Austin was briefly called Waterloo, and Sam Houston tried to steal its archives
Texas's capital was chosen partly because a vice president liked the scenery on a buffalo hunt. Within two years its arch-rival Sam Houston was trying to move the government out, and townspeople blocked him from carting off the official records. Austin kept its papers, lost its population, and eventually won.
People lived around Austin long before it had a name. Clovis-culture hunters left traces in the area around 9200 BC, documented at the Gault Site, and digs at the French Legation downtown found a camp from the Archaic period about 5,000 years ago. Coahuiltecan descendants still count Barton Springs among the four springs in their creation story. Spanish expeditions passed through, and in 1730 three missions were merged on the Colorado River's south bank, in today's Zilker Park, only to move to San Antonio about seven months later.
After Texas broke from Mexico, its congress wanted a capital to replace Houston. Mirabeau Lamar had hunted buffalo on the Colorado's north bank in 1837 to 1838 and recommended its hills and water; the spot also sat where trade routes crossed. In 1839 the town was briefly incorporated as Waterloo, then renamed for Stephen F. Austin. Surveyor Edwin Waller drew a 14-block grid split by Congress Avenue, rising from the river to the planned capitol, and it still shapes downtown.
Houston hated the remote choice. Citing Mexican incursions, he moved the government in 1841 and tried to haul the Land Office papers away in what became the Archive War, but locals stopped the documents leaving. The town shrank to a few hundred until Congress, meeting in Austin again in 1845, confirmed it as the seat of government and approved joining the United States.
Today the city counted 961,855 people in 2020, the second-largest state capital after Phoenix. Its technology story began with Tracor in 1962, IBM building Selectric typewriters there from 1967, and Motorola chips from 1974, earning the nickname Silicon Hills. It also calls itself the Live Music Capital of the World, hosts South by Southwest, and residents who fear gentrification rally around the slogan Keep Austin Weird.
Source: Austin, Texas
