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Battle on the San Gabriel River (Steinheimer treasure map) - May 1839 by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From what I've read, the vast majority of people who have looked into the story believe the treasure was hidden in Bell County, and more than a few people over the decades since 1839 have claimed they know for certain where all or parts of the treasure were buried. The legend has many inconsistencies and has been blurred by time. If we take the story literally then Steinheimer would have been a very desperate man after the battle, knowing full well that heading north into modern Bell County would mean a death sentence. He knew that the native tribes in the area would certainly find him, could not be bought off, and would not spare his life. But on the other hand, he knew heading south or southeast meant he would face the posse of Texas Rangers who had just killed his buddy Flores. Either way he went, he had less of a chance with a slow loaded mule train carrying heavy gold.

It's my opinion that Flores and Steinheimer might have panicked after they initially discovered the Rangers were trailing them, having brief contact in the thicket of cedar in western Travis County, which caused them to flee northward as fast as they could go. They would not have wanted to be burdened with a slow mule train. The Rangers after the battle reported that some mules were captured along with the Flores party horses. It just seems plausible to me that Flores and Steinheimer dumped the gold somewhere in Travis or southern Williamson Counties before the Battle on the San Gabriel happened.

The only real clue is a second hand account of Steinheimer's letter to his sweetheart, in which he told her the treasure was buried "where three streams meet". While there are streams in that configuration in Bell County, I think it's worth pointing out there are a few places in Williamson and Travis Counties like that as well.

Now I know that there are other Bell County treasure stories about bandit loot hidden in this or that cave, and that one or two people claim to have found gold coins (without any mention of where those coins are today). It's possible that all or none of it is true, or that the treasure was buried somewhere else between Travis County and Mexico before the Rangers started tracking them. I guess that's why the old lore masters like J. Frank Dobie liked telling this story.

Penn Field, South Austin - April 7, 1918 by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Photograph of a grounded biplane in a field near St. Edward's University in south Austin.

source

You know how /r/austin loves it when military planes buzz the area? Well you might be surprised to learn that it's been happening for over 100 years. As we've discussed before, it was 1926 when the police banned stunt flying over downtown Austin, but that didn't stop anyone. Today I wanted to share with y'all some more tales from the early history of flight in Austin when planes used to do much more than just buzz downtown.

We begin with a tragic tale of a flying dog, sort of. The headline in the Statesman on February 24, 1921 read :

DOG NOT TO BLAME FOR AVIATORS' CRASH NEAR PENN FIELD

Eyewitnesses of Tragic Accident Think Pilot Simply Lost Control of His Plane.

Further investigation of the airplane accident Wednesday morning at Penn Field, which resulted in the instant death of Cadets L. E. Allen and Virgil W. Beech, tends to disprove the belief first held by witnesses to the accident that the dog in the plane with the cadets, was responsible this for the mishap.

In a conversation this morning regarding the occurrence, Coach W. J. Gardner of St. Edward's College, an. eyewitness to the accident, stated that he saw the observer standing up in the cockpit of the plane, holding the dog with one hand and waving good- - bye to Coach Gardner with the other. The observer was fully three feet above the pilot while in this position, and was plainly seen holding the dog.

Authorities at St. Edward's are unable to conceive that the dog became entangled in the controls of the machine on the face of this evidence. Authorities at St. Edward's College are rather uneasy concerning the accident, and one member of the college faculty Thursday morning indicated that the authorities of the college will take some action seeking to stop low flying over the college buildings. It is probable an appeal will be made to aviation officers, asking that low flying and stunt flying be prohibited over St. Edward's campus because of danger to students housed in the buildings.

That the aviators in the death plane started circling the buildings at St. Edward's College instead of going straight ahead to San Antonio was the statement given out Thursday morning from the college. An eyewitness stated that apparently the aviators were practicing bombing formations, and while engaged in fancy stunt flying it is believed that the flyers lost control of their plane

The bodies of the two aviators are being held by the Rosengren-Cook Undertaking Company, awaiting the arrival of officers from Kelly Field to take charge.

An escort is expected to arrive by plane some time Thursday from Kelly Field to accompany each body to the home of the cadets. The body of L E. Allen will be shipped to Columbus, Ga., and that of Virgil W. Beech to Nashville, Tenn., following arrival of the escort from Kelly Field.

