

Forex client’s money occurs overnight in the 

central time zone as the company deals with 

German marks, Swiss francs, the British 

pound and Japanese yen. 

That’s why Erxleben begins his day at 3:30 

a.m. After exercising, he’s generally at his 

desk an hour later. Remarkably, it’s not 

uncommon for him to make a mid-to-high 

six-figure profit for the firm before lunch. 

It has been said that he has an innate feel 

for anticipating market shifts and understands 

how and why an impending sociopolitical 

circumstance will alter the dynamics 

of the market at any given time. 

Austin Forex International commissioned 

E-Forex of San Francisco to develop Broker 

FX, a sophisticated software system that is 

used by brokers to facilitate trades. Using cutting 

edge computers and telecommunications, 

transactions a world away can be completed 

in as little as 7 seconds. 

Austin Forex International has also developed 

banking models that ensures a direct 

relationship with major international banks. 

This gives clients an edge as well in terms of 

minimizing the response time required for 

making trades in an ever-shifting market. 

Importantly, secure banking relationships 

more often than not reduces commissions 

paid to intermediaries. 

Austin Forex International occupies 

expansive offices on the 19th floor of the 100 

South Congress building. Looking to the 

future, the firm plans to open multiple offices 

in major cities throughout the world. Each 

office will employ 30 to 50 brokers. 

Imbued with a yen for active participation 

in currency trading, Erxleben, his associates 

and the customers of Austin Forex 

International plan to continue and enlarge on 

their success in the exciting and rewarding 

foreign currency exchange marketplace. 

Additional useful information about the 

company is available on the Internet at 

www.austinforex.com. 

✧ 

Erxleben conducts intensive training 

sessions for FEI broker/associates. 


129

✧ 

PHOTOS BY PAUL CATER DEATON. 

VINTAGE 

VILLAS 


130 

Overlooking beautiful 

Lake Travis, only 

30 minutes from 

downtown Austin, 

Vintage Villas can 

meet your needs 

when it comes to corporate 

retreat/conference 

facilities, or 

providing an early 

Texas-style bed and 

breakfast setting. 

Vintage Villas 

offers three separate 

villas containing a 

total of 40 rooms and 

three suites, all with a 

panoramic view of 

Lake Travis. Each villa 

is named and decorated in the style of a particular 

region of Texas—South, Central, and 

East. While rooms at most other hotels are 

monotonously the same, each of the Vintage 

Villas’ rooms and suites is uniquely decorated 

with its own custom designed bedding, 

antiques and original works of art by several 

leading local and Southwestern artists. 

Companies needing a quiet location for a 

business conference or retreat will enjoy a 

choice of meeting rooms and individual 

suites, each with duplex jacks allowing private 

phone/computer/fax service, and a 27- 

inch TV with built-in VCR. Each guest room 

also contains a microwave, coffeemaker, 

refrigerator with frost-free icemaker, and individual 

climate control. 

Since opening in December 1996, a large 

number of corporate accounts have enjoyed 

the “conference/retreat friendly” atmosphere 

the villas provides. 

Corporate guests often 

reserve an entire villa for a 

relaxed and self-contained 

meeting place. From the 

meeting room to the breakout 

rooms, the feeling is 

more than that of just a typical 

meeting. One conference 

participant stated, “this 

wasn’t just a meeting—this 

was an experience.” 

Conferences and retreats are just part of 

the activities at Vintage Villas. At any given 

time, the Villas draws guests from all over the 

world—recent visitors have hailed from Mexico, 

Canada, Europe, and the Far East. Wedding parties, 

in particular, are fond of the Vintage Villas 

and its unique design. In addition to providing a 

“home away from home” for the bride, groom, 

their families and friends, the adjacent wedding 

and event center is the perfect setting for wedding 

ceremonies and receptions. 

A continental breakfast is set up in the living 

room of each villa each morning with a 

selection of fresh muffins, pastries, juices and 

coffee awaiting the early risers. A full gourmet 

breakfast is served each morning in the dining 

room. The menu varies and provides 

items from crab cakes to pancakes. 

For those who want to take advantage of 

lake activities, Vintage Villas is only seven minutes 

from four different marinas. Three of 

Central Texas’ finest golf course are 10 minutes 

away, and it is just a short drive to Austin to 

enjoy the many activities the capital city has to 

offer. The Slaughter Leftwich Winery is nearby, 

and group tours of historic Hill Country communities, 

antique shops, and outlet malls can 

be arranged. 

For those wanting to relax, Vintage Villas 

provides a complimentary library of books and 

videos that you can enjoy in the comfort of 

your own room or suite.

LA REYNA 

MEXICAN 

RESTAURANT 

Among south Texans conventional wisdom 

has it that really authentic, restaurant-prepared 

“Tex-Mex” cuisine can’t be found anywhere 

north of, say, San Antonio. 

Aficionados would also agree with the 

term ‘cuisine’, since the real thing is as 

deserving of that appellation as any food category 

found in LaRusse Gastronomique. 

Today, the slangy (probably politically 

incorrect), idiomatic name of this regional 

culinary staple is often referred to as Norteno 

and nowhere is the art practiced better than at 

Austin’s La Reyna Mexican Restaurant. 

This modest, unassuming establishment 

on the city’s near south end, is one of those 

off-the-beaten-track eateries frequented, for 

the most part, by savvy locals, some of whom 

enjoy a measure of celebrity. 

Owner Vicente Hernandez is originally 

from Saltillo, Mexico. He arrived in Austin in 

1963, bringing with him a family tradition of 

bread baking, that led to the opening in 1974 

of La Reyna Bakery, which soon became a 

mecca of sorts on West Mary Street. 

The shift toward what is now the restaurant 

began, as these things occasionally do, 

with bakery patrons asking for coffee to 

accompany a morning pastry. “Next thing you 

know, people were asking for breakfast tacos,” 

Hernandez recalls. 

Gradually, a full menu developed, the bakery 

operation was integrated into the restaurant 

and the two co-existed through a period 

of growth in the 1980s that resulted in a 

three-location operation. 

“That became just too much,” said 

Hernandez, who feared that his reputation for 

quality and service was being compromised. 

Scaling back, the satellite restaurants were 

closed in 1990 and the bakery was sold to one 

of the employees who eventually relocated to 

a site two blocks south of the original location. 

The restaurant was then expanded to include 

both indoor and patio dining, as well as a 

commodious room for private functions. 

The ambience of La Reyna Mexican 

Restaurant appeals to employees, as well as 

patrons. Most of the kitchen and wait staff 

have been with Hernandez an average of eight 

to ten years. The present chief cook, Mrs. 

Marianna Mendez has been turning out “The 

Number One in Homemade Mexican Food in 

Austin” for the better part of 22 years. 

La Reyna employs 25 persons in all, 

including the owner’s son, Vincent John, and 

daughters, Rosemary and Linda Hernandez. 

As to the claim about being the best, 

here’s what one Austin food critic said about 

La Reyna: 

“El mejor...this is the authentic stuff. There 

is one valid reason that La Reyna enjoys landmark 

status and it can be summed up in one 

word: homemade!” 

But you can’t eat words, so a visit is in order. 

La Reyna, at 1816 South First Street, is open 7 

days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

✧ 

La familia (from left): David, Rosemary, 

Vincent John, Maria Theresa, Vickie, 

Hortencia and Vicente Hernandez. 

PHOTO COURTESY OF JULIE FERNÁNDEZ. 


131

✧ 

Above: The inn sits high above MLK Drive 

at its intersection with Pearl Street. 

Below: Inviting, classical Euro-style 

guest room. 

AUSTIN 

EXECUTIVE 

LODGING/ 

THE INN AT 

PEARL STREET 


132 

Frommer’s Guide provides 

comprehensive information 

about Austin 

accommodations, listing 

everything from high end 

resorts to lodging for the 

budget-minded business 

and leisure traveler. 

Although profiled in the 

Bed & Breakfast section of 

the current edition, The 

Inn at Pearl Street is decidedly 

atypical of the genre. 

Owner Jill Bickford’s 

gemlike labor of love is 

more akin to the diminutive 

country inns of Europe 

than the typical mom and pop enterprise of 

North America. 

Bickford is also the owner of Austin 

Executive Lodging (AEL) (www.austinlodging.com) 

and from the dynamics of that hospitality 

category, has established a modus 

operandi for The Inn at Pearl Street 

(www.innpearl.com) that she believes is more 

suited to contemporary “home away from 

home” lifestyle demands. 

And while the gracious, even opulent 

surroundings are in keeping with a classic 

B&B, the management style is attentive but 

unobtrusive. A full breakfast is served on 

weekends (including champagne on Sundays); 

during the week guests may elect to help themselves 

to a European-style variety of morning 

goodies. House privileges extend to one’s own 

entry key, permitting access at any hour. 

“We’re cognizant of the time pressures 

people are under today and want our guests 

to feel we’re a haven from constraints of any 

kind,” Bickford says. 

An avid collector, Bickford antiques and 

collectibles dominate the interiors, providing 

an eclectic sensory adventure. Erté statuettes 

share space with Victorian and Texas oak 

primitives, yet nothing is sacred. 

“It’s all here to be shared and enjoyed,” 

said the innkeeper. “We don’t want anyone to 

feel as though they have to tiptoe around for 

fear of breaking something.” 

Situated in the heart of Austin’s Uptown 

Cultural District, this 1896 Greek Revival was 

rescued in 1993. With help from the owner’s 

parents, Burton and Victoria Bickford, it has 

been lovingly restored to its near-original 

turn-of-the-century charm. 

The first official record of the property can 

be found in the Austin City Directory of 1914 

when it was the private residence of a prominent 

Texas jurist. In the early 1980s, it was 

briefly used as a movie set even as it was 

falling to ruin. 

Nearly two years and a tidy sum of money 

went into the meticulous restoration, much of 

it accomplished by Bickford’s father, a retired 

dentist who could easily have earned a significant 

reputation as a master cabinet maker. 

While the overall ambience bespeaks a 

reverence for the past, the modern touches— 

-stylish bathrooms in each guest suite, the 

cobblestone drive, and a 1,600 square foot 

deck—blend in artfully. 

At this writing there are four bedrooms; 

however, once the adjacent Burton House 

(named for Dr. Burton Bickford) has been 

restored Bickford anticipates being able to 

offer a total of nine rooms and suites. 

She sees her B&B property as a natural 

extension of Austin Executive Lodging, a 

business she has grown over the past 18 

years. AEL provides one- and two-bedroom 

furnished apartments throughout the city for 

extended stay rental. 

“With The Inn at Pearl Street we can now 

offer a unique setting for the business traveler 

in a near-town location,” Bickford says.

Granite House is a leading film, video, and 

multimedia company in a city that is now the 

heart of the Texas film industry. Directed by 

three partners with diverse but complementary 

skills, the company produces films and 

commercials for national network television 

as well as video and multimedia for a variety 

of clients including high-technology giants 

such as Dell, Tivoli Systems, and VTEL; oldline 

Austin companies such as County Line 

Restaurants and Thundercloud Subs; and 

Austin institutions from the University of 

Texas to Scholtz’s Beer Garden. “Ours is one 

of the emerging companies that make content 

for the Austin market and worldwide,” says 

Dwight Adair, Granite House president. 

