History
Since at least 9200 BC, human settlement has existed in Austin, Travis County, and Williamson County. Based on evidence found throughout the area and documented at the much-studied Gault Site, midway between Georgetown and Fort Hood, the area’s first known occupants lived during the late Pleistocene (Ice Age) and are related to the Clovis culture approximately 9200 BC (nearly 11,200 years ago).
The Tonkawa tribe occupied the area when European settlers came. The area was also known to be frequented by the Comanches and Lipan Apaches. Spanish colonists passed through the area, notably the Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre expedition, yet few permanent colonies were established for a long time. Three East Texas missions were merged and reconstituted as one on the south bank of the Colorado River near what is now Zilker Park in Austin in 1730. The mission barely lasted around seven months in this location before being relocated to San Antonio de Béxar and divided into three missions.
Pioneers began to establish the area near central Austin along the Colorado River in the 1830s. In what is today Bastrop and San Marcos, Spanish forts were built. New settlements sprang up in Central Texas after Mexico’s independence, but the region’s growth was stifled by disputes with the region’s Native Americans.
Before it was installed atop the rotunda, a statue of the Goddess of Liberty stood on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol.
Texans battled and won independence from Mexico in 1835–1836. As a result, Texas became a sovereign state with its own president, legislature, and monetary system. Vice President Mirabeau B. Lamar recommended that the republic’s capital, then in Houston, be relocated to the area on the north bank of the Colorado River after visiting the area during a buffalo-hunting expedition in 1837 and 1838. (near the present-day Congress Avenue Bridge).
The site was chosen to replace Houston as the Republic of Texas’s capital in 1839, and it was founded under the name “Waterloo.” The name was changed to Austin shortly afterward in honor of Stephen F. Austin, the “Father of Texas” and the republic’s first secretary of state. With the erection of the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas at Austin, the city grew during the nineteenth century and became a hub for government and education. Austin’s steady expansion resumed after a significant halt in economic growth caused by the Great Depression.
The Texas Congress established a commission in 1839 to find a location for a new capital to be named after Stephen F. Austin. The commissioners were instructed to study the area known as Waterloo by Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the newly founded Republic of Texas, who noted the area’s hills, canals, and lovely environs. Waterloo was chosen as the new name for the town, and “Austin” was chosen as the new name for the town. The position was viewed as a handy crossroads for commerce routes connecting Santa Fe and Galveston Bay, as well as routes connecting northern Mexico and the Red River.
TIMELINE
Second capitol building in Austin
Lamar chose Edwin Waller to examine the village and draw out a plan for the future capital. [35] The initial location was reduced to 640 acres (260 ha) along the Colorado River between two rivers, Shoal Creek and Waller Creek, afterwards named after him. The Waller Plan, devised by Waller and a team of surveyors, divided the site into a 14-block grid plan bisected by a broad north–south roadway, Congress Avenue, which ran up from the river to Capital Square, where the new Texas State Capitol was to be built. On the corner of Colorado and 8th Streets, a one-story temporary capitol was built. On August 1, 1839, the first auction of 217 out of 306 lots total was held. The Waller Plan, which was created and surveyed, is now the foundation of downtown Austin
The Council House Fight and the Battle of Plum Creek, two battles between the Texas Rangers and the Comanches in 1840, pushed the Comanches westward, mostly ending fighting in Central Texas. The settlement of the area grew rapidly. Travis County was founded in 1840, and the adjacent counties followed suit during the next two decades.
The new capital prospered at first, but Lamar’s political foe, Sam Houston, exploited two Mexican army invasions into San Antonio as a pretext to relocate the government. Sam Houston was a vocal opponent of Lamar’s choice to locate the capital in such a faraway location. Men and women who traveled mostly from Houston to handle government business were also dissatisfied. The population had climbed to 856 by 1840, with nearly half of them fleeing Austin when Congress adjourned. In January of the same year, there were 176 African Americans living in the city.
The fear of the Indians and Mexico, which still regarded Texas to be part of their territory, prompted Sam Houston, the first and third President of the Republic of Texas, to shift the capital once more in 1841. Houston seized the Land Office in response to threats from Mexican forces in Texas, transferring all official records to Houston for safekeeping in what became known as the Archive War, but the people of Austin would not allow this irresponsible decision to be carried out. The documents remained in place, but the capital would be relocated from Austin to Houston to Washington-on-the-Brazos for the time being. During the early 1840s, Austin’s population plummeted to only a few hundred individuals due to the lack of a governing authority. Anson Jones, the fourth President of the Republic, and Congress, which reconvened in Austin in 1845, voted to preserve Austin as the capital.
During the early 1840s, Austin’s population plummeted to only a few hundred individuals due to the lack of a governing authority. The issue of keeping Austin as the seat of government and annexing the Republic of Texas into the United States was settled by the fourth President of the Republic, Anson Jones, and Congress, who reconvened in Austin in 1845.