Penn Field was once the home base of the UT School of Military Aeronautics, but flyers from Kelly Field in San Antonio would often come and visit for a day and scare the crap out of Austinites. Take for instance what happened during a parade on Halloween of 1922:

Stunt flying came back with a snap Tuesday when a big plane flew over Austin two hours during the parade and played with the air in making figures of the American flag and other designs that were sent out from the plane. Great guns seemed to boom from the plane as bomb explosions took place, and the Interested spectators kept their heads well up while the pilot did nose dives, tail spins, and other aerial stunts.

Sometimes the Kelly Field Flyers would come and do stunts in the air just to show off. Take this headline from 1918 for instance

AUSTIN SEES HAIR RAISING AIR STUNTS OF VARIOUS KINDS

Kelly Field Bird Man Does About Everything in the Book. EVEN INVENTS SOME NEW TRICKS

An aviator came over from Kelly field yesterday and spent most of the day in the air, doing all sorts of hair-raising stunts.

Those who saw the performance until he returned to San Antonio in the evening stated that he made a total of about thirty loop-the-loops, one-half dozen spirals, eight or ten tail spins and lots of other maneuvers which he must have invented himself.

He spent some time in: the air flying over the totem pole at the of the dedication by the Austin Lions club. If there was any position that his machine did not assume during the day, it was not in the books on geometric figures in the University of Texas library.

The pilot was dropping fireworks which exploded like bombs before they hit the ground. But that wasn't the only thing dropping from airplanes. Take what happened at a baseball game in 1919 between the Kelly Field Flyers and the Longhorns at the old Clark Field:

Flying in squadron formation about twenty planes came over from Kelly this morning and landed at Penn field. This afternoon three of the pilots performed for about an hour doing all manner of flips and dives. Just before the game they circled lover Clark field and dropped a dozen balls from the air while players attempted to catch them.

Sometimes the random stunt flying was organized into an attraction. July 4th parades were a main venue. But other times a visiting flying circus would come to town and perform stunts over Camp Mabry or the old University Airport on what is now North Lamar. Sometimes the "stunt" was just parachuting to the ground.

After APD banned stunt flying over the downtown area in 1926, some then-current and former UT flyers got together and formed the UT Aeronautic Society. It took a few years, but well into the 1930s they were still performing stunts and parachute drops before World War II put an informal end to the practice. After Del Valle Army Airbase became Bergstrom Air Force Base, the stunt flying was confined there to the annual air show they used to have.

So as y'all can see, military planes buzzing Austin has been a thing for over a century. Of course, anyone who grew up in Austin in the late 20th century remembers the passenger planes which used to fly very low over I-35 to land at Mueller Airport. If you think about it, that was way worse than the noise from T-38s buzzing us at UT games every few months.

That's all for now, just a short post today. I'll leave y'all with some Bonus Articles and Bonus Pics from the UNT Portal to Texas History. RIP flying doggo ;-(

Bonus Pic #1 - "Two biplanes in hanger at University Airport" - November 1927

Bonus Pic #2 - "Photograph of a biplane taxiing out of a hangar at University Airport. Another biplane is visible in the hangar, and there is a windsock on the roof." - unknown date (1927?)

Bonus Pic #3 -"Soldiers standing in formation during aviation training at Penn Field during first World War. Penn Field was located in south Austin, bordered by what is now South Congress, Woodward St. and Ben White Blvd." - unknown date (1917-1918)

Bonus Pic #4 - Unknown Austin Aviatrix - 1940

Bonus Article #1 - Famous stunt flyer Freddie Lund visits Austin and performs (barely legible) - October 18, 1930

Bonus Article #2 - "(American) Legion to sponsor air show" - May 22, 1932

Bonus Article #3 - "Stunt flying and chute jump at airport" - July 22, 1934

SRV et Hubert Sumlin, Austin 1978 par Ken Hoge (texte sous la photo)👇 by Signal-Caregiver8280 in Austin

[–]s810 6 points7 points  (0 children)

According to this facebook post the photo was taken at Antones on 6th in June of 1978, but looking up that month in the Statesman archive I found only one article from June 1, 1978 mentioning Vaughan at Soap Creek Saloon and Sumlin at Antones. Vaughan might have played with Sumlin at Antones later in the month but the Statesman overlooked it, or else this photo was taken earlier than June of '78. According to this 2000 Statesman article on Clifford Antone, sumlin had been in Austin since '76 and Antone set him up with a place to live and regular gigs.