An avid filmmaker since high school, 

Adair moved to Los Angeles twenty years ago, 

where he started as a dialog coach on the 

movie Urban Cowboy. “It was a way to get into 

the business sideways,” he says. For the next 

fifteen years he and his wife, Sandra, worked 

in the Los Angeles film industry. 

By the time they returned to 

Austin in 1993, Adair had been a 

director of prime-time TV shows 

such as Dallas and Dynasty, and 

Sandra had several feature films 

and documentaries to her credit 

as an editor. They saw Austin as 

a place where the film industry 

was growing, a place where “we 

could control our own destiny,” 

says Adair. 

While Sandra edited films for 

emerging auteur Richard 

Linklater, Dwight pooled his talents 

with other like-minded individuals, 

including Mike Martin, 

whose 17 years’ experience as a 

producer and cinematographer in 

television meshed with Adair’s 

vision of creating a regional independent 

motion picture company. 

They incorporated Granite 

House in 1994. One year later 

the company was producing She 

Fought Alone, a made-for-TV 

movie for NBC. 

Lucy Frost joined the company 

in 1995, bringing expertise in 

high-tech marketing. The three partners 

began to combine entertainment, information, 

and technology in marketing, training, 

sales, and image videos for Granite House’s 

growing list of corporate clients, which 

include some of Austin’s leading hightechnology 

companies. Today, roughly 80 

percent of the company’s revenues come from 

producing films, videos, CD-ROMs, Web 

sites, and commercials for its high-profile corporate 

clients. 

Granite House has continued to increase its 

offerings through strategic alliances with other 

media companies, including Infinite Solutions 

Design Group, specialists in graphic design 

and interactive media, and Creative 

Consultants, well-known corporate and special 

event planners. “We are atypical in that we 

have fingers in a lot of pies,” says Adair. “The 

demand for content—movies, TV, cable, internet—is 

voracious,” he adds. “Granite House 

definitely will continue to be a provider.” 

GRANITE 

HOUSE 

✧ 

(Left to right) Michael Martin, Lucy Frost 

and Dwight Adair. 


133

TEXAS KILN 

PRODUCTS 


134 

Those who try to eke out a living from the 

harsh, unforgiving land of the U.S. 

Southwest, feel about mesquite trees as they 

do about predators with a taste for livestock. 

Like the loathsome cockroach that can survive 

thermonuclear assault, the mesquite 

thrives during the worst of times; when the 

water table permits, it will suck up 35 gallons 

of water a day, but it laughs at drought and 

grows more bean pods. 

Enough to lockjaw the preacher and give 

weeds a bad name! 

Ray and Bo Shelton redefine the pejorative 

“tree hugger.” Like a good woman loves her 

babies, the brothers love mesquite. 

As do growing numbers of aficionados who 

buy the Native Texas Wood products that flow 

from the Shelton’s Texas Kiln Products (TKP) 

operation in nearby Smithville. 

Ray Shelton is president and CEO of the 

thriving company he created from whole 

cloth in 1988. He’d spent a career in the semiconductor 

industry with Texas Instruments 

and later in Austin with Motorola. At 

Louisiana State University, he’d studied an 

array of subjects, ranging from architecture to 

metallurgy. Retired and casting about for new 

challenges, Ray thought his affinity for woodworking 

and awareness of the marketability 

of Louisiana cypress could somehow translate 

into a viable business. 

He soon re-learned that Texans (the brothers 

are from these parts) are disdainful of natural 

materials that don’t grow here. 

The 25-acre site of Texas Kiln Products 

was dense with mesquite—as are 55 million 

Texas acres—and Ray set out to learn as much 

about the gnarly, gritty, ornery stuff as possible. 

In the process much else was learned 

about all manner of native trees, and today 

TKP and its proprietors are considered 

experts in the field. Their customers range 

from architects and artisans to some of the 

nation’s renowned furniture makers. 

The kiln-drying techniques developed by 

TKP, as well as the computerized kilns invented 

and built enable them to produce mesquite 

and pecan boards in thickness and lengths 

previously unattainable. 

Ray and Bo Shelton are proudest of two 

accomplishments in their relatively short history. 

One centers on the company providing 

rewarding opportunities for their dozen 

employees and their families, as well as the 

several tree harvesting concerns that they 

helped get started. 

Their most publicized accomplishment 

was their involvement in salvaging and processing 

the vandalized sections of Austin’s 

historic Treaty Oak, some of which has since 

been used in the State Capital and the 

Governor’s mansion. 

Among the roughly 10,000 board feet of 

native Texas timber the company processes each 

month mesquite represents fully half the output. 

The balance is comprised of Pecan, Red 

and White Oak, Walnut, Aromatic Cedar, 

Loblolly Pine, Sycamore and Tidewater Cypress. 

Many of Austin’s more upscale homes featuring 

flooring, staircases or cabinetry started life at 

TPK. Among recent institutional projects that 

boast extensive native wood treatments are the 

Bass Concert Hall in Fort Worth and the Dallas 

headquarters of the Southland Corporation.

Imagine for a moment a ’90s remake of 

the film The Graduate. Cut to the 

scene where the boozy sage whispers knowingly 

into Dustin Hoffman’s ear the admonition, 

“Plastics.” Today’s scriptwriter would 

likely substitute “mergers and acquisitions” 

or “internet.” 

But what about “office furniture”? 

Ask Jay Femal, president of Austin 

Business Furniture, and he’d likely tell you 

that such advice, while a lot less glamorous 

than high finance or cyberspace, would serve 

one well as a career choice. 

Femal, as he surveys his tasteful showroom 

located at 9901 Burnet Road in Austin, recalls 

his beginnings in the business, when fresh 

out of college he worked for what was then a 

major player in the industry, Shaw Walker, 

inventors of the modern day filing cabinet. 

“I’m not sure I consciously knew it at the 

time, but it seemed to me to be a very stable, 

necessary business,” Femal said. 

He goes on to point out that white collar 

commerce as we know it today, is a business 

revolution that has a relatively short history. 

“The advent of the cubicle, and a growing 

[even today] cadre of workers whose livelihood 

is inextricably linked to a desk, is only 

about 50 years old,” Femal notes, adding, “so 

the future of the office furniture 

industry is limitless.” 

Austin Business Furniture, 

with its 25 employees, began as a 

liquidating subsidiary of the nowdefunct 

Able Contract Furniture 

and Equipment Company. That 

was in 1985. 

Enjoying a steady, if unspectacular, 

growth rate for more than a 

decade, ABF has been able to 

make a long-term commitment to 

the business and design entities of 

Austin and Central Texas. 

In 1992, for example, ABF 

became the region’s exclusive distributor 

of Kimball International, 

one of the largest manufacturers 

in the $18 billion annual office 

furniture market. 

The year 1996 was a watershed 

year for Austin Business 

Furniture, according to Femal. At the start of 

that year, Kimball rolled out its Office 

Furniture Group, essentially a joint venture 

encompassing the lines of Kimball, National 

and Harpers, which together comprised more 

than 100 years of manufacturing and marketing 

experience. 

In 1998, Austin Business Furniture took 

another step forward, when it became aligned 

with HON Industries’ Contract Group to 

become distributors for such prestigious 

products as Allsteel, Terrace and Concensys. 

“We now have in place what we feel is 

a complete package,” Femal concluded, 

“total best solutions for every conceivable 

customer.” 

Commercial furniture dealerships rely 

totally on their manufacturers to change and 

adapt to new technology. 

“The close of the millennium will initiate a 

paradigm shift in our industry,” Femal says, 

predicating this statement on his belief that 

technology will result in a lessened emphasis 

on traditional white collar careers. 

Femal’s positioning of ABF, therefore is 

expressed in “the belief that we must help our 

customers create workspaces that advance 

their strategic intent in a manner that allows 

for future change. 

AUSTIN 

BUSINESS 

FURNITURE 

✧ 

C3 Communications Facilities Manager, 

John Garcia (left) and Jay Femal, President 

of Austin Business Furniture, enjoy the 

results of a multi-floor modular furniture 

installation at C3’s new Austin 

Headquarters. 


135

LAKEWAY INN 

✧ 

Top: Aerial view of Lakeway Inn 

and Marina. 

Middle: Typical guest room. 

Bottom: Construction was underway in 

1998 on a new addition to Lakeway Inn. 


136 

Visionary developers, like 

cosmetic surgeons, or graphic 

artists, have a knack for seeing 

possibilities—the trees 

and the forest. 

Exceptional developers 

like Flint Sawtelle, Lee 

Blocker and John Crooker 

dreamed big and worked on a 

large canvas. 

In 1962, the trio pondered 

a spit of land jutting out into 

Lake Travis and saw a site for 

a world-class resort, where, 

on that Spring morning, most 

folks would have seen a sunbleached, 

rocky and perfectly 

ordinary chunk of land. By the fall of that 

same year, Lakeway Inn, at a modest 49 

rooms became a reality—an instant success, 

destined to become a Texas classic. 

Each succeeding year and decade, something 

new and enticing was added. Golf was 

enjoying its first boom when, in 1965, work 

was completed on the first nine holes of the 

Live Oak Course. That coincided with the 

addition of 31 new guest rooms at the Inn, and 

a second nine holes was added shortly thereafter. 

Lakeway’s other championship venue, 

the Yaupon Course was completed in 1978. 

The surrounding community of Lakeway 

evolved in fits and starts in those early years, 

but began to show signs of its present-day 

growth spurt once the Jack Nicklaus-designed 

Hills Golf Course was in place in 1981-82. 

The first remodeling of Lakeway Inn was 

accomplished in 1987 and despite the economic 

downturn, new ownership/management 

commitments ensured that the resort 

remained vastly popular. 

Lend Lease Real Estate Investments is the 

present owner of Lakeway Inn, which is managed 

by Dolce International, a leading, global 

conference center/resort management company. 

Dolce currently manages 12 properties in 

the U.S., Canada and Europe, and has a 

vision toward expanding their respective 

ownership/management portfolio to 35 properties 

in five years. 

One result of that partnership involves a 

major, $20 million expansion at the Inn, 

undertaken in 1998. A new, multi-story building 

will be the resort’s centerpiece, while the 

existing Inn will be completely renovated to 

provide expanded dining and leisure facilities. 

Importantly, the Inn will grow to 239 

rooms and suites while total meeting room 

space will burgeon to 20,000 square feet. 

Enhancements will include a dedicated learning 

environment, complete with cutting edge 

communications technology. 

But the essence of Lakeway Inn, as always, 

is embodied in its captivating Hill Country 

setting, an attentive and amiable staff, exceptional 

dining venues, and a stunning array of 

leisure activities. For more information, visit 

their Web site, www.dolce.com.

Seldom do preservationists go to alert status 

if a threatened property is younger than 

100 years old—unless it once sheltered someone 

famous or (in Texas) notorious. And no 

building-huggers worthy of their Timberlands 

would get exercised over a commercial property 

built in 1961. No one spends emotion on 

concrete block motels, it seems. 