Slaves made up 38% of Travis County residents in 1860. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, voters in Austin and other Central Texas towns voted against secession. Austin, on the other hand, sent hundreds of troops to the Confederate forces as the war advanced and worries of Union attack grew.During the early 1840s, Austin’s population plummeted to only a few hundred individuals due to the lack of a governing authority. The issue of keeping Austin as the seat of government and annexing the Republic of Texas into the United States was settled by the fourth President of the Republic, Anson Jones, and Congress, who reconvened in Austin in 1845.
Slaves made up 38% of Travis County residents in 1860. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, voters in Austin and other Central Texas towns voted against secession. Austin, on the other hand, sent hundreds of troops to the Confederate forces as the war advanced and worries of Union attack grew.
After Union General Gordon Granger enforced the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at Galveston, an event marked as Juneteenth, the African American population of Austin exploded. Wheatville, Pleasant Hill, and Clarksville were formed as black villages, with Clarksville being the longest surviving post-Civil War colony founded by former African-American slaves west of the Mississippi River. Black people accounted for approximately 36.5 percent of Austin’s population in 1870.
After World War II, the population and economy grew dramatically. With the establishment of the Houston and Texas Central Railway (H&TC) in 1871, Austin became the region’s principal commerce center, capable of transporting both cotton and cattle. The MKT (Missouri, Kansas, and Texas) line trailed closely behind. The Chisholm Trail’s southernmost segment terminated in Austin, and “drovers” herded livestock north to the railroad. Cotton was one of the few products grown in the area for export, and a cotton gin engine was stationed alongside the trains to “gin” cotton of its seeds and transform it into bales for transportation.
In the 1870s, however, as other new railroads were built in the region, Austin began to lose its trade dominance to the surrounding communities. Furthermore, towns east of Austin absorbed Austin’s cattle and cotton output, particularly in towns like Hutto and Taylor, which sit atop the blackland prairie, which has deep, rich soils ideal for growing cotton and hay.
Austin’s public schools opened their doors in September 1881. Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute (now Huston–Tillotson University) opened its doors the same year. Although lessons had been offered in the previous wooden state capitol for four years prior, the University of Texas began classes in 1883.
The state capitol building, which was finished in 1888 and touted to be the seventh largest edifice in the world, gave Austin a fresh lease on life in the 1880s. Austin expanded its city borders to more than three times their previous size in the late 1800s, and the first granite dam on the Colorado River was built to power a new streetcar line and the new “moon towers.” On April 7, 1900, the first dam was washed away by a flood.
Austin implemented the 1928 Austin city plan through a series of civic development and beautification initiatives in the late 1920s and 1930s, which resulted in the creation of much of the city’s infrastructure and many of its parks. In addition, the state legislature established the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), which, in collaboration with the city of Austin, built the Highland Lakes dam system along the Colorado River.
These initiatives were made possible in part because Austin received more financing for municipal construction projects from the Public Works Administration than other Texas cities.
In the early twentieth century, Austin developed a three-way system of social segregation, with Anglos, African Americans, and Mexicans separated in most aspects of life, including housing, health care, and education, by custom or legislation. Many of the civic improvement programs implemented during this time, such as the construction of new roads, schools, and hospitals, were planned specifically to institutionalize the segregation system. Residential segregation was further aided by restrictive deed requirements. After 1935, most house deeds made it illegal for African Americans (and other nonwhite groups) to use the land. Racial segregation increased in Austin during the first half of the twentieth century, when it was combined with a system of segregated public services, with African Americans and Mexicans facing high levels of discrimination and social marginalization.
The demolished granite dam on the Colorado River was finally replaced in 1940 with a hollow concrete dam, which created Lake McDonald (now known as Lake Austin) and has withstood all floods since then. In addition, the LCRA constructed the considerably bigger Mansfield Dam upstream of Austin to create Lake Travis, a flood-control reservoir.
The Texas Oil Boom of the early twentieth century ushered in a slew of new economic prospects throughout Southeast and North Texas. The boom’s growth completely bypassed Austin at first, with the city falling from fourth to tenth place in Texas between 1880 and 1920.
Austin established itself as one of Texas’ major metropolitan areas after the mid-twentieth century. Austin’s population was 14.5 percent Hispanic, 11.9 percent black, and 73.4 percent non-Hispanic white in 1970, according to the US Census Bureau. Austin became a major high-tech center for semiconductors and software in the late twentieth century. The University of Texas at Austin has grown into a major institution.
Austin’s national music culture exploded in the 1970s, thanks to homegrown performers like Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, as well as legendary concert venues like the Armadillo World Headquarters. The long-running television show Austin City Limits, the Austin City Limits Festival, and the South by Southwest music festival have all helped to cement the city’s prominence in the music industry.