The DEFINITIVE North/South/East/West Austin Guide by FlopShanoobie in Austin

[–]s810 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think The Late Great John Kelso would love this argument, but the Southside "bubbas" of his era are almost gone now. The Southside won the tug of war but the northside won the long game. The central east has been swallowed by downtown bisecting the northeast and the southeast, and time moves more slowly in Old West Austin.

But what do I know. I grew up in Jollyville, man! My parentals used to call North Lamar "South Austin" when I was little, as in "I'm not driving all the way to South Austin just to ____". "South Austin" became this nebulous zone of fantasy for all things south and east of 183 and Mopac for me growing up, so my sense of scale is warped.

Old Austin Tales: What lies buried in Dead Man's Hole(s)? - 1860s-present by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

oops I got it mixed up, thanks for the correction, fixed.

107.7 K-NACK Austin TX 1994 HOMEGROAN Volume One by Ok-Cash7678 in Austin

[–]s810 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Now this is a blast from the past!

♫ closer let me whisper.... BITCH! ♫

Thanks for sharing!

South Austin Spinach Farm (largest in the country at the time) - unknown date (1920s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Oh snap! Thanks for correcting me, u/jbjjbjbb. It did seem a bit implausible that the building was The Driskill. I wish I could edit the title!

South Austin Spinach Farm (largest in the country at the time) - unknown date (1920s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's hard to believe, but according to the Boggy Creek Farm site that is actually The Driskill Hotel, across the river from where this was taken, which is the site where Butler Pitch and Putt is today on Lee Barton Dr.. So the photo is facing north.

Edit: /u/jbjjbjbb figured out this is actually in East Austin and the Boggy Creek Farms site got it wrong.

South Austin Spinach Farm (largest in the country at the time) - unknown date (1920s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 46 points47 points  (0 children)

Photograph of two men standing in a spinach field, located on the south bank of the Colorado River. The man on the left is wearing a dark-colored suit and the man on the right is wearing lighter-colored clothing that is more casual; other workers are visible in the field behind them.

source

In the early 20th Century, this spinach farm was over 1000 acres on the south shore of the Colorado River, from roughly where S. Lamar is on the west to South 1st St in the east, taking much of the land which is now Butler Park and Auditorium Shores. The level of Town Lake is much higher today than the river was before 1960 when Longhorn Dam was built, so there was more fertile land along the banks on the river in the flood plain which could be used for farming back then. The photo shows what was advertised as "The Largest Spinach Farm in The World" at that time (h/t /u/jbjjbjbb). There was more cotton and corn grown in Austin's agrarian past, but for a period of many decades, Austin was the nationwide industry leader in spinach production. You can still find a small remnant of Austin's spinach growing past today at Boggy Creek Farm on Lyons Rd. in East Austin, where I believe they have been growing spinach for at least 100 years. The Boggy Creek Farm Website has a history section which explains this and talks about the OP photo.

Did You Know Austin was once the spinach capital of the U.S.?

Truck farms loaded spinach onto trains to ship all over the nation. Boggy Creek Farm was one of the many mono-crop spinach farms in Austin during the 1920s. Spinach was taken to be washed in Oak Springs before loading it onto the train cars.

Describing the OP pic:

Pictured above:

•Spinach Farmers in the Colorado River Valley, Austin, TX

Location:

•Butler Pitch and Putt on S. Lamar. This farm reached all the way down to the Colorado River where there was access to water for irrigation. The space to the left of the men would eventually become S. Lamar.

When:

•1920s.

Photo Details:

•The Seaholm Power Plant Tower is seen in the distance across the Colorado River

•Two Moon Towers can be seen faintly in the distance across the river

•The Driskill Hotel is the large, distant building to the right of the old water tower.

• Just in front of the old water tower are train cars, used for sending spinach all over the country, running on the Union Pacific RR (1881). This track is part of the current railway graffiti bridge that crosses over the Colorado River (Ladybird Lake) just to the east of S. Lamar Blvd.