So, there was no hand wringing at the back 

end of the 1980s, when one of near-south 

Austin’s interstate travel havens was empty and 

fast becoming just another off-ramp derelict. 

Today, what beckons to the road-weary or 

the new arrival looking for a temporary 

home, is the HomeGate Studios and Suites. 

Given the times and Austin’s boom economy, 

the HomeGate extended stay concept is 

arguably one of the best in a history of incarnations 

for the lakefront property. 

That it would and should have been rescued 

goes without saying. The 6.5 acres surrounding 

the lodging is only one of a handful 

of commercial sites on Town Lake and it 

boasts 1,000 feet of water frontage. 

When first built and christened, The 

Ramada Gondolier, the pseudo-Venetian decor 

made it unique for its time and locale, and 

Austinites suspended disbelief long enough to 

enjoy its diversions, including moonlight 

excursions aboard mock canal boats. 

Now guests at the HomeGate can watch 

lithe athletes of the University of Texas rowing 

team flexing their way upstream and 

down, nudging aside wisps of morning haze. 

Joggers and cyclists can be seen, or joined 

as they take advantage of the shaded pathways 

along the far shore. And guests who 

bring along their gear and own a 

license, can even fish from the 

hotel’s private fishing dock, one of 

only a handful still in existence on 

this dammed-up stretch of the 

Colorado River. 

Although operated successfully 

for the better part of 25 years by its 

chain builder/owners, market forces 

and a shift in the commercial growth 

pattern of Austin resulted in decline 

in occupancy and profitability. 

It was briefly known as Riverside 

Quarters and employed by the 

University of Texas as an off-campus student 

dormitory. During the financial unpleasantness 

of 1989-91, the Resolution Trust 

Corporation auctioned off the property for a 

scant 15% of its book value and it wasn’t until 

1994 and its acquisition by another national 

chain that the hotel was reborn and again 

became a viable property. 

Today, it has regained nearly the full measure 

of its early popularity. Prime Hospitality 

Corporation following its 1997 merger with 

Austin-based HomeGate Hospitality, Inc. 

added the Town Lake landmark to its growing 

portfolio of extended stay hotels. 

Each expansive studio and suite offers 

a fully-equipped kitchen and work area, 

complete with state of the art direct dial dataport 

telephones and voice mail. Lake front 

guest accommodations all have accessible balconies 

and spacious common areas also boast 

lake views. 

And, although overnight guests are always 

welcome, HomeGate is an ideal close-to-town 

haven for those anticipating a protracted stay. 

✧ 

HOMEGATE 

STUDIOS & 

SUITES 

Above: The north lobby lounge area features 

towering windows and a balcony (not 

shown) overlooking Town Lake. 

Below: Palladian-style windows and a porte 

cochere welcome guests to the HomeGate, 

which fronts on Riverside Drive. 


137

QUALITY OF LIFE 

140 Westminster Manor 

142 Huston-Tillotson College 

144 Clinical Pathology Laboratories, Inc. 

146 City of Austin Department of Aviation 

148 Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeons 

150 Girling Health Care, Inc. 

152 Austin Community College 

153 Heritage Society of Austin 

154 Texas Army National Guard 

155 Riverbend Church 

156 Workers’ Assistance Program 

157 St. Edward’s University 


WESTMINSTER 

MANOR 

✧ 

Below: Westminster Manor’s interior 

courtyard. 


140 

More than 30 years ago Westminster 

Manor created a new standard in elder healthcare. 

Founded by the First Presbyterian 

Church of Austin, whose roots in Texas date 

back to 1850, Westminster Manor was a 

pioneer in housing for retired men and 

women. Its unique arrangement of private 

apartments, group dining, recreational activities, 

and convalescent care created a comfortable, 

secure, and independent way of life that 

was unusual at the time. It was the first 

Presbyterian home for the aged built in Texas, 

and one that combined the privacy of a family 

home with the services of a 24-hour on-site 

health center. Even today, Westminster Manor 

is the city’s only retirement community to 

provide life-long nursing and rehabilitative 

care to its residents. “We have a reputation as 

the premier retirement living facility in the 

Austin area,” says former chairman of the 

board, Harry Bengtson. 

The 112-year-old First Presbyterian 

Church of Austin had a history of leadership 

in social services long before it traded its 

downtown property for a new seven-acre site 

in West Austin on Jackson Avenue to broaden 

its ministry. Recognizing a growing need for its 

members, church elders led by the late Harris 

Bell started to think about a community dedicated 

to retired men and women where they 

could continue to lead active lives but with the 

security of having healthcare when, and if, 

needed. Plans for a new five-story home were 

approved in 1962, and that same year a separate 

not-for-profit corporation was created 

under the name Westminster Manor, Inc. The 

church sold part of its land to the new nonprofit, 

and a leading local architect was chosen 

to design the building. “The life-care concept 

was in its early infancy, and this form of retirement 

living had not really been tested,” says 

Bengtson. “It took a lot of faith and daring on 

the part of church members. We admire and 

thank them for their foresight.” 

Westminster Manor opened in April 1967 

with 143 apartments. Four years later preliminary 

plans were started to add 80 new apartments, 

which were completed in 1975. 

Outside marketing and management services 

were brought in 1976 to handle day-to-day 

operations, and the nursing center was 

expanded by remodeling some vacant residential 

units. By 1978 another wing of apartments 

was being planned, which was finished two 

years later. When its neighbor, the First 

Presbyterian Church, moved a second time, 

Westminster Manor bought the adjoining 

property, which became the site of a new 90- 

bed health center that was completed in 1987.

Now the city’s oldest retirement community, 

Westminster Manor has 271 apartments— 

including three penthouses—for 320 residents, 

many of whom have had distinguished 

professional careers. Most residents are longtime 

Austinites and have included the mother 

of Governor Ann Richards, Texas Lieutenant 

Governor Walter Woodul, Texas Supreme 

Court Justice St. John Garwood, and the first 

woman secretary of the Texas Senate Bess 

Pierce. Several residents have lived there for 

more than 20 years. 

This centrally located West Austin enclave 

is near neighborhoods, major shopping areas, 

and the University of Texas. Westminster 

Manor offers residents a wide variety of 

amenities—library, game room, exercise 

room, book club, even a small grocery—as 

well as planned activities that include transportation 

to cultural events, movies, and 

shopping; out-of-town day trips; and musical 

or theatrical productions at the Manor’s 250- 

seat auditorium. Residents purchase an 

endowment based on the size of their apartment 

that includes housing and healthcare. A 

monthly maintenance fee covers such services 

as meals, utilities, and housekeeping. 

Its location, services, and quality of life 

mean there is generally a waiting list. Over 

the years, the non-denominational 

Westminster Manor has become independent 

of the church but is still governed by a local 

board of trustees. Iowa-based LifeCare 

Services, a manager of life-care facilities 

around the country, contractually manages 

the community for the board. “We have a 

well-organized staff, a dedicated board of 

directors, a caring resident’s association, and 

most of all, we are blessed to have a wonderful 

group of residents,” says Bengtson. 

✧ 

Above: Every apartment has an outside 

view. Some enjoy a breath-taking view of 

the city. 

Below: One of the amenities is a 

comfortable, up-to-date library.. 

Sharing the Heritage | QUALITY OF LIFE 

141

✧ 

Above: Samuel Huston College, a 

predecessor of Huston-Tillotson College. 

Below: Evans Industrial Hall, Tillotson 

College, another predecessor of Huston- 

Tillotson College. 


142 

HUSTON- 

TILLOTSON 

COLLEGE 

The oldest institution of 

higher education in Austin, 

Huston-Tillotson College provides 

quality education to prepare 

students to meet the challenges 

of the 21st century. The 

institution unites the missionary 

zeal and historic commitments 

to the education of the “freedmen” 

of Congregationalists and 

Methodists under the motto, “In 

Union, Strength.” 

Following the Civil War, few 

efforts were made by state or federal governments 

in the South to provide education for 

newly-freed slaves. That task fell to various 

churches, which opened a total of 13 institutions 

in Texas between 1866 and 1912. 

Reverend George Jeffrey Tillotson, a retired 

minister from Wethersfield, Connecticut, 

moved to Texas in the 1800s in order to 

establish a school to train Negro teachers. He 

founded Tillotson College in Austin in 1875 

upon a secondary school campus that had 

been sponsored by the American Missionary 

Association, a predecessor of the United 

Church of Christ. Chartered in 1877, 

Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute 

opened its doors four years later. The college 

sat atop Austin’s second highest hill overlooking 

the Colorado River. 

In 1881, there were no public schools for 

colored people in Austin. Many of Tillotson’s 

first students had no prior formal education; 

however, the eager students, who numbered 

100 by the end of the first year, knew that they 

were the “elect” of their race. The institution 

was organized as a junior college in 1925, as a 

women’s college in 

1926, and again as a 

senior college in 

1931, returning to 

coeducational status. 

It was accredited 

with an “A” classification 

by the 

Southern Association 

of Colleges and 

Schools in 1943. 

Under similar circumstances 

in Dallas, 

Reverend George W. Richardson, with the support 

of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 

organized Andrews Normal College, the predecessor 

of Samuel Huston College, in 1876. 

The years in Dallas were difficult and, at one 

point, the school was burned to the ground at 

the hands of white terrorists. To serve a larger 

number of students, the school was relocated 

to Austin in 1878 by a vote of the West Texas 

Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 

Church. In 1887, it was renamed for Samuel 

Huston, an Iowa farmer who donated $9,000 

for the college’s first building. Because of various 

financial problems and construction 

delays, Samuel Huston College was not ready 

for classes until 1900. In 1926, the college was 

approved as a senior college, and in 1934 it 

was accredited with an “A” classification by the 

Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. 

With common goals, the two colleges 

began discussing cooperative efforts in the 

1930s. While institutions across the nation 

were grappling with the issues of whether 

they should provide a traditional liberal arts 

education, with emphasis on literature, history, 

languages, philosophy, and art, or practical 

education in various trades, like agriculture, 

engineering, business and industrial sciences, 

the two colleges worked hard to provide a 

balanced curriculum that offered both a comprehensive 

foundation in the liberal arts and 

useful skills like carpentry. Moral and religious 

instruction undergirded the academic 

curriculum at both institutions. 

Located less than a mile apart in East 

Austin, both schools enjoyed healthy competition 

and rivalry in athletic programs, cooperation 

in student activities, and collegial

elationships among the faculty, staff, and students. 

They both affirmed commitment to 

community service and making a noble contribution 

to the wider society as the purpose 

of education. The two colleges merged into 

one institution—Huston-Tillotson College— 

on October 24, 1952. 

The current Huston-Tillotson College 

occupies the 23-acre site of the former 

Tillotson College. The campus of Samuel 

Huston College was demolished when 

Interstate 35 was expanded through Austin, 

but a Texas State Historical Marker, erected in 

October 1996, stands at the site: the southeast 

corner of I-35 and 12th Street. Two original 

Tillotson College buildings still stand, 

both constructed by Tillotson students— 

Evans Hall, built in 1911-12 and zoned historic 

in 1984, and the Old Administration 

Building, built in 1913-14 and entered on the 

National Register of Historic Places in 1993. 

