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AUSTIN, TEXAS (Travis
County). Austin, the capital of Texas, county seat of Travis
County, and home of the University of Texas at Austin, is
located in central Travis County on the Colorado River and
Interstate Highway 35. Situated at 30°16' north latitude
and 97°45' west longitude, it is at the eastern edge of the
Hill Country and the Edwards Plateau. The city was
established by the three-year-old Republic of Texas in 1839
to serve as its permanent capital, and named in honor of the
founder of Anglo-American Texas, Stephen F. Austin. A
site-selection commission appointed by the Texas Congress in
January 1839 chose a site on the western frontier, after
viewing it at the instruction of President Mirabeau B.
Lamar, a proponent of westward expansion who had visited the
sparsely settled area in 1838. Impressed by its beauty,
healthfulness, abundant natural resources, promise as an
economic hub, and central location in Texas territory, the
commission purchased 7,735 acres along the Colorado River
comprising the hamlet of Waterloo and adjacent lands.
Because the area's remoteness from population centers and
its vulnerability to attacks by Mexican troops and Indians
displeased many Texans, Sam Houston among them, political
opposition made Austin's early years precarious ones.
Surveyors L. J. Pilie and Charles
Schoolfield laid out the new town, working under the
direction of Edwin Waller, who was appointed by Lamar to
plan and construct Austin. Out of the 7,735 acres they chose
a 640-acre site fronting on the Colorado River and nestled
between Waller Creek on the east and Shoal Creek on the
west. The plan was a grid, fourteen blocks square, bisected
by Congress Avenue, and extending northward from the
Colorado River to "Capitol Square." Determined to
have Austin ready by the time the Texas Congress convened in
November 1839, Waller opted for temporary government
buildings at temporary locations. The one-story frame
capitol was set back from Congress Avenue on a hill at what
is now the corner of Colorado and Eighth streets. The first
auction of city lots took place on August 1. During October
President Lamar arrived, government offices opened for
business, Presbyterians organized the first church, and the
Austin City Gazette, the city's first newspaper, made
its appearance. Congress convened in November, Austin was
incorporated on December 27, and on January 13, 1840, Waller
was elected the town's first mayor. By 1840 Austin had 856
inhabitants, including 145 slaves as well as diplomatic
representatives from France, England, and the United States.
Austin flourished initially but in
1842 entered the darkest period in its history. Lamar's
successor as president, Sam Houston, ordered the national
archives transferred to Houston for safekeeping after
Mexican troops captured San Antonio on March 5, 1842.
Convinced that removal of the republic's diplomatic,
financial, land, and military-service records was tantamount
to choosing a new capital, Austinites refused to relinquish
the archives. Houston moved the government anyway, first to
Houston and then to Washington-on-the-Brazos, which remained
the seat of government until 1845. The archives stayed in
Austin. When Houston sent a contingent of armed men to seize
the General Land Office records in December 1842, they were
foiled by the citizens of Austin and Travis County in an
incident known as the Archive War. Deprived of its political
function, Austin languished. Between 1842 and 1845 its
population dropped below 200 and its buildings deteriorated.
But during the summer of 1845 a constitutional convention
meeting in Austin approved the annexation of Texas to the
United States and named Austin the state capital until 1850,
at which time the voters of Texas were to express their
preference in a general election. After resuming its role as
the seat of government in 1845, Austin officially became the
state capital on February 19, 1846, the date of the formal
transfer of authority from the republic to the state.
Austin recovered gradually, its
population reaching 854 by 1850, 225 of whom were slaves and
one a free black. Forty-eight percent of Austin's family
heads owned slaves. The city entered a period of accelerated
growth following its decisive triumph in the 1850 election
to determine the site of the state capital for the next
twenty years. For the first time the government constructed
permanent buildings, among them a new capitol at the head of
Congress Avenue, completed in 1853, and the Governor's
Mansion, completed in 1856. State-run asylums for deaf,
blind, and mentally ill Texans were erected on the fringes
of town. Congregations of Baptists, Episcopalians,
Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholics erected permanent
church buildings, and the town's elite built elegant Greek
Revival mansions. By 1860 the population had climbed to
3,546, including 1,019 slaves and twelve free blacks. That
year thirty-five percent of Austin's family heads owned
slaves.