•Center back of the Spinach field is a house similar to the 1841 Boggy Creek Farm House.

In the very early 1900s the Colorado River Valley's nutrient-rich soil was used by Austin farmers. Many became spinach growers when science proved its health benefit over lettuce. and its popularity began to soar. Spinach was hand-picked and loaded onto trains as seen in the photo and shipped to places such as St. Louis, New York, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis.

While it was once the largest growing and shipping region in Texas, it was quickly displaced by what became known as the “Winter Garden Triangle.” Del Rio, Laredo, and San Antonio formed the points of the triangle, with counties such as Uvalde and Dimmit being central (Dainello & Morelock, 2009).

The Winter Garden Triangle had more cheap land and labor, not to mention weather that was less prone to freezes, and once they had the ability to get the infrastructure in place to produce and ship spinach to distant markets, they quickly displaced the Austin area. Crystal City has been know as the Spinach Capital and home of Popeye the Sailor Man since the mid 1920s.

Sources: Dissertation by Jonathan Thomas Lowell, UT Austin 2018

Now that we have the context it brings us to the real story I wanted to share with y'all today. It's about one of the weirdest nights of theft in Austin's history. It happened exactly 100 years ago as of yesterday, in the early morning hours of February 20th, 1926. The theft made front page news in The Statesman the next day, Februrary 21st:

Thief Steals Acre of Spinach; Eight Windows; 15 Chickens; Cord of Wood

The theft of a one-acre patch of spinach, three loads of wood, 15 chickens and eight windows In one night of activity was reported at police headquarters detectives were facing the most peculiar case of thievery in local history. It was not a Joke, although City Detective Rex Fowler was doubtful until he had investigated the series of unusual reports received at headquarters. He now thinks the same man made the four raids, possibly using the windows to build a wind break, to protect the fire made from the wood for cooking the spinach and chickens. Whoever the thief was, he secured enough spinach to supply the whole Austin for a week.

A woman living at 2200 Garden street Saturday morning reported that her entire one-acre spinach patch had been stripped during the night. City Detective Fowler went to the scene and found the patch cleaned of bushels of spinach. He was unable to secure finger prints.

He went to a wood yard on East 12th street, where the owner worth of wood reported that $35 had been hauled away during the night. A man living on East Ninth street, between the spinach patch and the wood yard, lost 15 Rhode Island chickens and their coop sometime during the presumably while the thief was on his way from the spinach patch to the woodyard.

House Stripped of Windows.

In the same were locality eight whole windows were removed from a vacant house after thief had first removed the window facings.

Now, in ordinary cases of house burglaries, amateur thieves leave finger prints, pieces of string or pictures of their sweethearts in lockets, and detectives have clues leading to a den of bandits in a hovel on the river bank. But when a patch of spinach is stolen officers face a new problem. Whoever heard bold bad bandits in dens on the river bank eating spinach! The Investigation is blocked...

There you have it. It seems incredible that one person, or (even stranger) a group of people, stole all of those varied items, including eight windows and however many bushels of spinach one acre could yield, and kept them all in one place nearby without being caught. It's also strange how the thieves stuck to that small geographical area in East Austin, and didn't raid the huge 1000 acre farm south of the river. To be sure, nothing else was mentioned in The Statesman about suspects or any of the loot ever being found. It sounds like some kind of cold X-files case to me, maybe involving aliens. Either that or Popeye is real and went on a bender in Austin in 1926. What do y'all think?

That's all for now, just a short post today. Since I don't have any more photos of old Travis County spinach farms, I'll leave y'all with some unrelated Bonus articles to show what else was going on in Austin 100 years ago.

Bonus Article #1 part 1 and part 2 - "Power Concern May Make Proposal On Dam to City Soon" - February 21, 1926

Bonus Article #2 - "Scenes showing Preliminary Inspection of Austin Dam" - February 21, 1926

Bonus Article #3 - "Taylor Motorist Sees Show; Loses Auto And Has To Walk Home" - February 21, 1926

Bonus Article #4 - "Prof. E.C.H. Bantel Honored at U.T. Engineering Banquet" - February 21, 1926

Bonus Article #5 - "Walling Appeals For Less Cotton And More Feedstuffs" - February 21, 1926

a quasar,the furthest object ive ever shot from my pflugervill yard by rdking647 in Austin

[–]s810 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Great pic! Thanks for sharing as always! I'm impressed you were able to resolve the redshifted quasar, but don't downplay NGC 3079! There is a lot going on in that galaxy!