Following World War II, the demand for 

higher education changed radically. Thanks 

to the G.I. Bill, the baby boom, the end of 

legal segregation, the increasing independence 

of women, and changes in the world’s 

technology and economy, colleges and universities 

were inundated with more students 

than ever before. Huston-Tillotson College 

had always welcomed students of all ages, 

races, nationalities and faiths, and now it 

found the percentage of non-African- 

American men and women in its student 

body was increasing. 

Huston-Tillotson College today remains 

rooted in the vision and heritage of its founding 

United Methodist and United Church of 

Christ denominations, and is committed to 

becoming the premier historically black 

undergraduate college in the Southwest. 

Changes in curriculum have introduced new 

majors in Public Management and 

Psychology, a high-tech Institute for Research 

and Training, and an increasing number of 

courses offered in blocked format or on 

evenings and weekends. The college already 

boasts an outstanding teacher education program 

and plans to offer master’s degrees in 

education in the near future. 

Huston-Tillotson also has plans to house a 

research center for the study, collection and 

preservation of African-American culture in 

Texas and the Southwest. Such a center 

would include scholars and writers in residence, 

oral historians, archivists, other 

researchers and a public museum. Its collections 

would include, in addition to books and 

other standard archival items, notes, diaries, 

photos, artifacts, and other original materials 

from a variety of places and historical eras. 

Located in Austin, one of the best places to 

live and work in the United States, Huston- 

Tillotson College enters the 21st century with 

a successful history and a promising future. 

✧ 

Above: Huston-Tillotson College President 

Joseph T. McMillan, Jr. and students. 

Below: Huston-Tillotson Bell Tower. 


143

✧ 

CLINICAL 

PATHOLOGY 

LABORATORIES, 

INC. 

An artist’s rendering of Clinical Pathology 

Laboratories, Inc.’s Austin headquarters. 

Clinical Pathology Laboratories is the 

largest, privately owned medical laboratory in 

Texas. Owned and directed by pathologists 

(physicians specializing in laboratory medicine), 

the company provides special tests 

and diagnostic analysis to the Austin medical 

community as well as other doctors, hospitals, 

and businesses throughout the state. In its 50- 

year history, Clinical Pathology Laboratories 

has grown from a small private practice with 

one doctor to a corporation with a staff of 50 

doctors and more than 700 employees. Its mission 

over the years has remained the same: to 

provide high-quality laboratory services to 

other practicing physicians. 

The company was founded by Austin 

native Charles Pelphrey, M.D., who opened a 

medical office in May, 1948, on a tree-lined 

street between the State Capitol and the 

University of Texas. As the city’s first formally 

trained pathologist, Dr. Pelphrey could offer 

locally for the first time some of the special 

laboratory services needed by the medical 

community in Austin. 

Over the next decade, the company grew 

to include Doctors. John Rainey and Thomas 

Price and moved into a large new office in 

1957 under a new name, Clinical Pathology 

Laboratories and was earning a reputation for 

innovation, service, and commitment. 

The company expanded again in 1968 to 

accommodate the growing demand for medical 

laboratory services brought about by the 

new federally sponsored healthcare program 

Medicare and the introduction of automated 

laboratory testing equipment. The laboratory 

service industry boomed nationwide during 

the 1970s with new markets and the ability to 

perform more tests in less time. 

Clinical Pathology Laboratories reached a 

turning point in 1981. Dr. Pelphrey retired 

but, with 60 employees and six partners, the 

company he created had a strong base from 

which to expand even further. That decade a 

new form of healthcare—health maintenance 

organizations—was introduced and accepted 

in Austin long before catching on in the rest 

of the state. 

The company decided to pursue this fledgling 

market, carving out a special niche for 

itself while others were more cautious. With 

the experience gained in working with HMOs 

in its hometown, Clinical Pathology 

Laboratories was in a strategic position to 

grow as the HMO concept was accepted 

statewide—and nationally. 


144

By the 1990s, the company had expanded 

its services outside Austin by forming partnerships 

with other pathologists. In less than 

ten years it had quadrupled in size and was 

operating in the major metropolitan areas in 

Texas. With its tradition of excellence that has 

characterized the company for more than 50 

years, Clinical Pathology Laboratories will 

continue to pursue its vision of quality 

throughout the state. 

✧ 

Clinical Pathology Laboratories offers 

specialized diagnostic testing services to 

doctors, hospitals and businesses across 

the state. 


145

CITY OF 

AUSTIN 

DEPARTMENT 

OF AVIATION 

✧ 

Braniff International began scheduled 

service to Austin in January 1935, joining 

American and Essair, which were already 

serving the airport. In this photograph from 

1961, passengers board a Braniff flight by 

walking across the tarmac from one of six 

gates while families and friends watch from 

the second floor outdoor observation deck. 

In 1911, just eight years after the Wright 

Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, N.C., the 

skies over Central Texas were buzzing with 

excitement when pilot Calbraith Perry 

Rodgers made Austin one of his stops during 

the first coast-to-coast flight across the United 

States. Rodgers brought his plane, the Vin 

Fizz, down near 45th and Red River Streets, 

signaling the arrival of aviation in Austin. 

In 1917, a small dirt strip called Penn 

Field, near St. Edward’s University in South 

Austin, served as a practice landing strip for 

Army De-Haviland biplanes. Over the years, 

other private airfields followed. In the late 

‘20s, the Austin City Council petitioned the 

Army Corps at Kelly Field in San Antonio to 

have a pilot fly over Austin and select the site 

most suitable for a municipal airport. The 

army sent Lt. Claire Chennault, who would 

later command the Flying Tigers during 

World War II. 

Based on Chennault’s recommendation, 

the city purchased 340 acres of land and 

began construction on the Robert Mueller 

Municipal Airport. Two years later the airport 

opened, complete with one hangar, terminal 

building, and a single 1,000-foot long runway. 

As the popularity of air travel grew, so 

did Mueller, which fell under the auspices of 

the City of Austin Department of Aviation 

in 1958. 

In the ‘70s, it became apparent that the 

city’s air travel needs were outgrowing its airport. 

When Mueller opened, it was situated on 

the outskirts of town, a town that grew and 

eventually surrounded the airport. There was 

no room to expand to meet the demand for 

additional passenger and cargo service, which 

were vital to Austin’s growth and emerging 

role as a high-tech center. In addition, several 

neighborhoods were being affected by the 

noise and traffic generated by the airport. 


146

The answer lay in Southeast Austin where, 

during World War II, the city purchased land 

for the Del Valle Army Air Base, later renamed 

the Bergstrom Air Force Base after John 

August Earl Bergstrom, the first soldier from 

Travis County killed in the war. The base 

served the country well until it was closed 

during the early ‘90s. 

The situation, instead of being a blow to 

the local economy, was a boon for Austin. 

Millions of dollars were saved since the city 

would not have to purchase new land for the 

airport and could adapt many existing structures 

at Bergstrom instead of having to build 

everything from scratch. 

In 1993, residents voted to move Austin’s 

airport to Bergstrom and approved $400 million 

in revenue bonds for construction. 

Grants from the Federal Aviation 

Administration and revenue from Mueller 

would be used to defray costs, meaning that 

no tax dollars were needed to build the 

new airport. 

Work soon began to improve the existing 

12,250-foot runway and build a second 

9,000-foot runway. The 550,000-square-foot 

passenger terminal building, named after the 

late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, will 

contain 25 gates and can be expanded to 55 

gates if the need arises. 

The longer runway will be able to handle 

any size aircraft and the terminal building’s 

international gate will allow Austin to expand 

reach to other countries with regularly scheduled 

passenger jet service as well as charter 

flights. 

Air cargo operations took off at Austin- 

Bergstrom International Airport in June 1997, 

and passenger flights are scheduled to land in 

May 1999. 

✧ 

Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, 

opening in May 1999, connects directly to 

Texas Highway 71 and is 

eight miles from the State of Texas 

Capitol Building. 


147

CARDIOTHORACIC AND 

VASCULAR SURGEONS 

✧ 

Above: (left to right) Drs. John D. Oswalt, 

Homer S. Arnold and James H. Calhoon 

perform the first heart transplant in Central 

Texas. CTVS has performed over 150 heart 

transplants since the first one in 1986. For 

more than three decades the most 

sophisticated heart, lung, and vascular 

diagnostic and surgical techniques in the 

region have been utilized by CTVS. 

Below: Dr. R. Maurice Hood and some of 

his early partners have retired, but CTVS 

continues to be pioneers in medical history 

and has amassed a record of medical 

“firsts.” Front row: (left to right) Drs. 

James H. Calhoon, founder R. Maurice 

Hood, amd Homer S. Arnold. Back row (left 

to right) Drs. Robert A. Tate, Thomas D. 

Kirksey, and Gerald A. Baugh. Drs. Arnold 

and Tate continue to practice with CTVS. 


148 

One of the leading physician groups in 

Central Texas, Cardiothoracic and Vascular 

Surgeons (CTVS), has been a pioneer for 40 

years in state-of-the-art diagnostic and surgical 

procedures of the heart, lungs, chest, and 

major blood vessels in the human body. 

Collectively, 13 surgeons care for patients of 

all ages, from infants to seniors, throughout the 

Central Texas region from their office in 

Austin, through clinics in nearby Llano and 

Marble Falls, and from all area hospitals. 

Privately owned, it is the largest group of 

specialists in the field in Central Texas. Its mission 

is to provide the people of Central Texas 

with the highest-quality cardiac, thoracic, and 

vascular surgical services. For four decades the 

most sophisticated heart, lung, and vascular 

diagnostic and surgical techniques in the 

region have been utilized by CTVS. 

Individually and collectively, the physicians 

of what is today Cardiothoracic and 

Vascular Surgeons have amassed a record of 

medical “firsts” that started in 1958, when the 

company was founded as a solo practice by 

Dr. R. Maurice Hood. Dr. Hood was the first 

physician in Austin to employ diagnostic 

techniques and perform surgery on the heart. 

Local hospitals are staffed and equipped 

today to handle sophisticated procedures due 

to the influence of Dr. Hood and his earliest 

partners, Drs. James H. Calhoon, Homer S. 

Arnold, Thomas D. Kirksey, Robert A. Tate, 

and Gerald A. Baugh. In 1965, Dr. Calhoon 

was the only chest surgeon on hand in Austin 

to treat the victims of sniper Charles 

Whitman, who wounded 50 people and killed 

17 from the tower at the University of Texas. 

CTVS performed the first open heart surgery 

in Central Texas in 1961 and participated 

in the development of a peritoneal catheter 

used in kidney dialysis in 1963. Although 

commonplace today, it was such a revolutionary 

device at the time that Dr. Kirksey was 

featured on the CBS national news program 

60 Minutes. 

During the 1970s, they continued to be 

pioneers in medical history, treating patients 

with kidney diseases, once considered incurable, 

with an organ transplant; in the same 

era, easing the minds of parents with a sick 

infant with the ability to implant a permanent 

heart pacemaker.

