In most states one town is tapped to be the capital and another is given the state university. In Texas, Austin has both. And in the biggest state of the Lower 48 they are scarcely four blocks apart.
There is nothing organic about the birth of Austin. After becoming a Republic in 1836 President Mirabeau Lamar established a commission to find the best site for the new national capital. Lamar envisioned western expansion in his country and eschewed established communities near the Gulf of Mexico for a central location on the frontier. The commissioners settled on a speck of a village called Waterloo on the Colorado River and bought up 7,735 acres. When the town was chartered in 1839 it was named for the Virginia-born colonizer of the state, Stephen F. Austin.
Judge Edwin Waller was called on by Lamar to design a street grid which he accomplished around a grand artery running north from the Colorado River that he called Congress Avenue. Were he to return today Judge Waller would still recognize his old plan. A one-story capitol building was raised in May of 1839 and in the fall the entire government of the Republic of Texas rumbled into town by oxcart from Houston to set up shop. The worries about locating the capital on the frontier were not unfounded and the capitol was surrounded by an eight-foot stockade that remained until Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845.
As a new part of the United States Austin was immediately torn in the pre-Civil War days by those clamoring for secession and those preaching to remain with the Union (the majority in Travis County). But unlike other Southern states dealing with two voices of dissension, Austin had three - there was a vocal faction who wanted Texas to return to being its own country. The coming Civil War stifled growth in Austin that wasn’t overcome until the Houston and Texas Central Railroad rolled into town in 1873.
In the days of the Republic of Texas the Congress had set aside 40 acres north of the capitol for a university. The University of Texas finally became a reality in 1883. For many decades thereafter if you were in Austin chances are you were there for either government business or university business. The population of Austin grew steadily with those two institutions but not dramatically. The city did not see its 100,000th resident until after World War II.
But after the war both the university and the state government grew exponentially. So did the town - up to more than 225 square miles in 1990 from 30 square miles a half-century prior. Austin has been one of the fastest growing cities in America for much of that time with a population now north of 800,000. Through it all Congress Avenue has remained at the heart of the town.
That is where we will begin our walking tour, at a building as big and bold as Texas itself. When it was unveiled in 1888 it was trumpeted as the “Seventh Largest Building in the World”...
John Neely Bryan first came to what would become Dallas in 1839, scouting a natural ford in the Trinity River for a trading post. He eventually aimed his sights a bit more ambitiously and set out to create a town. While still a part of the Republic of Texas the village was surveyed and platted. Some say it got the name Dallas from George Mifflin Dallas, a Pennsylvania senator who got elected Vice-President with James K. Polk partly on his support for the annexation of Texas by the United States. Others say it was inspired by his brother Alexander who was a Navy office and still others claim Bryan named the settlement after his friend Joseph Dallas.
Bryan worked hard in the early years to build his town by running the post office, operating a ferry and recruiting newcomers. One group who came were a coterie of cultured Europeans seeking to establish a utopian community in North Texas in 1855. When the dream died a few years later many of the 350 scientists, artists and professionals re-rooted themselves in young Dallas, giving the frontier town an unusual level of sophistication.
Dallas bumped along through its early years until the Houston and Texas Central Railroad arrived in July 1872. In short order the town became the most important inland cotton market in the United States. When the first trains rolled into Dallas the population was about 3,000; by the end of the century it was over 40,000 and the town was serviced by six railroads.
There were so many railroad tracks coursing through Dallas that downtown growth was strangled. George Kessler, a pioneering city planner, devised a strategic plan that called for the consolidation of the railroads into a Union Terminal, the uprooting of much of the above ground track in the city and a moving of the Trinity River channel. Dallas now had a blueprint for its development into a modern city.
A century later Dallas has evolved into that modern city but traces of its architectural heritage remain scattered around downtown. Our walking tour will seek them out but first we will begin in the plaza where the city of Dallas was seared into the American consciousness on November 22, 1963...
The lowest natural pass in a region of deserts and mountains has been used by humans for thousands of years. The Spanish sent expeditions of missionaries and conquistadores through “El Paso” as early as 1558 but the area remained largely undeveloped during most of the period of Spanish control. It wasn’t until Mexican rule that a community started to form, growing up around the ranch of Juan Maria Ponce de Leon, who acquired a 211-acre land grant on the north side of the Rio Grande River.