From 1861 to 1865 the Civil War
dominated life in Austin. In February 1861 Austin and Travis
County residents voted against the secession ordinance 704
to 450, but Unionist sentiment waned once the war began. By
April 1862 about 600 Austin and Travis County men had joined
some twelve volunteer companies serving the Confederacy. The
Austin-based Tom Green Rifles served with Hood's Texas
Brigade in Virginia. Austinites followed with particular
concern news of the successive Union thrusts toward Texas,
but the town was never directly threatened. Like other
communities, Austin experienced severe shortages of goods,
spiraling inflation, and the decimation of its fighting men.
The end of the war brought Union occupation troops to the
city and a period of explosive growth of the
African-American population, which increased by 57 percent
during the 1860s. During the late 1860s and early 1870s the
city's newly emancipated blacks established the residential
communities of Masontown, Wheatville, Pleasant Hill, and
Clarksville, organized such churches as First Baptist Church
(Colored), started businesses, and patronized schools. By
1870 Austin's 1,615 black residents composed 36 percent of
the 4,428 inhabitants.
On December 25, 1871, a new era
opened with the coming of the Houston and Texas Central
Railway, Austin's first railroad connection. By becoming the
westernmost railroad terminus in Texas and the only railroad
town for scores of miles in most directions, Austin was
transformed into a trading center for a vast area.
Construction boomed and the population more than doubled in
five years to 10,363. The many foreign-born newcomers gave
Austin's citizenry a more heterogeneous character. By 1875
there were 757 inhabitants from Germany, 297 from Mexico,
215 from Ireland, and 138 from Sweden. For the first time a
Mexican-American community took root in Austin, in a
neighborhood near the mouth of Shoal Creek. Accompanying
these dramatic changes were civic improvements, among them
gas street lamps in 1874, the first streetcar line in 1875,
and the first elevated bridge across the Colorado River
about 1876. Although a second railroad, the International
and Great Northern, reached Austin in 1876, the town's
fortunes turned downward after 1875 as new railroads
traversed Austin's trading region and diverted much of its
trade to other towns. From 1875 to 1880 the city's
population increased by only 650 inhabitants to 11,013.
Austin's expectations of rivaling other Texas cities for
economic leadership faded.
Austin solidified its position as a
political center during the 1870s and 1880s and gained a new
role as an educational center. In 1872 the city prevailed in
a statewide election to choose once and for all the state
capital, turning back challenges from Houston and Waco.
Three years later Texas took the first steps toward
constructing a new Capitol that culminated in 1888 in the
dedication of a magnificent granite building towering over
the town. In 1881 Austin emerged as a seat of education. In
a hotly contested statewide election, the city was chosen as
the site for the new University of Texas, which began
instruction two years later. Tillotson Collegiate and Normal
Institute, founded by the American Missionary Association to
provide educational opportunities for African Americans,
opened its doors in 1881. The Austin public school system
was started the same year. Four years later St. Edward's
School, founded several years earlier by the Holy Cross
Fathers and Brothers, was chartered as St. Edwards College.
In 1888 civic leader Alexander P.
Wooldridge proposed that Austin construct a dam across the
Colorado River and use water power to attract manufacturing.
The town had reached its limits as a seat of politics and
education, Wooldridge contended, yet its economy could not
sustain its present size. Proponents of the dam won
political control of Austin in 1889. Empowered by a new city
charter in 1891 that more than tripled Austin's corporate
area from 4 ½ to 16 ½ square miles, the city fathers
implemented a plan to build a municipal water and electric
system, construct a dam for power, and lease most of the
waterpower to manufacturers. By 1893 the sixty-foot-high
Austin Dam was completed, impounding Lake McDonald behind
it. In 1895 dam-generated electricity began powering the
four-year-old electric streetcar line and the city's new
water and light systems. Thirty-one new 150-foot-high
"moonlight towers" illuminated Austin at night.