As Austin grew in the 1980s, the practice 

more than doubled in size, during which time 

the physicians performed the first heart transplant 

in Central Texas. They also were among 

the first in the world to perform the Ross 

Procedure-delicate repairs to the heart that 

replace the valves-and the first homografts, 

which replace damaged arteries and heart 

valves with those from donors. In 1988, the 

group founded the first pediatric cardiac surgery 

program for infants and children in 

Central Texas. CTVS is also noted for being 

the first in the world to perform the Ross 

Procedure on a newborn. 

Other like-minded surgeons joined CTVS 

in the 1990s to meet the needs of a fast-growing 

community. The group’s trail-blazing techniques, 

such as VATS (video-assisted thoracic 

surgery), resulted in reduced medical costs 

and shorter hospital stays, and the use of staples 

instead of stitches for lung resections 

reduced the time patients spend in surgery. 

Dr. Hood and some of his early partners 

have retired, but a tradition of pioneering 

has earned CTVS physicians international 

reputations. In addition to surgery, they host 

international conferences and seminars as 

well as travel the world to teach other physicians 

their progressive surgical techniques. 

Being recognized as a leader in technology 

among their colleagues, CTVS has traveled 

throughout the United States for invaluable 

medical consultations. 

Today, the physician staff of Cardiothoracic 

and Vascular Surgeons includes Drs. Homer 

S. Arnold, Robert A. Tate, president John D. 

Oswalt, Emery W. Dilling, Robert A. Bridges, 

Phillip J. Church, Stephen J. Dewan, Mark T. 

Stewart, Lewis G. King, Michael C. Mueller, 

Andrew T. Hume, John K. Politz, and Mark C. 

Felger. They treat patients from Austin as well 

as Waco, San Angelo, Burnet, and Temple and 

have plans to extend their specialized practice 

into other communities in the region. 

“Our mission is to serve Austin and 

Central Texas with compassion, integrity, dignity, 

and charity,” says Dr. Arnold. “That is 

fixed and unswerving, and will remain so.” 

✧ 

Above: Local hospitals are staffed and 

equipped today to handle sophisticated 

procedures due to the influence of Dr. Hood 

and his earliest partners. Here, in the 

earlier years of CTVS, (left to right) Drs. 

James H. Calhoon and Homer S. Arnold 

perform a CAB (coronary artery bypass) 

with very little technological equipment and 

only one overhead light. 

Below: The physicians of Cardiothoracic and 

Vascular Surgeons: (front row, left to right) 

Drs. James H. Calhoon, founder R. Maurice 

Hood, Homer S. Arnold, (middle row left to 

right) Lewis G. King, Robert A. Tate, 

Thomas D. Kirksey, John D. Oswalt, Mark 

T. Stewart, Emery W. Dilling, (back row) 

Andrew T. Hume, Gerald A. Baugh, Phillip 

J. Church, John K. Politz, Michael C. 

Mueller, Mark C. Felger, Stephen J. Dewan, 

Robert A. Bridges. 


149

GIRLING 

HEALTH CARE, 

INC. 

✧ 

Robert G.W. Girling, III 


150 

It’s appropriate that Girling Health Care 

Inc., which provides quality in-home healthcare 

services for more than 13,000 patients in 

six different states, began in the home of 

Bettie J. and Robert W. Girling, III. 

Former minister Robert Girling and his wife 

Bettie, who both hold master’s degrees in social 

work from the University of Texas, were 

involved in counseling and administrating 

social programs for children’s homes in Fort 

Worth during the 1960s. Their busy schedules 

required them to enlist the aid of nannies to 

help take care of their children and with various 

chores around the house. When they 

moved to Austin, the Girlings found that it was 

not easy to hire reliable “babysitters”—skilled 

professional or therapeutic in-home help. 

“It was our experience in having good 

in-home care for our children, that we wanted 

to duplicate that for people with children 

in Austin,” Robert Girling says. “Then we 

decided to expand our services to provide all 

kinds of skilled care for the elderly and people 

of all ages.” 

In 1967, the couple began providing that 

service. Bettie, who stayed home to take care 

of their three children, worked to locate and 

place qualified caretakers for their clients’ 

needs, whether it was help in raising children 

or providing various services for elderly or ill 

patients in their homes. By 1969, Girling 

Health Care, Inc. had applied for and 

received certification to serve Medicare and 

Medicaid patients in Texas. 

Girling Health Care, in coordination with 

the patient and the patient’s physician, provides 

in-home care to its clients. Those services 

include everything from skilled nursing,

home health aides, medical social workers 

and physical, speech therapy and occupational 

therapy, to buying groceries, providing 

homemaker tasks and escorting clients to and 

from doctors’ offices. 

Clients include both the elderly and persons 

suffering from acute or chronic illnesses. 

The Girlings, and the medical community at 

large, have learned it is psychologically better 

for patients—and less taxing on their pocketbooks—if 

they can work through the healing 

process in their own home. 

“People want to be at home,” Robert 

Girling says. “What happens with me is that 

after I go through the acute phase of care at 

the hospital, I’m ready to get out. I’m slipping 

out the elevator to get home.” 

In 1975, Girling Health Care, Inc. began 

to expand throughout Texas and had the 

state covered by 1979. The next decade, 

the company moved into New Orleans, 

Louisana, Memphis and Knoxville, 

Tennessee, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Phoenix, 

Arizona and New York City. Today, the firm 

has a total of 9,500 employees, including 

1,200 in Austin. 

Aside from Medicare recipients, Girling 

also serves private for-pay patients, and has a 

contract with the State of Texas Department 

of Human Services to provide primary home 

care and community-based alternatives for 

indigent elderly patients. 

The company provides similar programs 

for the states of Oklahoma and New York. 

“Our focus has been on quality of care, 

giving people the best care available,” Robert 

Girling says. “I think that quality of care is 

that for which Girling stands.” 

✧ 

Bettie J. Girling. 


151

AUSTIN 

COMMUNITY 

COLLEGE 

Austin Community College (ACC) is one 

of 50 regional junior colleges in the state that 

provides innovative, hands-on education to a 

diverse student body of more than 49,000 

students annually from eight Central Texas 

counties. Located in a city with a major university 

and three private colleges, ACC has 

created a niche for itself by providing accessible, 

affordable education to meet the varied 

needs of greater Austin residents. 

Many students are enrolled in ACC’s popular 

university transfer program, whose 27 academic 

disciplines, flexible class schedule, low 

cost, and transferable course credits allow students 

to earn associate degrees or advance to 

other schools. ACC also offers technical classes 

to train students for jobs with major 

local businesses in such areas as high 

technology, hospitality, healthcare, and 

commercial art. GED preparatory 

courses and literacy classes are available 

to adults who dropped out of 

high school. In addition, ACC teaches 

business-related skills and offers continuing 

education classes to those who 

want to maintain their skills or 

advance their careers. “We take people 

from where they are and move them to 

a level where they can be successful,” 

says Richard Fonté, ACC president. 

Created by voters in 1972, ACC 

was started with discarded furniture 

and two abandoned public school buildings on 

the east and west side of town. From the beginning 

it had an “open-door” policy that turned 

no one away, a dedicated faculty, and a yearround 

curriculum that offered a mixture of 

technical and academic courses during the day 

and at night. Within ten years ACC was fully 

accredited and offering credit and non-credit 

classes to 24,000 students at more than 60 

locations—public schools, libraries, businesses, 

and industrial plants. It was an early pioneer 

in distance learning. 

In 1986, voters approved the use of a dedicated 

property tax to fund the college, and 

ACC began to consolidate and expand its 

facilities to handle its growing student body. 

The college more than quadrupled in size with 

the addition of the Riverside Campus, the 

Northridge Campus, the Pinnacle Campus in 

Oak Hill, Cypress Creek in Cedar Park, and an 

administration building near Highland Mall. 

In the 1990s, ACC has added to its curriculum 

special high-tech training programs 

for Austin’s burgeoning semiconductor, software, 

and multi-media industries as well as a 

high-school equivalency program for adults. 

A new initiative is the Virtual College of 

Texas, which offers students the opportunity 

to take classes on-line via the Internet from 

various colleges around the state. “It’s another 

exciting area we’re getting into through technology,” 

says Fonté. 


152

HERITAGE 

SOCIETY OF 

AUSTIN 

The Heritage Society of Austin (HSA) was 

the first local organization to be interested in 

preserving the city’s unique architectural, cultural, 

and environmental artifacts. Privately 

funded for more than 45 years, the organization 

has been an active participant in preserving 

notable properties throughout the city. 

Its group of dedicated volunteers has combined 

business and pleasure with appreciation 

awards, benefits, galas, and tours of historic 

homes to raise more than $2.5 million that, 

through grants and loans, have been used to 

save and restore historically significant buildings 

threatened with demolition. HSA often 

purchases and resells to preservation-minded 

individuals or businesses buildings of architectural 

importance. It also provides technical 

assistance on preservation projects, sponsors 

educational workshops and seminars, makes 

scholarships in the field of restoration architecture, 

and publishes related books. “What’s 

important about the Heritage Society is that 

it’s done the glamorous as well as such everyday 

things as helping a family restore the 

facade on their East Austin home,” says Beth 

Atherton, executive director. 

Organized in 1953, HSA started with an 

informal meeting in the home of Mrs. 

Wayman Adams, who noticed the city’s customs, 

buildings, and antiquities were disappearing. 

Within two years the Heritage 

Society had 200 members and had undertaken 

a survey of architecturally important 

homes in central Austin on behalf of the city’s 

planning department. 

HSA bought its first building in 1958, 

which it used for several years as its headquarters. 

In 1963, the Heritage Guild was created, 

and its hundreds of volunteers used their 

culinary and organizational skills to raise 

money from regular bake sales and from running 

the coffee shop at the Old Lundberg 

Bakery—an historic building on Austin’s main 

street HSA bought in 1962—and in the historic 

Driskill Hotel 1886 Lunchroom, one of 

the city’s most popular downtown restaurants. 

Other fund-raising efforts included an annual 

antique show and a spring pilgrimage to significant 

homes around Austin. In 1969, HSA 

created a foundation to administer grants from 

a self-perpetuating revolving fund. 

As Austin grew in the 1970s and 1980s, 

the Heritage Society took the lead in acquiring 

key buildings that were in danger of being 

torn down. Chief among these was the 112- 

year-old Driskill Hotel—host to U.S. presidents 

and scores of Texas statesmen—in 

which HSA was one of four major stockholders. 

It also was instrumental in the buying, 

zoning, and reselling of other significant residential 

and commercial buildings and provided 

the leadership in revitalizing downtown. 

“This is not just about architecture,” says 

Cynthia W. Brown, Heritage Society president. 

“It’s about a broad definition of our culture 

and heritage.” 