El Paso passed through Mexican rule, Texan rule, Confederate rule and American rule with little more effect than a name change in 1859 from Franklin to El Paso. When the town was incorporated in 1873 the population was noted as “23 Anglo-Americans and 150 Mexicans.” The happening town was actually on the other end of the ferry across the Rio Grande in Juarez where the town boasted several thousand people.
What finally kickstarted El Paso out of its existence as a sleepy little collection of adobe huts was the coming of the transcontinental railroad in the early 1880s. The Southern Pacific won the race to the strategic crossing near the Rio Grande in the pass above the town on May 19, 1881 and it was quickly followed by the Santa Fe and Texas and Pacific lines. El Paso boomed and at the same time gained a reputation as a haven for desperadoes, gamblers and gunslingers preying on the new arrivals. But so many people were pouring into El Paso that its colorful days as a lawless frontier town were short-lived. Although prostitution and gambling would thrive until World War I in El Paso, by 1890 the population had swelled to 10,000 and with the coming of the new century the city was entrenched as the leading manufacturing, transportation and retail center of the American Southwest.
One of those newcomers in the first years of the 1900s was Henry Charles Trost. Trost hailed from Ohio where he attended art school and trained as an architectural draftsman. He spent time with celebrated architect Louis Sullivan and his disciple Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. He worked his way around the West, developing a hankering for the design of the early Spanish missions of Northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Trost arrived in Tucson in 1899 when he was 39 but only stayed a few years before moving on to El Paso. Working with his brother, Trost would become one of the country’s most prolific designers with over 600 buildings to his credit. In El Paso alone, Trost worked on over 200 commissions. Few cities were impacted so dramatically by a single architect as El Paso was by Henry Trost. Many of his most important works still define the El Paso streetscape a century later. We will encounter Trost more than a dozen times on our walking tour of downtown El Paso and we will begin in a ceremonial open space in the shadow of four Trost creations...
There was a never a fort in Fort Worth and the town’s namesake never had anything to do with the place either. William Jenkins Worth was a veteran of the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars and the Mexican War who was placed in command of the Department of Texas in 1849. Worth died of cholera shortly after arriving in San Antonio and less than a month later the camp established at the confluence of the West Fork and Clear Fork of the Trinity River, near present day Houston and Belknap streets, was named in his honor. The outpost was intended to check Indian activity in North Texas and was officially designated Fort Worth on November 14, 1849. When that activity shifted westward the U.S. Army followed and the camp was abandoned by 1853. Settlers moved into the remnants of the post and set about building a town.
The Civil War and economic hard times stifled the early growth of the settlement although pioneer residents managed to wrangle possession of the county government in its early days. So many people moved away in the early 1870s that an article appeared in the Dallas newspaper describing Fort Worth as so moribund that a panther was observed to be asleep in front of the courthouse. Rather than take offense the townsfolk adopted the panther as its mascot.
But it was not a panther but another animal that came to define Fort Worth - the cow. The railroad pulled into town in 1876 and Fort Worth became the Southwest’s westernmost railhead for shipping cattle. Cowboys flooded into the booming town and “Cowtown” became renowned for its lawlessness, especially in the part of town packed with saloons and dance halls known as Hell’s Half-Acre, although chroniclers of the crime-plagued town estimated the area as more like two and one-half acres.
Fort Worth was mostly settled down by 1893 when Louville Niles established the Fort Worth Stockyards Company and the country’s two biggest meatpackers, Swift and Armour, set up shop in town. The stockyards spread across more than 250 acres of Fort Worth, larger than anything south of St. Louis. Population soared from about 25,000 in 1890 to over 160,000 by 1930.
It was during this growth period that the face of Fort Worth began taking shape. Almost every important building in town in the early 1900s was designed by the architectural shop of Marcus Sanguinet, Carl Staats and Wyatt Hedrick, who joined the firm in the later years of this period. Fort Worth has done an admirable job of retaining these heritage structures which stand a century later as a portfolio of the architects.
Our exploration of the Fort Worth streetscape will track down these skyscrapers but first we will begin where modern architectural masters have left their imprint on the city...
During the 1800s Galveston was a booming port city rivaled only by New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico. it was the most sophisticated city in Texas; the first to get telephone lines, the first to get gaslights, the first to get electric lights. As many as 18 newspapers battled to bring residents the latest news of the world.
