'Untold Stories' revived: What the heck is that in the middle of my Austin park?
Austin Answered is not new. The current ongoing feature is part of a journalistic culture at the American-Statesman that reaches back to at least the 1970s. Previous columnists who answered reader questions about their city on a regular basis included Ellie Rucker and Jane Grieg.
A similar version of this Q&A format was employed for "Austin Found," written by multiple journalists from 2017 to 2019. It grew into a podcast by the same name, put together by radio personality J.B. Hager and myself. Listeners can still access all 87 episodes of that effort wherever podcasts are available.
That's not all. Almost 10 years ago — and for just 12 months — we devoted one short column a week to questions about the past lives of Austin parks. We called it "Austin Untold Stories."
At the time, my primary source was Kim McKnight, then a consultant for the Parks and Recreation Department, now the agency's staff program manager overseeing a range of activities connected to tourism, interpretive signs and historic preservation.
One reason why we encountered so many questions about Austin parks derives from the widespread civic custom of uprooting historic structures and moving them to these green settings, often without much rhyme or reason.
Another factor relates to money: Older elements in the parks — some natural, some decorative, some unrelated to recreational functions — had been left to deteriorate because of chronically emaciated parks budgets.
Readers were left to ask: What the heck is that?
Despite updated practices and new sources of funds for these Austin parks, you are still asking questions. Here are some answers that we ran during the year of "Austin Untold Stories."
Taylor Lime Kiln, an industrial relic in Reed Park
What is it? A fort? An observation tower? The world's biggest barbecue pit?
In Reed Park, a small Tarrytown enclave, rises a brick monster. It predates the park — with its playground, game field, swimming pool and picnic tables — by 84 years.
This is how it was described in a letter dated Feb. 4, 1874, published in the "Texas New Yorker" and later cited in a 1982 report by Howard Ferguson:
"Here about three miles from Austin," the letter reads, "counting the meandering rings of the winding way, all snugged and hidden by hill and hollow, sturdy oak and emerald cedar, we found what is known as P.C. Taylor's Patent Perpetual Lime Kiln. We never should have found it but for the good guide we had in the person of its owner."
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The strengthened industrial kiln, which consumed juniper night and day, was used to melt limestone into lime, which was then mixed with sand and other ingredients to make mortar, essential for any masonry structure. The stone was quarried in nearby Taylor Slough. A wagon trail, still evident to the naked eye, connected the quarry with the giant kiln, built in 1871 by Peter Calder Taylor, a native of Scotland's Orkney Islands, on rugged land he purchased for $4,000.
The lime — at peak production 50,000 barrels a year — was not only used to build Austin, it was exported via railroad as far away as Galveston, then the state's biggest city. Workers lived and shopped in a company village nearby. Taylor added a second quarry and kiln that now sits on private property.
Soon after Taylor's death in 1895, his land on both sides of Lake McDonald — predecessor to Lake Austin — was subdivided and sold. The kiln cooled down, perhaps for the first time in a generation.
In 1954, the land was given to the city by Mrs. Fagan Dickson. She put no conditions on the gift, but told the Austin Statesman: "If the council sees fit, we'd like the park named for our little girls." Reed Park honors her daughters, Roberta Reed, then 15, and Lucy Reed, 13.
(Reed Park: 2600 Pecos St. Opened: 1955. Taylor Lime Kiln: 1871. Column published: Aug. 19, 2015.)
Spelunking in Adams-Hemphill Park
For decades, children from Hyde Park and Aldridge Place took a secret passage to the Austin State Hospital on Guadalupe Street.
They started in Adams-Hemphill Park, walking along the allée of pecan trees that date back to the park's founding in 1912. Back then, Lewis Hancock — banker, former Austin mayor, Austin Country Club developer and namesake for Hancock Center — donated to the city more than two acres along Hemphill Creek, a western tributary of Waller Creek.
Eventually, neighborhood scamps dropped down into the park's stone drainage channel, built in 1934 as a New Deal project and still the park's distinguishing feature, and followed it underground.
At the channel's northern terminus, these would-be Tom Sawyers and Becky Thatchers entered a dark passageway. This tunnel, large enough for a creeping child, led to the hospital. Recalling these exploits, some Austin adults remember that the hospital staffers kept treats on hand for kids who made the journey — inadvertantly encouraging these undertakings.
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The drain is now gated. Some of the rainwater that would have raced through it — and into the park — now forms ponds in the Central Park project.
Spelunking aside, Adams-Hemphill is one of those ideal little Austin parks. The upper portion (Hemphill) is fine for dog-walking and picnicking above the decorative channel. The lower section (Adams), south of West 30th Street and downhill from the Scottish Rite Dormitory and Kirby Hall, contains sporting areas and a playground.
The first five acres of the Adams part of the park were acquired in 1929. An old stone wall, not unlike the channel and some of the bridges, lines its southern flank. The combined parks now encompass more than 10 acres.
(Park founded: 1912. Adams addition: 1929. Channel built: 1934. Published: Aug. 28, 2015)
A cabin in the park belonged to a distinguished man
If you explore certain Central Texas parks long enough, you'll run across a log cabin. No, you haven't stumbled onto a lost pioneer settlement. Almost none of these rustic relics from the 19th century sits on an original site. Rather, civic-minded folks have moved them to public places where all could glimpse a slice of frontier life.
In the middle of Rosewood Park in East Austin, the small, rough-hewn Henry Madison Cabin rests in the shadow of the Bertram-Huppertz House, a large limestone home built above Boggy Creek in the 1870s. The cabin's the real thing. But its journey to the park was an irregular one.
The park's land belonged to prominent businessman Rudolph Bertram, namesake for the town of Bertram. His daughter Emmie married Charles Huppertz, a grocer who also served as Travis County Auditor until his death in 1921.
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In 1929, the City of Austin purchased the Bertram-Huppertz land to establish a park for African Americans, whom city leaders had planned to segregate in East Austin. During the 1930s, a bandstand, sports field and swimming pool were added to Rosewood Park.
In 1944, construction was started nearby on Doris Miller Auditorium, named for Doris "Dorie" Miller, the first African American awarded the Navy Cross, given for his heroism during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But the log cabin didn't show up until the 1970s.
"It was discovered within the walls of a wooden frame house at 807 E. 11th Street during demolition," writes Kim McKnight in an Austin Parks and Recreation report. "It dates to 1864 at the latest."
Henry Green Madison (1843-1912) was a farmer and policeman who homesteaded the cabin with his wife, Louise, and their eight children. He also built the frame house that enclosed the cabin in 1886.
The property's owner during the late 1960s, Mrs. Greenwood Wooten, donated the cabin to the city. She cooperated with the Rosewood Recreation Association and Delta Sigma Theta service sorority taking the cabin apart and putting back it together in the park in 1973, where you can find it today.
(Cabin built: 1864 at the latest. Moved: 1973. Park established: 1929. Published: Aug. 29, 2015.)
Send your questions — or answers — about Central Texas past and present to "Austin Answered" at mbarnes@statesman.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: We still solve mysteries about Austin past, including its parks