✧ 

The 1997 Annual Preservation Awards 

For 37 years, the Heritage Society of Austin 

has been giving awards in appreciation for 

significant contributions to the preservation 

of Austin’s architectural, cultural, and 

environmental heritage. The Sue and Frank 

McBee Visionary Award which was initiated 

in 1996 honored Lady Bird Johnson, Janet 

Long Fish, Roberta Crenshaw and Beverly 

Sheffield for their lifelong commitment to 

preserving the natural beauty of Austin. 

Pictured are the recipients receiving their 

award from Sue McBee (second from left). 

Not pictured-Beverly Sheffield. 


153

TEXAS 

NATIONAL 

GUARD 

✧ 

The Texas National Guard is equipped with 

the latest in modern military equipment. 


154 

Time was when the term “weekend warriors” 

was a mild pejorative used to demean 

citizen soldiers and reservists. Today, the term 

more often applied to those who disdain the 

couch in favor of the track or the playing 

field. And that’s just fine with the more than 

22,000 men and women of Texas’ own Army 

and Air National Guard units. 

“Professionalism as defined today, is made 

up of a lot of attributes,” said Lt. Col. Ed S. 

Komandosky, spokesman for the more than 

200 guard units strategically placed all across 

the state for which Austin’s historic Camp 

Mabry serves as headquarters. 

Among those qualities, Lt. Col. 

Komandosky said, “are commitments to 

excellence, family, discipline, and trust.” 

Ingrained in the Guards’ mission is the 

expressed desire to be always “ready to serve 

Texas and our nation.” 

And this is as it has been since formation 

of what is the modern day Army and Air 

National Guard, which traces its roots to the 

Texas Revolution of 1835. 

Camp Mabry was named in 1892 in honor 

of General Woodford J. Mabry, then Texas’ 

adjutant general. The original facilities 

encompassed an 85-acre tract of land donated 

by a group of Austin businessmen. 

Throughout the years and by way of grants 

and donations, it has grown to its present size 

of 375 acres. 

Significant milestones in the history 

and development of the Texas National 

Guard include: 

• The 1st Texas Regiment of Volunteers 

came under fire for the first time in October 2, 

1835 at Gonzales. 

• Some 8,000 Texas volunteers augment 

forces of Generals Zachary Taylor and 

Winfield Scott in the 1848 war with Mexico. 

• The state furnishes 69 regiments and 

nearly 90,000 men, primarily cavalry men, 

when the great Civil War erupted in 1861. 

Among legendary Texas units was General 

John Bell Hood’s Texas Brigade (1st, 4th and 

5th Texas). 

• Militia units began to reform in 1873 

following a lengthy period in limbo 

during Reconstruction. 

• In 1898, five regiments of the Texas 

Volunteer Guard were called to serve in the 

Spanish American War. One regiment was 

sent to Cuba. 

• The federal government in 1903 enacted 

legislation authorizing various state militia to 

form the National Guard. 

• The first units of the Texas Guard arrived 

in France in May 1918. Some 1,300 were lost 

in battle; two were awarded the Congressional 

Medal of Honor; 30 Texans received the 

Distinguished Service Cross and 128, the 

Croix de Guerre. 

• World War II added to the proud combat 

history of the Texas National Guard and the 

112th and 124th Cavalry regiments battled in 

every theatre of war. 

• Other units also distinguished themselves 

in the Korean and Vietnam War eras. 

Almost all the Texas Air National Guard 

served in Korea during the conflict there. 

Today, the Texas Guard embraces units in 

117 communities throughout the state. It represents 

the only sizeable, trained force available 

to the governor in the event of natural 

disasters or civil disturbances.

Many Americans, particularly Baby 

Boomers, are seeking respite from the unrelenting 

pressures of day-to-day life in the ’90s 

by returning to the churches they either abandoned 

or attended in fits and starts during 

their salad days. 

Statistics reveal that congregations across 

the religious spectrum have felt the impact of 

the more than one-third of dropouts who’ve 

found their way back to religion, raising to 43 

million the number of people who regularly 

attend church services. 

Dr. Gerald Mann, senior pastor of Austin’s 

Riverbend Church, sees this resurgence as 

evidence that people in general are waking to 

the fact that life’s secular pursuits, no matter 

how absorbing or rewarding, are largely 

empty without a spiritual component. 

“All of the would-be saviors of the ’60s— 

education, social programs, and militant liberationism—have 

not filled the ‘hole in the 

soul,’” says Dr. Mann. “People are still skeptical 

of the traditional religious forms; but they 

are hungry for spiritual experiences and a 

community of grace where they can give their 

lives in meaningful service.” 

Dr. Mann is an Austin fixture, and the 

church he and sixty families founded in 1979 

in a rented schoolhouse today ministers to 

8,000 members, nearly half of whom attend 

services each week. 

Seemingly, it is both the medium and the 

message that underlie the phenomenal 

growth of the church. 

Dr. Mann, whose characteristic 

puckish grin suggests 

a sense of fun not normally 

attributable to a Southern 

Baptist preacher, is friend and 

confidant to the likes of Willie 

Nelson and former University 

of Texas coaching legend 

Darell Royal. A more worldly 

duo is difficult to imagine. 

But they, and those whose 

penchant for living in the fast 

lane has caused unhappiness 

or worse, respond to the 

minister’s easygoing, often 

anecdotal style and the 

church’s essential message of 

“love and grace.” 

“Hope,” says Dr. Mann, “is the greatest 

need felt by most people today. They want to 

know they are not alone in facing today’s trials 

and tomorrow’s troubles. In short, what 

we all want most is to know that God is with 

us now and will be in the future.” 

The bricks and mortar future of Riverbend 

Church is embodied in an architectural marvel, 

replete with soaring frontal arch and towering, 

twin atriums with spectacular views of 

the Hill Country. The newest sanctuary was 

dedicated in the spring of 1998; christened a 

“Home for Hope,” the native limestone edifice 

seats 3,000 in an amphitheater setting. 

But the vision and mission of Riverbend 

Church have remained constant: Says Dr. 

Mann, “[we have] always sought to reach the 

cynical, the unchurched, and the skeptical.” 

Austin, by any measure, has responded 

to the “laid back” style of the church and 

its ministerial staff, both of which are stylistically 

different from the more conventional 

Baptist churches with whom they share 

basic beliefs. 

An example of the congregation’s nonjudgmental 

attitudes derives from Riverbend’s 

extensive community outreach programs. Of 

the thirteen homes the congregation volunteered 

to build under auspices of Habitat for 

Humanity, one was for a single mother who 

had been shunned by other groups for being 

unmarried. 

As Dr. Mann himself might say, “’Nuff said.” 

RIVERBEND 

CHURCH 

✧ 

Above: Riverbend Church services reach 70 

million households across the United States 

each week. 

Below: Dr. Gerald Mann, founding pastor 


155

WORKERS 

ASSISTANCE 

PROGRAM, INC. 

Born and Bred, 

Don’t it always seem to go 

That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. 

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. 

— Joni Mitchell 

Big Yellow Taxi 

Austin was never really a paradise, of 

course, but sometimes the place could fool 

you. Armadillo World Headquarters, Clark 

Field, the Varsity Theater, open country on all 

sides. A lowercase city that dodged the bullet 

that took out Houston. A city without the 

haze, without the crowding, without the rush. 

A city whose vision for the future was more 

than just a big number with a dollar sign in 

front of it. A city where people mattered. 

The Workers Assistance Program hasn’t 

forgotten. It is here to lend a helping hand, 

and it is good at what it does. The organization’s 

purpose hasn’t changed in over 20 

years. The WAP is in the business of restoring 

communities—one life at a time. 

KNOW HOW 

We know what we’re doing. The Workers 

Assistance Program serves over a million people, 

in fully half the states of the Union, as 

well as in Canada. We run employee assistance 

programs, and drug-free workplace 

programs for some 250 companies, and over 

90 government agencies, both state and local. 

Our clients include General Motors, Ford 

Motor Company, Trane, Inc. and United 

Technologies, not to mention the city 

of Austin. 

The Workers Assistance Program also 

oversees the Peer Assistance and Leadership 

program (PAL) in school districts throughout 

Texas. PAL, as the name implies, trains selected 

students to act as guides and mentors to 

other students at school, and to reach out to 

the larger community through volunteer service 

projects. 

Finally, we have joined with other groups 

around the state to create the Texas HIV 

Connection. Together, we dispense information, 

train workers, and make sure that those 

affected by the human immunodeficiency 

virus find timely counsel and treatment. 

AUSTIN: ONCE AND FUTURE 

The Workers Assistance Program grew up 

in Austin. Its people look like Austin. More 

important, they think like Austin—the city of 

recent memory, the city that made sense. 

WAP knows it can’t fix everything that’s broken 

nowadays, but it is determined to do 

what it can. 

Which is more important: brains or heart? 

With the Workers Assistance Program, you 

don’t have to choose. 

Austin was never really paradise, but 

sometimes the place could fool you. Maybe, if 

we get our bearings, find the will, and pull 

together, we can all be fooled again. 

For more information about the Workers 

Assistance Program please visit the WAP Web 

site at www.wap.com. 


156

Founded 113 years ago, St. Edward’s 

University is one of the oldest institutions of 

higher education in Texas. It is a small, 

Catholic, liberal arts college with a legacy of a 

progressive, values-based curriculum that continues 

to define it today. St. Edward’s offers 33 

different undergraduate degrees in the humanities, 

natural sciences, behavioral or social sciences, 

business, and education. Preprofessional 

programs in the health sciences and law 

are available. A pioneer in education for working 

adults, the university also offers innovative, 

self-paced degree programs in the evening and 

on weekends as well as graduate degrees in 

business and human services. 

Father Edward Sorin, a priest of the 

Congregation of Holy Cross and St. Edward’s 

founder, was lured to Texas with the prospect 

of a gift of land for establishing a college in 

the state capital. He wanted a counterpart for 

the University of Notre Dame, which he had 

founded in Indiana. 

Started as a boarding school for boys, it 

was first called St. Edward’s Academy. 

Students were taught by scholarly priests and 

brothers in a system modeled after Notre 

Dame, and enrollment gradually increased as 

international and out-of-state students were 

drawn to its classical studies and classes in 

science and commerce. The need for more 

space prompted the combination high school 

and college to move in 1889 to its current 

hilltop location overlooking the city, where its 

main building was designed by the noted 

architect Nicholas Clayton. 

St. Edward’s set its sights 

on growth after the turn 

of the century. In 1925, it 

was chartered as a university. 

During World War II, 

the high school was transformed 

briefly into a military 

academy. Afterward, 

university enrollment 

boomed as veterans took 

advantage of the G.I. Bill 

to attend college. Changes 

ensued in the 1960s 

with the closing of the 

high school and the decision 

to admit women to 

the university. 

For the last two decades, St. Edward’s has 

been in a period of unprecedented growth. It 

became a leader in core curriculum development 

and was named to the Templeton 

Foundation’s Honor Roll for Character- 

Building Colleges. Today, there are more than 

3,400 undergraduate and graduate students. 