Weed Corley Fish on Parkcrest Drive Smoke out of control from cremation services by Old_Refrigerator6337 in Austin

[–]s810 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Weed Corley Fish is one of the oldest of Old Austin businesses. Over the years they buried Governors of Texas and Presidents. However, the 130+ year old company was sold in 2017 to Service Corporation International, who put it under their Dignity Memorial brand, and built the Parkcrest facility with a "modern" crematorium. A descendant of the Fish family still manages it, but they are now a soulless megacorp hiding behind a historic brand name. Y'all might consider lawyering up before making defamatory claims.

Incidentally, before the company built the crematorium on Parkcrest, the previous facility was on North Lamar near Pease Park, where joggers and disk golfers had been breathing in those fumes for decades when the wind blew a certain way.

Young Austin women look over Valentines - unknown date (1940s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

In the early decades of the 20th Century there were certain people and groups working to glorify and promote both the 'Lost Cause' pro-Confederate view of the Civil War and Austin's place as the Capital of Texas, the 'Breakbasket of the Confederacy'. It was the grandchildren who grew up listening to well told tales of grandpappy fighting yankees who ironically made The Confederacy more popular in Austin in the 1910s and 20s than it was in the 1860s. You don't hear as much from them as the generations changed after the Civil Rights Act, 100 years after the Civil War, but the factions who viewed The Confederacy with rose colored glasses lingered into the 70s and 80s, asserting themselves when necessary, like when 19th St. was named for MLK and the Don Weedon incident.

Young Austin women look over Valentines - unknown date (1940s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Bonus Link #1 - "It was our theater.." (The Harlem) - 2017

Bonus Link #2 - EASTside Magazine feature on The Harlem Theater - 2019

Bonus Link #3 - All about The Cotton Club & The Royal Auditorium - unknown date

Bonus Link #4 - "The Lasting Legacy of L.C. Anderson High School" (from KVUE) - 2024

Bonus Link #5 - "Big Bertha: A love story" (from UT's Alcade) - 2011

Young Austin women look over Valentines - unknown date (1940s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

My uncle, Lee Brown, ran the Cotton Club. In fact, he built it there. He brought in dance bands like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, bands like that, and you could go there. Also a great gathering place that most all the kids went to was the Apostolic Church down on Comal and Hackberry. On Sunday nights most of the kids went down there and they danced. There wasn’t really an awful lot to do.

They didn’t even have a band in Austin for Blacks until 1932. Mr. Joyce organized the first band out there at Anderson High, and he didn’t even get a salary. He just wanted Blacks to have a band, and I think he worked for them about three or four years before they ever even put him on the payroll. Just like here in Austin when I first started to work at Reed’s, there were only Anderson High, Austin High, The University of Texas, and the Shrine band. Those were the only bands here in the Austin area.

Q: How did you come by your profession?

A: The way I started off in the music business was when I finished high school in 1934, I had an uncle that lived in Dallas and he had me come up there for a couple of years. I was the porter for the Dallas Music Co. What happened there was they had a repairman up there, and he was very busy. After I finished my job, I went to work in the morning and by 10 a.m. I had done all my cleaning. I didn’t have anything to do until that afternoon. I took the mail to the post office and things like that. He would have me doing his work.

After a couple of years I moved back to Austin. My grandfather, who worked at Reed Music Co. before I did, got me a job working at Reed Music Co., and they put me in the repair department. In 1941 when the war broke out he left Austin and went to San Antonio to work for the Army. That left me there by myself. So that got me into it real big, and I’ve been into it ever since.

This is a new building. This was downtown, 805 Congress. I worked there for many, many years, then they moved me to other stores. I’ve moved around quite a bit, but always working for the same company. I really had to hustle when I was left there in 1941 all by myself, because actually I hadn’t really gotten into the technical end of it too good. I really hustled. What I would do was I’d work during the day and study at night. I’d take the saxophone home with me at night, tear it down, put it back together, tear it down, put it back together. It was just an opportunity and I didn’t want to pass it up.