Everything changed on September 8, 1900 when the storm surge from hurricane winds swamped the city. An estimated 6,000 people perished and the Galveston storm remains the deadliest disaster in American history. The city rebuilt, including a protective seawall, but never really recovered. While the population of Houston grew by many hundreds of thousands 100 years later Galveston was home to less than 60,000 people, scarcely more than lived on the island prior to the flood.
All the better for those who live in the graceful old homes of the East End Historical District, comprised of over 50 blocks that was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a National Historic Landmark. The architecture of the tree-lined streets reflects a variety of styles and periods, the earliest being examples of Greek Revival style built during the 1850’s. Early residents represented an economic and social cross-section of the community, also expressed in the dwellings which range from small, simple cottages to large, elaborate houses.
Our walking tour will start at 1114 Broadway Street, the divided boulevard that bisects the island and is the principle artery between the mainland and the Galveston beaches...
It was a couple of sharp-eyed New Yorkers who made Houston, brothers Augustus Chaman and John Kirby Allen. Looking to cash in on the winning of Texas independence in 1836 the brothers came to the new country looking to start a port city upstream from the Galveston Bay. They first eyed land along the Buffalo Bayou that had been surveyed and laid out by John Richardson Harris a decade earlier but there was no clear title to the land to buy. Reluctantly the brothers sailed further inland and bought up land around the confluence of the White Oak Bayou and Buffalo Bayou.
There were plenty of obstacles for the brothers to overcome in launching their dream city. The land was muddy and infested with mosquitoes which, although it wasn’t known at the time, was the cause of the region’s constant plague of yellow fever. Buffalo Bayou was clogged with navigation-hindering roots and those roots sheltered menacing alligators. And the hamlet of Harrisburg still maintained the superior access to the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Undaunted the Allen brothers started their town in 1837 and named it after the most popular man in Texas, Sam Houston, the general who had just won the Texas Revolution. They hired Gail Borden, a publisher who had supposedly coined the phrase “Remember the Alamo!” and who would invent condensed milk several decades later, to draw up a map of the proposed town. On the map of the proposed town were squares marked prominently for the national capitol and other government buildings. Meanwhile the Allens embarked on a publicity campaign for their new town in Eastern newspapers, painting a picture of a frontier Eden that did not exist.
And it worked. Houston was designated the seat of both the county and national government and population soared to more than 1,000 in its first year. The bayou was cleared, a dock built, Borden started a newspaper and theater troupes were performing in town. And then in 1839 President Mirabeau B. Lamar decided to move the Texas capital to Austin.
Many an early American town withered into irrelevance with the loss of its status as a capital. Houstonians had only to look a few miles to the east at Harrisburg that had once been the county seat and capital of Texas when it was a Mexican colony. Houston business leaders were determined not to suffer the same fate. A Chamber of Commerce was formed which actively lobbied to dig out a shipping channel, build a plank road and lobby for the construction of a railroad. The Civil War slammed the brakes of much of that development but afterwards progress resumed and by 1890 Houston was the railroad center of Texas. After a hurricane decimated Galveston on the Gulf Coast in 1900 investment moved inland and Houston was developed as a true deepwater port.
The economic face of the town was forever altered when the Spindletop salt dome oil field was tapped near Beaumont in 1901. Houston quickly became the energy capital of the world and a town that didn’t even have 50,000 residents when the first gusher came in would have more than 2,000,000 a century later. A city growing that fast doesn’t always have time to care for its relics from the past but our walking tour will seek out what remains and we will start where it all began in 1837...
Oscar Martin Carter was approaching his 50th birthday in 1891 and he could look back on a remarkable life. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts and was orphaned at an early age. He ran away from his abusive foster parents and joined a pack train heading to Colorado. In Nebraska Carter cooked for an ox-team, learned to be a tinsmith, ran a hardware store, managed political races, worked as an Indian trader, tried his hand at mining and invented a drill bit that made him a fortune, and served as president of a string of Omaha banks. He had been married for half his life and fathered six children but never owned a house, living most of the time in one of his stores or hotels. In his 49th year Carter had recently sold his Omaha interests on behalf of his American Loan and Trust Company and brought millions of dollars to Houston where he acquired both the Houston City Street Railway Company and the Bayou City Street Railway Company.