In the last ten years, the university’s endowment 

has grown to $28.4 million, and a successful 

$27 million capital campaign was 

completed in 1997 so the school can continue 

to pursue, according to its mission statement, 

“the courage to take risks, an international 

perspective, and the commitment to 

provide educational opportunities for students 

of varied cultural, religious, educational, 

and economic backgrounds.” 

ST. EDWARD’S 

UNIVERSITY 

✧ 

Below: St. Edward’s University 


157

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158

INDEX 

# 

12th Air Force, 92 

24th Street, 67 

41st Street, 49 

45th Street, 57, 76 

55th Street, 76 

6th Texas Infantry, 28 

802 San Marcos Street, 20 

8th Ward, 37 

A 

Abilene, Kansas, 48 

Adjutant General’s Department, 51 

Aguirre, Pedro de, 5, 6 

Air Corps, 72 

Air Force One, 92 

Akin, Harry, 78 

Alabama, 20 

Alamo, The 12, 16, 17 

Alphabet Agencies, 67 

American National Bank, 60 

Apaches, 6 

Apple Computer, 85 

Archives War, 19 

Armadillo World Headquarters, 90 

Armour, J. Ogden, 57 

Army, 30, 37, 63, 71, 72, 73, 75 

ARPANet, 84 

Associated Press, 38 

Asylum for the Blind, 24, 29 

Asylum for the Deaf, 24 

Atlanta, 59 

Austin American, 63, 66, 78 

Austin American-Statesman, 73 

Austin Brass Band, 31 

Austin Business League, 59 

Austin Chamber of Commerce, 44, 

63, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 81, 83, 93 

Austin City Gazette, 15 

Austin City Light Artillery, 27 

Austin City Light Infantry, 27 

Austin Collegiate Female Institute, 27 

Austin Daily Statesman, 43, 45, 47, 

52, 58, 60, 61, 63, 66 

Austin Economic Development 

Council, 81 

Austin Grays, 27 

Austin Greys, 51 

Austin High School, 68 

Austin National Bank, 72 

Austin State Hospital, 24 

Austin Statesman, 31, 36, 42, 66, 79 

Austin Water, Light and Power 

Company, 45 

Austin, Moses, 8 

Austin, Stephen F., 8, 9, 10, 11, 32, 

50 

Austinians, 15, 19 

Austinites, 15, 21, 27, 29 28, 31, 32, 

35, 39, 42, 47, 48, 57, 58, 60, 

61, 63, 64, 66, 72, 73, 76, 84, 91 

Australia, 47 

Avenue G, 49 

B 

Balcones Escarpment, 7, 9, 10 

Balcones Research Center, 75, 79, 81, 

82 

Ballard, Charles, 67 

Baptist, 17 

Barret, E. [Eugenia], 26 

Barrett, Corinne, 30 

Barrett, Eva Stern, 30 

Bartholomew, Ed, 68 

Barton Creek, 20 

Barton Springs Pool, 68 

Barton Springs Road, 73 

Barton, Eliza, 11 

Barton, Parthenia, 11 

Barton, William, 9, 11 

Barton’s Springs, 11 

Bastrop County, 16, 72 

Bastrop, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 

32, 33, 42 

Bastrop, Baron de, 10 

Battle of Missionary Ridge, 28 

Battle of San Jacinto, 10 

Baylor University, 64 

Beaumont, 27 

Bedichek, Roy, 55 

Bell, Peter Hansbrough, 22 

Bell, William, 19 

Ben Hur, 47 

Bergstrom International Airport, 93 

Bergstrom, 72, 74, 92, 93 

Bergstrom, John A.E., 72 

Berlin, 23 

Big Lake, 64 

Big Spring, 65 

Black Tuesday, 65 

Board of Trade, 44 

Bois d’Arc Street, 15, 21 

Boston Gazette, 39 

Brackenridge Hospital, 73 

Brackenridge Tract, 63 

Brackenridge, George W., 46 

Brady Pool, 91 

Brandon, John, 23 

Brazoria County, 11 

Brazoria, 11, 13 

Brazos River, 9, 13, 15, 18, 32 

Brazos Street, 42 

Brenham, 28, 32 

Brown, Clyde, 60 

Brownrigg, R. P., 25 

Brueggerhoff and Tips Building, 36 

Brushy Creek, 18 

Bryan, 33, 67 

Buda, 58 

Bull Pen, 29 

Bullock, Richard, 14, 20 

Bullock’s Hotel, 15 

Burch, Clarence, 71 

Burgess-Wright, 58 

Burleson, Edward, 11, 24 

Burnet County, 39 

Burnet Road, 77, 78 

Burnet, 39 

Burns, Robert, 84 

Burton, I. W., 13 

C 

Camp Gary, 73 

Camp Hood, 73 

Camp Mabry, 63, 78 

Camp Swift, 72 

Campbell, Isaac, 13 

Campbell, Tom, 60 

Capital City, 31, 38, 57 

Capital National Bank, 68 

Capitol Board, 41 

Capitol, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 

29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 

40, 41, 42, 50, 52, 58, 60, 78, 

90, 91, 92 

Cardwell, John, 45 

Cardwell, Mary, 63 

Castile, 5 

Caswell, Will, 57 

Cave, E. W., 25 

Cedar Street, 14 

Chicago, 35, 50, 62 

Chinese, 60 

Chisholm Trail, 35, 76, 87 

City of Austin, 72, 87 

Civil War, 25, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 45, 

72 

Clark Army Air Field, 72 

Clark, Edward, 26 

Clarksville Northern Standard, 19 

Coahuila y Tejas, 9, 10 

Coca-Cola, 58 

Coke, Richard, 34 

Cold War, 92 

Coleman, Alexander, 19 

Coleman, Robert M., 11 

College Hill, 41 

Colorado Ranger, 32 

Colorado River, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 

13, 15, 20, 24, 27, 32, 33, 36, 

42, 43, 44, 47, 52, 53, 55, 70, 

73, 79, 81, 87, 91 

Colorado, 21 

Columbian Exposition, 50 

Columbus, Ohio, 13, 51 

Comal River, 5 

Comanche, 21 

Computation Center, 83 

Confederacy, 26, 42 

Confederate States of America, 25, 

27 

Confederate, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 

39, 45, 73 

Congress Avenue, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 

20, 21, 23, 25, 29, 35, 36, 38, 

39, 40, 45, 46, 58, 59, 60, 62, 

63, 66, 70, 76, 78, 92, 93 

Congress, 18, 62, 67, 72 

Connally, John B., 75 

Connecticut, 9 

Constitution, 12, 25, 33, 40, 41, 63 

Control Data Corporation Model 

1604, 83 

Control Data Corporation Model 

6600, 83 

Cook, Abner, 24 

Cooke, Louis P., 13 

Cox, 9 

Cox, A. H. “Hamp,” 34, 35 

Cravens, Eddie, 68 

Cret, Paul P., 68 

Crockett, 17 

Crystal, the, 61 

Cuba, 52 

Current, The, 59 

D 

Daily State Journal, 33 

Dallas Morning News, 59 

Dallas, 42, 59, 76 

Davis, Edmond J., 34 

Dawson County, 6 

Defense Department, 83 

Del Valle, 71, 72 

Dell, Michael, 86 

Democrat, 34 

Democratic, 46, 66 

Denver, 59 

Depression, 66, 68, 70 

Dixie, 30 

Dobie, J. Frank, 69 

Driskill Hotel, 42, 63 

Driskill, Jesse Lincoln, 41, 42 

Durham’s Spring, 13 

Duval Street, 57 

E 

East Avenue, 76, 78 

Eberly, Angelina Belle, 18 

Edmonson, James, 19 

Eighteenth Street, 63 

Eighth Steet, 15 

Eleventh Street, 35, 66, 76 

England, 38, 47 

English, 33 

Espinosa, Isidro de, 5, 6, 7 

Estes, Athol, 50 

Europe, 62, 71 

Exposition Boulevard, 78 

F 

Fannin, James, 12 

Fanning, J.T., 48 

Federal Communications 

Commission, 75 

Federal, 26, 35, 70, 93 

Ferguson, James E., 62 

Ferris, Warren, 17 

Fifth Street, 14 

First Baptist Church, 29 

First National Bank, 51 

Florence, 60 

Florida, 34 

FM 1325, 79 

Fontaine, Edward, 12 

Ford, Marshall, 70 

Formosa, 50 

Fort Coleman, 11 

Fort Colorado, 11 

Fort Prairie, 11 

Fort Wayne Electric Company, 48 

Fort Worth, 42, 51, 59 

Fourth Street, 14 

Fourth Texas Congress, 16 

Fox Movietone News, 71 

Franco-Texan, 20 

Frisco Shop, 78 

Frizell, Joseph P., 46 

G 

Galveston, 20, 27, 28, 31, 41 

Gann, Harvey, 71, 72 

Georgetown, 45 

Georgia, 10 

German Reichstag, 38 

German Romanesque, 24 

German, 21, 26, 49 

Germany, 20, 23, 24, 60, 62 

GI Bill, 75 

Giraud, Francois P., 22 

Glenn, John W., 44 

Goddess of Liberty, 40 

Goliad, 12 

Gordon, Mary, 55 

Governor’s Mansion, 24, 29 

Grant, U. S., 35 

Gray, George H., 14 

Great Britain, 19 

Greek Revival, 21, 23, 24 

Guadalupe Street, 14, 60, 66, 76 

Gulf of Mexico, 6, 9, 43, 55 

H 

Hamburg, Germany, 60 

Hamburg-Bremen Fire Insurance 

Company, 60 

Harrell, Jacob, 11, 12 

Harris, L.B., 66 

Harrison, Charles A., 22 

Harvard, 42 

Hawaii, 72 

Hearst, William Randolph, 57 

Helena, Arkansas, 45 

Hempstead, 32, 50 

Highway 81, 76 

Hill Country, 21, 26, 39, 75 

Hill, Captain A. C., 35 

Historical Commission, 78 

History of Texas, 19 

Hobby, Bill, 91 

Hobby, William P., 62 

Holly Street, 87 

Holt, William, 21, 32 

Honduras, 51 

Hood County, 41 

Hood, John Bell, 73 

Hornsby, Joseph, 19 

Hornsby, Reuben, 9, 10 

Hornsby’s Bend, 10 

Horton, A. C., 13 

House of Representatives, 25 

Houston and Texas Central, 28, 31, 

76 

Houston Chronicle, 78 

Houston Morning Star, 20 

Houston Post, 51 

Houston Telegraph 

and Texas Register, 11 

Houston, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 25, 

26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 51, 59 

Houston, Sam, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 

20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 39, 40, 50, 78 

Houston, Temple, 40 

Huntsville, 21, 28 

Hyde Park, 49, 50, 52 

I 

I-35, 90 

IBM, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86 

Illinois, 13 

Intel, 84 

Internet, 84 

Interregional Highway, 76 