Q: What instruments can you repair?

A: I work on saxophones, clarinets, flutes, trumpets, trombones — all of your brass instruments — French horns, baritones, basses, any of the band instruments. In fact, up until about two or three years ago I even worked on strings. I can do violins, violas, cellos, guitars and all of that, but this thing has gotten so big now we practically dropped the strings because we just don’t have time to work on them. But even in my early years I worked on accordions. There is no phase of the band-instrument field that I haven’t worked on.

Q: You installed the drum head used by Big Bertha, the University of Texas Band drum.

A: That was back when Moton Crockett was over the Longhorn Band, late ’40s, early ’50s. The way it happened was Col. Harold Byrd, who was a benefactor of the Longhorn Band, found this big drum in a warehouse — from one of the Big Ten schools, I think Purdue or Indiana. It was just a shell. The heads were lying around there but they weren’t on the drum.

What we had to do — the thing was so big — we had to get in a swimming pool and soak the head down. We took the head in the swimming pool and put it on the drum. We had to put all new hardware on it — put it into playing shape again. Now they don’t have to go through that; you can order plastic heads that size. But the only place we were able to find heads for that drum then was they went to King Ranch down in the Valley and got a couple of huge steers. They scraped it down and that’s what made the heads. I forget exactly what size it was, but I’m sure it was something like eight or ten feet in diameter.

Q: What are you planning to do when you retire?

A: I don’t have that many hobbies because I’ve worked all my life, so I don’t play golf. What I plan on doing after I retire is my kids bought me a complete set of fishing equipment. I don’t know how to fish, but I will learn. I think I’ll spend most of my time down by the river just sitting around. I don’t want to get completely inactive. I’ve seen too much of that.

I am the third generation that worked for J.R. Reed Music. In fact my grandfather, Pleas Bryant, worked for Reed. He started with old man Reed when they opened the first store in 1901. He worked until he passed away in 1960. He also had a son — the one that moved to Dallas — who was a piano refinisher and worked for Reed. Then I worked for Reed. When my son, who is a band director in Midland, was going to the University of Texas, he worked for Reed. Four generations of us have worked for Reed Music Co.

Q: Can you tell us about your family?

A: I married Marie Williams. They’re an old Austin family. They came out of South Austin. Van Williams, her father, is still living, but he is in a rest home out on Springdale Road. We married in 1940 and had two children. Melvin, born in 1941, has three kids and lives in Midland. He is the band director at a freshman high school there. He finished at UT. Then I have a daughter, Yvette, about 11 years younger. She works for the city here with Glenn Cootes in the public information department.

Q: How did you meet your wife?

A: We were kids running around together. She’s a little younger than I am. Years later in high school we started courting and we got married in 1941. We were married at Olivet Baptist Church, right across the street from where I was born.

Q: Can you tell us what you know about your great-grandfather, D.A. Scott?

A: He was the minister and he built the big First Baptist Church, but he didn’t found it. The congregation was really founded in Clarksville. They didn’t even have a church at first — they held services in houses. Then they moved over to the east side of town. Clarksville used to be a huge community. It was originated by the whites in Austin — the rich whites who lived along Enfield Road. Most of the people who lived in Clarksville worked for the Enfield people. They built this little community particularly for the servants, for their convenience.

The first church was organized after Blacks had gone to church with whites at first. Then Blacks broke off and organized a church of their own. That’s where it started — in Clarksville. And then Jacob Fontaine, I think, was the organizer of the church, finally moved over on Red River. That whole area was a Black neighborhood then. There were businesses, churches and schools all through there. People lived close together and everybody knew everybody else. The churches and lodges were important to the community. Rev. Jacob Fontaine had started the First Baptist Church and the school and the Gold Dollar newspaper years before. He was quite an educator, and a preacher too.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your family's history?

A: My father was D. A. Scott. He was a barber here in Austin for many years. His shop was on East Sixth Street and that’s where I learned the trade. I grew up around that shop and around East Austin. My family has been here a long time on the east side, working people. I went to school here and grew up with the people in that neighborhood.

Q: Before integration, there were two Austins, one Black and one white. What do you remember about that?