Civic pride ran strong during those years, which also saw
the city blessed with the talents of sculptor Elisabet Ney
and writer William Sydney Porter (O. Henry). But it turned
out that the dam produced far less power than anticipated,
manufacturers never came, periodic power shortfalls
disrupted city services, Lake McDonald silted up, and, on
April 7, 1900, the dam collapsed.
Between 1880 and 1920 Austin's
population grew threefold to 34,876, but the city slipped
from fourth largest in the state to tenth largest. The
state's surging industrial development, propelled by the
booming oil business, passed Austin by. The capital city
began boosting itself as a residential city, but the heavy
municipal indebtedness incurred in building the dam resulted
in the neglect of city services. In 1905 Austin had few
sanitary sewers, virtually no public parks or playgrounds,
and only one paved street. Three years later Austin voters
overturned the aldermanic form of government, by which the
city had been governed since 1839, and replaced it with
commission government. A. P. Wooldridge headed the reform
group voted into office in 1909 and served a decade as
mayor, during which the city made steady if modest progress
toward improving residential life. In 1918 the city acquired
Barton Springs, a spring-fed pool that became the symbol of
the residential city. Upon Wooldridge's retirement in 1919
the flaws of commission government, hidden by his
leadership, became apparent as city services again
deteriorated. At the urging of the Chamber of Commerce,
Austinites voted in 1924 to adopt council-manager
government, which went into effect in 1926 and remained in
the 1990s. Progressive ideas like city planning and
beautification became official city policy. A 1928 city
plan, the first since 1839, called upon Austin to develop
its strengths as a residential, cultural, and educational
center. A $4,250,000 bond issue, Austin's largest to date,
provided funds for streets, sewers, parks, the city
hospital, the first permanent public library building, and
the first municipal airport, which opened in 1930. A
recreation department was established, and within a decade
it offered Austinites a profusion of recreational programs,
parks, and pools.
By 1900 segregation of blacks and
whites characterized many aspects of city life, and the
lines of separation hardened in the early twentieth century.
Despite a two-month streetcar boycott organized by blacks,
the city implemented an ordinance in 1906 requiring separate
compartments on streetcars. While residences of blacks had
been widely scattered all across the city in 1880, by 1930
they were heavily concentrated on the east side of town, a
process encouraged by the 1928 city plan, which recommended
that East Austin be designated a "Negro district."
Municipal services like schools, sewers, and parks were made
available to blacks in East Austin only. At mid-century
Austin was still segregated in most respects-housing,
restaurants, hotels, parks, hospitals, schools, public
transportation-but African Americans had long fostered their
own institutions, which included by the late 1940s some 150
small businesses, more than thirty churches, and two
colleges, Tillotson College and Samuel Huston College.
Between 1880 and 1940 the number of black residents grew
from 3,587 to 14,861, but their proportion of the overall
population declined from 33 percent to 17 percent. Austin's
Hispanic residents, who in 1900 numbered about 335 and
composed just 1.5 percent of the population, rose to 11
percent by 1940, when they numbered 9,693. By the 1940s most
Mexican Americans lived in the rapidly expanding East Austin
barrio south of East Eleventh Street, where increasing
numbers owned homes. Hispanic-owned business were dominated
by a thriving food industry. Though Mexican Americans
encountered widespread discrimination-in employment,
housing, education, city services, and other areas-it was by
no means practiced as rigidly as it was toward African
Americans.
During the early and mid-1930s
Austin experienced the harsh effects of the Great
Depression. Nevertheless, the town fared comparatively well,
sustained by its twin foundations of government and
education and by the political skills of Mayor Tom (Robert
Thomas) Miller, who took office in 1933, and United States
Congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, who won election in 1937.