Interregional, 76, 90 

Irish, 22 

Iron Front, The, 61 

J 

Japan, 75 

Jernigan, Albert J., 28 

Jim Crow, 38 

Johnson, Jim, 71 

Johnson, Lady Bird, 88 

Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 75, 88, 92 

Johnstown, 55 

Jones, Anson, 20 

K 

Kansas City, 35, 46 

Kansas, 21, 35, 42 

Kate Ward, 32 

Katy, 58, 59, 76 

Kellersberger, Julius G., 27, 28 

Kentucky, 9 

INDEX 

159

Killeen, 73 

King, John, 14 

Kinney’s Fort, 18 

KTBC, 77 

KVET, 75 

Kyle, Annie E., 39 

L 

La Grange, 13, 28 

Labrador, 33 

Ladies Aid Society, 27 

Ladies’ Needle Battalion, 27 

Lake Austin, 70, 87 

Lake Longhorn, 88 

Lake McDonald, 47, 50, 53 

Lake Tonkawa, 88 

Lake Travis, 70 

Lamar Boulevard, 76, 78 

Lamar, Mirabeau Buonaparte, 12, 13, 

15, 23, 40, 81, 88 

Lampasas, 51 

Land Office, 18, 24, 50 

Lavaca Street, 35 

LCRA, 70 

Lea, Margaret, 17 

Legislature, 22, 23, 38, 41, 42, 63, 

91 

Lewis, Mark B., 18 

Liendo, 50 

Limestone County, 21 

Lincoln, Abraham, 26, 41, 46 

Little Campus, 66 

Little Colony, 9 

Little Rock, 59 

Littlefield Building, 60 

Littlefield, George W., 60, 61, 62 

Llano River, 70 

Lone Star, 20 

Long, Walter, 55, 68, 73 

Longhorn Dam, 87 

Louisiana, 9 

Lower Colorado River Authority, 70 

Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential 

Library and Museum, 90 

M 

Mabry, W.H., 52 

Magruder, John Bankhead, 27 

Maine, 29 

Manor, 92 

Mansfield, J. J., 70 

Marble Falls, 39 

Marines, 63 

Markley, T.J., 45 

Marshall Ford Dam, 70 

Matagorda, 13 

Mayfield, Nute, 36 

McBride, Henry, 37, 38 

MCC, 85, 92 

McClellan, Carol Keeton, 91 

McDonald, John, 45, 46, 47, 70 

McLean, J. H., 24 

Memorial Stadium, 64 

Menifee, William, 13 

Methodist, 16 

Mexican War, 39 

Mexican, 9, 10, 17, 18 

Mexico, 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 26, 29, 39 

Microelectronics and Computer 

Technology Corporation 

Milam, Benjamin, 15 

Miller, Tom, 68, 70, 78 

Millett’s Opera House, 46 

Mina, 10 

Mina, Xavier, 10 

Mississippi, 21, 32, 92 

Missouri Pacific Line, 76 

Missouri, 9, 42 

Missouri, Kansas and Texas Land and 

Town Company, 48 

Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, 

58 

Missouri-Pacific Railroad, 90 

Montgomery, Edmund, 50 

Montopolis bridge, 70 

Montopolis, 10, 14, 15, 36 

MoPac, 90 

Morphis, James M., 19 

Motorola, 84 

Mount Bonnell, 10, 30 

Mount Zion, 39 

Murrah, Pendleton, 29 

Myer’s Creamery, 66 

N 

Nacogdoches, 9, 13 

Nalle and Company, 45 

Nalle, Joseph, 45, 46 

Navy, 63, 72, 75 

Neches Street, 13 

Nelson, Willie, 89 

New Deal, 65, 66, 67 

New Mexico, 21 

New Orleans, 9, 20, 51, 61 

New York, 17, 45, 51 

Ney, Elisabet, 49, 50 

Night Hawk, 78 

Ninth Street, 60 

Nixon, Richard, 90 

O 

O. Henry, 51 

O’Quinn, Truman, 88 

Oakhill, 39 

Oatmanville, 39 

Ohio, 45, 55 

Oklahoma, 21 

Old Main, 41, 69 

Olivares, Antonio de, 5 

Onion Creek, 6 

P 

Palace Saloon, 45 

Palestine, 21 

Paramount, 71 

Paris, Texas, 46 

Pasadena, California, 57 

Pearl Harbor, 72 

Pearl House, 42 

Pease, Elisha, 24,29, 32 

Pecan Street, 14, 23, 32 

Permanent University Fund, 63 

Philadelphia, 68 

Philippines, 72 

Pickle, Jake, 65, 66, 67, 68, 75, 93 

Pig War, 20 

Pilie, L. J., 13 

Pine Street, 14 

Porter, William Sydney, 50, 51 

Posen, 23 

President’s House, 15, 23 

Preston, Jasper N., 42 

Public Works Administration, 67 

R 

Ranger, 11, 12, 38, 90 

Reagan County, 64 

Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 

68 

Reconstruction, 33, 35 

Red Cross, 63 

Red River, 13 

Republic Bank and Trust, 68 

Republic of Texas, 10, 11, 12, 13, 

14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 

22, 24, 25, 38, 40, 41 

Republican, 34, 26, 46 

Richmond, 59 

Ridgetop, 57, 66 

Rio Grande River, 5, 6, 7, 17 

Roark, Amos, 16 

Robert Mueller Airport, 68, 92 

Roberts, Oran M., 26, 34, 37, 39, 41, 

50 

Robertson’s Hill, 19 

Rodgers, Calbraith Perry Cal", 57" 

Rolling Stone, The, 51 

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 66, 67 

Ruffini, Frederick Ernst, 41 

S 

Sabine Pass, 27 

Saligny, Alphonse Dubois de, 19, 20 

Salt Lake City, 59 

Saltillo, 10 

San Antonio de Bejar, 5 

San Antonio, 5, 9, 10, 15, 17, 18, 

22, 27, 32, 58, 59, 61, 67, 76 

San Augustine, 13 

San Francisco, 61 

San Gabriel River, 7 

San Jacinto, 11, 12, 17, 26, 27 

San Juan Bautista, 5 

San Marcos River, 5 

San Marcos, 20, 73 

Sandusky, William H., 13 

Santa Anna, General Antonio López 

de, 10, 17, 26 

Santa Fe, 13 

Santa Rita Number 1, 64 

Scarborough and Hicks, 61 

Scarborough Building, 62 

Scarbrough’s, 66 

Schlecht, Friedrich, 20, 21 

Scholz Garden, 40 

School for the Blind, 63 

Schoolfield, Charles, 13 

Seider’s Springs, 29 

Selectric Composer, 83 

Sematech, 92 

Senate, 20, 22, 62 

Session Building, 23 

Seventh Street, 15, 21, 42 

Shakespeare, 68 

Shaw, James B., 19 

Shipe, Monroe Martin, 48, 49, 50 

Shoal Creek, 11, 21, 29, 44, 67, 88, 

91 

Sixth Street, 13, 14, 23, 29, 42, 59, 

60, 62, 66, 88 

Sixth U.S. Cavalry, 29 

Smith, B. J., 27 

Smith, Colonel Thomas, 18 

Smith, Dr. Ashbel, 41 

Southern National Insurance 

Company, 60 

Southern Pacific, 76 

Spain, 7, 9, 52 

Spanish, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 35 

Spanish-American War, 52 

Speedway, 49 

Spring Creek, 20 

St. David’s Church, 31 

St. Edward’s University, 63 

St. Louis, 42 

Stars and Stripes, 20 

State Arsenal, 34 

State Building Commission, 78 

State Fair of Texas, 49 

State Library, 78 

State Lunatic Asylum, 24 

State Treasury, 29 

Stephen F. Austin Hotel, 63, 71 

Strategic Air Command, 93 

Stremme, Conrad, 24 

Sulphur Springs Draw, 6 

Swiss, 27 

T 

Tactical Air Command, 92 

Tannehill, Jesse, 9, 10 

Taylor, Charles S., 26 

Taylor, Matthew Addison, 27 

Tehuacana, 21 

Tejas Indians, 5 

Tenth Street, 60, 67 

Tenth Ward, 68 

Tew, Charles, 58 

Texas A&M, 64 

Texas Bank and Trust, 68 

Texas Congress, 20 

Texas Department of Public Safety, 

90 

Texas Independence Day, 78 

Texas National Guard, 51 

Texas Rangers, 38 

Texas Research Associates 

Corporation, 82 

Texas Rifles, 51 

Texas Siftings, 37, 38 

Texas State Gazette, 21 

Texas State Times, 23 

Texas Supreme Court, 34, 46, 78 

Texas Volunteer Guard, 51 

Texian, 10, 12 

Textran Corporation, 82 

Third Street, 12, 76 

Third Texas Congress, 12 

Thompson, Ben, 61 

Thorp Spring, 41 

Thurber, 58, 60 

Tigris and Euphrates, 9 

Tolman, Tom, 29, 30 

Tom Green Rifles, 27 

Tom Miller Dam, 87 

Tonkawas, 88 

Tower, 69, 90 

Town Lake, 88 

Tracor, 82 

Travis County, 5, 6, 7, 10, 16, 19, 

21, 26, 27, 36, 65, 70, 72 

Travis Rifles, 27, 34, 35 

Travis, William Barrett, 16 

Tyler, 41 

U 

U.S. Census, 21, 36 

Union, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 

30, 34 

United States, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26 

University of Texas, 38, 40, 41, 42, 

43, 55, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 

68, 69, 75, 77, 81, 84, 86, 90 

UT, 41, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 75, 83 

V 

Vásquez, General Rafael, 17, 18 

Vietnam, 90 

Vin Fiz, 57, 58, 68 

Virginia, 9, 45 

W 

Waco, 33, 41, 57 

Walker, Lewis, 58 

Wall Street Journal, 81 

Waller Creek, 13, 27 

Waller, Edwin, 13, 14, 16, 26, 92 

Walnut Creek, 11, 12 

Walsh, William C., 44 

Walton, William Martin (Buck), 66 

War Assets Administration, 75 

Washington, 18, 20, 21, 62 

Washington-on-the-Brazos, 

18, 20, 21 

Waterloo, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 24 

Waugh, Reverend Mr. Beverly, 16 

Webb, Walter Prescott, 59, 60, 69 

Webber, John F., 9 

Webberville, 70 

Webster, H. Daniel, 61 

Weddell, Wray, 79, 81, 83 

Wells, Martin, 9 

Wende, 23 

West Columbia, 11 

Wheeler, T. B. , 34 

White House, 66 

White, Mark, 91 

Wilbarger, Josiah, 9 

Williams, Samuel May, 10 

Williamson County, 7, 60 

Wilson, Eddie, 90 

Woodlawn, 29 

Wooldridge, A. P., 43, 44, 45, 59, 60 

Wooldridge, Alexander Penn, 43 

Works Progress Administration, 67 

World War I, 68 

WPA, 67, 68, 70 

Wroe, H.A., 68 

Wyoming, 21 

X 

XIT, 39 

Y 

Yale, 41, 43 

Yankee Doodle, 30 

Z 

Zilker Park, 8 


160

The mission of the 

Heritage Society of Austin 

is to promote and 

foster the preservation 

and appreciation 

of Austin’s unique 

architectural, historical, 

and cultural heritage.

Historic Austin

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