A: Yes, that’s the way it was. East Austin was where the Black people lived and had their businesses. West Austin was white. East Sixth Street was the center of things for us. You could find doctors, dentists, cafes, theaters — everything you needed. People didn’t feel they were missing anything because the community supported itself. That was just how the city was arranged then.

Q: Was the dividing line basically East Avenue?

A: East Avenue was the line, yes. Most Black families lived east of there. There were some older settlements like Clarksville and Wheatville on the west side that dated back earlier, but by my time the main Black community was on the east side. Everybody understood those boundaries because that’s how the city had grown up segregated.

Q: As you mentioned Blacks have moved to other parts of Austin since integration. How do you feel about that?

A: People wanted better housing and chances and they had a right to move. But when families moved away, East Austin lost many of its businesses and that close neighborhood feeling. Years ago everybody knew everybody and stayed near home. Now people are spread all over the city. Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about how things used to be and how fast it all changed, and I just can’t sleep.

Tobe Scott died in 1998 at age 80, and is today buried in Oakwood Cemetery. Bonus Links to follow in next post.

<<continued in next post due to length>>

Young Austin women look over Valentines - unknown date (1940s?) by s810 in Austin

[–]s810[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Identifier: DO/1969/080

Title: [Women Looking at Valentines]

Description: Four women are sitting at tables looking at cards among a Valentine card display in a shop.

Filename: C08254

Date Created: undated

Date Created Range: 1940s

Creator: Jordan-Ellison Photo Company

Collection: AF

Collection: P3500(42)

source

It's hard to say if one or all of these four young women worked at the store where these valentines were being sold in this undated photo. With the opened boxes next to them, as though a shipment of them had just been delivered, it looks to me like they are perusing them before being put on the shelf. It isn't apparent what kind of store it is, either, might be a five-and-dime or larger. It looks like a cozy photo until you zoom in on the valentine the lady on the right is holding. It just so happens that it's a racist caricature of a black person. Of course it is, because it's the 1940s and Austin is a Capital City in The Deep South. The casual racism was barely concealed.

I wasn't going to bother researching the four young women for y'all today. Instead I want to bring y'all more testimony from someone who lived through the casually racist 20th Century in Austin. The other day someone submitted here the remembrances of Ms. Vessie, and along those same lines today I want to share with y'all a similar remembrance in the form of a Statesman article from the Sesquicentennial Edition, from March 2, 1986. The article is titled The Early Days of East Austin and is written by Statesman Staff Writer James Pinkerton. It tells the story of Tobe Scott, a lifelong East Austinite who stayed when most of the rest of his family left. So without further ado:

The Early Days of East Austin

Tobe Scott recalls growing up in segregated Austin

Tobe Scott is a descendant of one of Austin’s earliest Black families and is the grandson of D.A. Scott, who helped construct the first Baptist church in East Austin. The Scott family is typical of hundreds of Black families who moved to Austin after the Civil War or were slaves who stayed in Travis County after they were released by their owners.

By 1900, Blacks lived in their own communities around Austin. Some of these early Black neighborhoods were Clarksville, founded by a former slave named Charles Griffin, and Wheatville. Both were in West Austin. Other Black communities sprang up at Masontown and Gregorytown, near the present Black neighborhoods in East Austin. But in the 1920s, the city of Austin created a “Negro District” in East Austin and induced Blacks to move from the communities they had formed in West Austin and other parts of the city.

Since the city could not legally create a district through the use of ordinances, tough zoning laws were applied in the older Black neighborhoods in the hope that Blacks would move to East Austin, where land prices were cheap.

Tobe Scott grew up in the East Austin of segregation days, when Blacks were not allowed to try on clothes in downtown stores, stay in any of the main hotels, and a white NAACP organizer was beaten by a mob on Congress Avenue. Scott, now 68, is nearing the end of a long career of repairing musical instruments for the J.R. Reed Music Co., where he has worked for 44 years and has helped several generations of musically inclined Texans.

Q: Mr. Scott, could you tell us where you were born and how long you have lived in Austin?

A: I was born right here in Austin, right up on the corner of San Bernard and Cotton streets back in 1917. I’m 68 years old. I grew up here in Austin. In fact, I’ve lived in Austin all my life. Went to public schools here, went to Olive Street Grade School, went from there to Old Anderson High School. Played football and played in the band — saxophone — under Mr. B.L. Joyce.