Its population grew at a faster pace during the 1930s than
in any other decade during the twentieth century, increasing
66 percent from 53,120 to 87,930. By 1936 the Public Works
Administration had provided Austin with more funding for
municipal construction projects than any other Texas city
during the same period. The University of Texas nearly
doubled its enrollment during the decade and undertook a
massive construction program. Johnson procured federal funds
for public housing and dams on the Colorado River. The old
Austin Dam, partially rebuilt under Mayor Wooldridge but
never finished due to damage from flooding in 1915, was
finally completed in 1940 and renamed Tom Miller Dam. Lake
Austin stretched twenty-one miles behind it. Just upriver
the much larger Mansfield Dam was completed in 1941 to
impound Lake Travis. The two dams, in conjunction with other
dams in the Lower Colorado River Authority system, brought
great benefits to Austin: cheap hydroelectric power, the end
of flooding that in 1935 and on earlier occasions had
ravaged the town, a plentiful supply of water without which
the city's later growth would have been unlikely, and
recreation on the Highland Lakes that enhanced Austin's
appeal as a place to live. In 1942 Austin gained the
economic benefit of Del Valle Army Air Base, later Bergstrom
Air Force Base, which remained in operation until 1993.
Between the 1950s and 1980s ethnic
relations in Austin were transformed. First came a sustained
attacked on segregation. Local black leaders and
political-action groups waged campaigns to desegregate city
schools and services. In 1956 the University of Texas became
the first major university in the South to admit blacks as
undergraduates. In the early 1960s students staged
demonstrations against segregated lunch counters,
restaurants, and movie theaters. Gradually the barriers
receded, a process accelerated when the United States Civil
Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in public
accommodations. Nevertheless, discrimination persisted in
areas like employment and housing. Shut out of the town's
political leadership since the 1880s, when two blacks had
served on the city council, African Americans regained a
foothold by winning a school-board seat in 1968 and a
city-council seat in 1971. This political breakthrough was
matched by Hispanics, whose numbers had reached 39,399 by
1970-16 percent of the population. Mexican Americans won
their first seats on the Austin school board in 1972 and the
city council in 1975.
From 1940 to 1990 Austin's
population grew at an average rate of 40 percent per decade,
from 87,930 to 465,622. The city's corporate area, which
between 1891 and 1940 had about doubled to 30.85 square
miles, grew more than sevenfold to 225.40 square miles by
1990. During the 1950s and 1960s much of Austin's growth
reflected the rapid expansion of its traditional
strengths-education and government. During the 1960s alone
the number of students attending the University of Texas at
Austin doubled, reaching 39,000 by 1970. Government
employees in Travis County tripled between 1950 and 1970 to
47,300. University of Texas buildings multiplied, with the
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library opening in 1971. A complex of
state office buildings was constructed north of the Capitol.
Propelling Austin's growth by the 1970s was its emergence as
a center for high technology. This development, fostered by
the Chamber of Commerce since the 1950s as a way to expand
the city's narrow economic base and fueled by proliferating
research programs at the University of Texas, accelerated
when IBM located in Austin in 1967, followed by Texas
Instruments in 1969 and Motorola in 1974. Two major research
consortiums of high-technology companies followed during the
1980s, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation
and Sematech. By the early 1990s, the Austin Metropolitan
Statistical Area had about 400 high-technology
manufacturers. While high-technology industries located on
Austin's periphery, its central area sprouted multistoried
office buildings and hotels during the 1970s and 1980s,
venues for the burgeoning music industry, and, in 1992, a
new convention center.
Austin's rapid growth generated
strong resistance by the 1970s. Angered by proliferating
apartment complexes and retarded traffic flow, neighborhood
groups mobilized to protect the integrity of their
residential areas. By 1983 there were more than 150 such
groups. Environmentalists organized a powerful movement to
protect streams, lakes, watersheds, and wooded hills from
environmental degradation, resulting in the passage of a
series of environmental-protection ordinances during the
1970s and 1980s. A program was inaugurated in 1971 to
beautify the shores of Town Lake, a downtown lake impounded
in 1960 behind Longhorn Crossing Dam. Historic
preservationists fought the destruction of Austin's
architectural heritage by rescuing and restoring historic
buildings. City election campaigns during the 1970s and
1980s frequently featured struggles over the management of
growth, with neighborhood groups and environmentalists on
one side and business and development interests on the
other. In the early 1990s Austin was still seeking to
balance the economic development it had long sought with the
kind of life it had long treasured.
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