This gentle bend in the Colorado River had many residents and visitors long before the first cornerstone was laid.

For hundreds of years, nomadic tribes of Tonkawas, Comanches, and Lipan Apaches camped and hunted along the creeks, including what is now known as Barton Springs. In the late 1700s, the Spanish set up temporary missions in the area. In the 1830s the first permanent Anglo settlers arrived and called their village Waterloo.

Judge Edwin Waller ca. 1860.  PICA 10960 In 1839, tiny Waterloo was chosen to be the capital of the new Republic of Texas. A new city was built quickly in the wilderness, and was named after Stephen F. Austin, “the father of Texas.” Judge Edwin Waller, who was later to become the city’s first mayor, surveyed the site and laid out a street plan that has survived largely intact to this day. In October 1839, the entire government of the Republic arrived from Houston in oxcarts. By the next January, the town’s population had swollen to 856 people.

The new town plan included a hilltop site for a capitol building looking down toward the Colorado River from the head of a broad Congress Avenue. “The Avenue” and Pecan Street (now 6th Street) have remained Austin’s principal business streets for the 150 years since. After Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845, it took two statewide elections to keep Austin the capital city. Congress Avenue ca. 1860.  Detail, C00393

The 1888 capitol under construction. Detail, PICA 08590a By the 1880s, Austin was becoming a city. In 1888, a grand capitol building, advertised as the “7th largest building in the world,” was completed on the site originally chosen in the 1839 plan. Funded by very creative financing involving the famous XIT Ranch, the building remains a central landmark on the Austin skyline. It has also, of course, remained the center of one of the city’s most prominent industries—government.

In September of 1881, the Austin City Public Schools admitted their first classes. In that same year, the Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute, predecessor of Huston-Tillotson College, opened its doors.Efforts to place the new University of Texas in Austin faced some opposition, however. Parents were warned that sending their sons to school so close to lawmakers would be a terrible influence on their morals. West Austin School, now Pease Elementary, class from 1880s.  Detail, PICA 07394

The Great Granite Dam C00065 In 1893, the construction of the Great Granite Dam on the Colorado River was another milestone in the city’s growth. The dam stabilized the river and provided hydraulic power to generate electricity, which in turn attracted manufacturers. By 1938, the dam had been replaced by a series of seven U.S. government-funded dams. One official who helped shape these public works was the young congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, who got his start in government work in Austin.