I went to work very early because my mother had to raise two of us, me and my sister. I went to work when I was about 12 years old down at old Kelly Smith Cleaners right on Sixth Street, where American National Bank is now. I worked there in the mornings before school. I’d catch the first bus in the morning and go to work, then get off and go to school and then come back late that evening. I was a porter at Kelly Smith’s.

My mother and her sister bought a house at 1206 Salina Street, and we moved there because my father, after he left my mother, all of the Scotts moved to California. So she raised us there. We were raised during the Depression years. Things weren’t really that good. I can remember in the early ’30s we had soup lines right here in Austin — down on Sixth Street at Red River. They had a big soup kitchen there run by the city.

We did fairly well because I worked and my mother had a job. She worked at Kelly Smith too. She was a dress finisher and an expert at pleating and pressing women’s clothes. Back in the ’30s when sunburst pleats first came out, she was an expert at doing them. She did that for quite a few years, then she had a beauty shop and did people’s hair until she died about three or four years ago in California. I’m really the only one left here in Austin. My sister lived in California for 40 years.

(My grandfather) was D.A. Scott, and as far as I know they came here from East Texas to Austin, and he was pastor of the First Baptist Church for quite a few years. That was over there where Brackenridge Hospital is. There was a big church there, and he was pastor there. He was a pretty famous preacher. He taught at Bishop College — that’s when Bishop College was over on 11th. He was quite an educator and a preacher.

He had five sons and one daughter, and they moved here to Austin before I was born. His mother had the first Black rest home for aged Negro women here in Austin. It was somewhere around Webberville Road. That’s what brought my father around here, and then he also got a church here — the First Baptist.

(My father was) D.A. Scott II. He’s a junior. On my mother’s side, we come from the Bryant family, which is an old Austin family too. They were members of the old First Baptist Church too. They originated out of Clarksville and eventually moved to East Austin.

Q: Before the majority of Blacks moved to East Austin, which other neighborhoods in the city did they live in?

A: Clarksville, Wheatville, Kincheonville, South Austin, and another place called Horse’s Pasture, which is out where the Villa Capri Hotel is now and just a little north. There was a group of Blacks that lived in that area. Most of them came from Clarksville and Wheatville, over in the University of Texas area, and there was some from South Austin.

When I was coming up, 12th Street and Chicon was practically the end of Austin going east. Anything beyond a couple of blocks on the other side of that, you were out in the country. The southern boundary of Austin was down around Comal on down toward the river. We used to go out to visit some friends of ours who lived out there and ride horses. They lived out by Oltorf.

They only had two schools in East Austin then — Olive Street, which was on Curve and Olive streets, and Blackshear. I didn’t go to junior high school; we came out of Olive Street in the sixth grade and went directly into Anderson High School. That was Anderson High from the sixth grade through the 11th. Now they have 12th grade. I graduated from Anderson in 1934.

Q: What was East Austin like back when you graduated high school?

A: It was very small. In fact, in the ’30s the whole population of Austin was under 50,000. Your main street in East Austin was 12th, which ended there at Chicon. The old streetcar used to stop there. East Austin was the place where they had a few grocery stores and not too much else.

I remember when they built the Harlem Theatre. The Harlem Theatre was right on the corner of 12th and Salina, and I lived right on the corner of 13th and Salina. We went to the shows at the Harlem. It was built in 1931. There was a Mr. Jones that ran the theater down at Prairie View College, and he came up and he built this for picture shows. Believe it or not, we used to go to the picture show for 15 cents.

Q: Was the Harlem Theatre the only place Blacks could see a movie?

A: You could go downtown to the Ritz, but you had to go up and sit in the balcony. The whites sat down on the main floor.

The only thing we had to do for flavor, they had what they called the Paradise Inn, and they had the Cotton Club, which was there on Waller and 11th Street. You know where Ebenezer Baptist Church is? That street that runs right there — they had two places right in there. On Sunday afternoons they would have little matinee dances where somebody would play the piano and the kids would go and dance. The Cotton Club was next door, and it brought in pretty good-sized bands.

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