History

Tired of looking through another antique store on your Hill Country drive? Why not take a few moments and look for some of the real history in area. Search our historic site database for interesting sites, log your visit and let others know what you found.

Features

Taylor's Lime Kilns This lime kiln produced the building materials used to construct man of the older buildings in the Austin area.

Lundberg Bakery This building on Congress no longer creates baked goods, but still provides treats for the citizens of Austin.

Nameless, TX Frustrated with the Postal Service's repeated rejections of names, the residents of of this town came up with a sarcastic reply that ended up being the name of the community.

Sauer-Beckmann Farm This living snapshot of farm life in the 19th century shows how things were really done.

Without the marquee in front, it would have been impossible to determine that there was a movie theater along 6th Street. Ritz Theater

Recent Log Entries

Found a 1938 photo of Zilker Park with the three Clay Pit towers visible. hovermike visited Clay Pit Tower
Drought opportunity Austin Explorer visited Mansfield Dam Tramway
A place of rest, even now Austin Explorer visited Seiders Springs
Oasis Austin Explorer visited Edward H. Rogers Homestead
Still there Austin Explorer visited Penn Field

Recommended Item

History Ahead: Stories beyond the Texas Roadside Markers (Texas A&M Travel Guides)
Dan K. Utley, Cynthia J. Beeman
List Price: $23.00 Our price: $13.98

More than 13,000 historical markers line the roadsides of Texas, giving drivers a way to sample the stories of the past. But these markers tell only part of the story.

In History Ahead, Dan K. Utley and Cynthia J. Beeman introduce readers to the rich, colorful, and sometimes action-packed and humorous history behind the famous (Charles Lindbergh, Will Rogers, The Big Bopper, and jazz great Charlie Christian) and the not-so-famous (Elmer "Lumpy" Kleb, Don Pedro Jaramillo, and Carl Morene, the "music man of Schulenburg") who have left their marks on the history of Texas. They visit cotton gins, abandoned airfields, forgotten cemeteries, and former World War II alien detention camps to dig up the little-known and unsuspected narratives behind the text emblazoned on these markers.

Written in an anecdotal style that presents the cultural uniqueness and rich diversity of Texas history, History Ahead includes nineteen main stories, dozens of complementary sidebars, and many never-before-published historical and contemporary photographs.

History Ahead offers a rich array of local stories that interweave with the broader regional and national context, touching on themes of culture, art, music, technology, the environment, oil, aviation, and folklore, among other topics. Utley and Beeman have located these forgotten gems, polished them up to a high shine, and offered them along with convenient maps and directions to the marker sites.