In 1891 Carter bought 1,756 acres of land four miles northwest of Houston with the intention of developing the town’s first planned suburb and one of the earliest in Texas. The land was about 23 feet higher than downtown Houston so it earned the name “Heights.” As the Omaha and South Texas Land Company laid out the new streets there was hardly any elevation change in the Heights. Houston Heights was its own municipality until 1919 when the town was gobbled up by the growing city of Houston.
From its beginnings in the 1890s Houston Heights was designed as a residential enclave. The target market for the developers was the emerging middle class of white-collar workers and skilled craftsmen. These new home owners built comfortable, but not ostentatious, houses in the then-popular Queen Anne style. Later arrivals constructed Craftsman bungalows and cottages across Houston Heights. Most of the community was built up by 1930 and retains much of its same appearance today.
Our walking tour will traverse the main north-south artery through Houston Heights and we will begin where the first house was constructed back in 1893...
It all begins with the river. The meandering, cottonwood-shaded, unhurried river that takes 15 miles to traverse about six miles of San Antonio downtown real estate. Payaya Indians settled along its banks for thousands of years and Spanish explorers and missionaries were pulled to its waters when they began arriving in the 1690s and named the place after Saint Anthony of Padova in Italy.
The settlement became a natural military center and in 1718 the first of five Spanish missions was established around the San Antonio River. It was called Mission San Antonio de Valero and would later be remembered as the Alamo, a nickname gleaned from the surrounding cottonwoods that it would acquire after the mission system was abandoned in the 1790s. The missions were consolidated into San Antonio de Bexar, the capital of Texas Province, in 1793.
The Mexicans and Spanish tussled over this land until the Mexicans secured independence from Spain in 1821. The new Mexican government at first encouraged American settlement but it wasn’t long before these new arrivals to the province of Texas were agitating for their own independence, especially after newly elected Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna rescinded the Mexican Constitution in 1833. Kentuckian Benjamin Milam led a contingent of Texans to capture San Antonio in December of 1835 but leader of the Texas Rebellion, Sam Houston, didn’t believe the capital could be held and called for the rebel forces to flee San Antonio.
The volunteers, with such now legendary names as James Bowie and Davy Crockett, under the leadership of 26-year old William Barrett Travis thought otherwise. Somewhere between 182 and 257 Anglo and Hispanic Texans fortified the Alamo mission and made a stand against some 1,500 Mexican invaders who arrived under Santa Anna on February 23. After a twelve-day siege the Mexicans stormed the mission on March 6, 1836 and all the defenders were killed or captured and executed.
In the aftermath of the Battle of the Alamo its defenders were martyred, Texas gained its independence the following month and became part of the United States a decade later, the mission was preserved in the center of the city which became the largest in the state for the rest of the century, San Antonio got a nickname and Texas got its best-known and most-visited tourist attraction. And that is where our walking tour will begin...
When Stephen F. Austin and his colonizers first happened on the Brazos River in the 1820s they found a band of Wichita Indians known as the Wacos living in the rich bottomlands. Austin first tried to destroy the village and then settled for making a treaty which accomplished the same thing. After the Wacos left the area George B. Erath, a surveyor representing land speculators from Galveston, named the town he laid out in 1849 after the original settlers.
The new Waco citizens lined up with the Confederacy and even produced a handful of high-ranking CSA officers but as soon as the Civil War ended the town’s leaders got down to drumming up business. Their solution was a bridge across the Brazos River and the pioneering 475-foot Waco Suspension Bridge was completed in 1870.
Waco now had the only bridge across the Brazos River and soon cattle herds on the Chisholm Trail were being driven through downtown streets. The bridge attracted so much traffic that nickel tolls paid off its $141,000 cost within twenty years. As Waco grew cotton fueled its economy and the community entered the 20th century as the sixth largest city in Texas.
Steady growth was stalled at 4:36 in the afternoon of May 11, 1953 when a rare F5 tornado hit the downtown area. More than 600 people were injured and 114 died as the funnel roared thought the heart of the business district. Only ten tornadoes in American history have been deadlier. Damage was estimated at over $41 million and hundreds of businesses were destroyed, forever altering the Waco streetscape.
In the aftermath of the tornado Waco energetically rebuilt but by the 1960s downtown was a ghost town. The wind spout was not the culprit, however. Suburbanization was sapping the life from Waco as it did to countless towns across the American landscape. Revitalization came to the rescue in the 1990s, first with Baylor University and then with downtown. Our walking tour will investigate the streetscape six decades after the Waco tornado and we will begin on historic Waco Square...