page_title: Shoal Creek, Austin, Texas
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Shoal Creek, Austin, Texas / History
caption_attribution_description: Marker placed by the City of Austin along Lady Bird Lake near the mouth of Shoal Creek.
context_page_description: Shoal Creek is a stream and an urban watershed in Austin, Texas, United States.
  Shoal Creek has its headwaters near The Domain and runs in a southerly direction, soon reaching the intersection of Texas State Highway Loop 1, locally known as "MoPac Expressway" or simply "MoPac," and Highway 183. It continues south, partly along Shoal Creek Boulevard and Lamar Boulevard, through the western part of downtown Austin to its end at Lady Bird Lake.
  Shoal Creek is the largest of Austin’s north urban watersheds, encompassing approximately 8,000 acres. About 27% of the watershed is over the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone. Its length is approximately 11 miles. It runs parallel to and between Waller Creek to its east and Johnson Creek to its west.
  The creek is notable for its links to the history of Texas and Austin, its floods, and its scenery and parks just a few minutes from the Texas Capitol.
context_section_description: Arrowheads and other artifacts indicate that Native Americans occupied the Shoal Creek watershed 11,400 years ago. There are also stories of attacks by the native people on early settlers. One Gideon White, who lived at Seiders’ Springs before the Seiders family settled there, was killed near his home in 1842 by a band of Native Americans. A Mrs. Sarah Hibbins, who had been captured by natives when crossing the Colorado River in 1836, escaped them by night and followed the channel of Shoal Creek back to the Colorado, where she obtained help. Her two children, or perhaps only one of them, were rescued but her husband had already been killed. At that time, the village that would become Austin was called Dewitt’s Colony.
  There is supposed to be a Native American burial mound “near the old McCall Spring just west of the street now called Balcones Trail.” Neither the spring nor the street exist now by those names.
  In 1838, a few settlers lived along the creek’s mouth in the village of Waterloo when Mirabeau B. Lamar, later the second president of the Republic of Texas, arrived there. Lamar was looking for places that would be suitable for Texas’s new capital. He shot a buffalo and admiring the area’s scenic beauty, returned to Houston. The next year, when Lamar was president, a commission appointed by him recommended Waterloo as the capital of Texas. Lamar wanted the capital to be on the “frontier” and have room to expand. He considered Shoal Creek to be the frontier and the land west of it to be Comanche territory.
  Shoal Creek was named by Edwin Waller and was the original western boundary of the city of Austin, then called Waterloo, when it was established in 1839. In the "Bird's-Eye View" map by Augustus Koch, Shoal Creek is the large canyon on the left side.
  When founded, the city issued land patents to several people, and others bought tracts of land. The Hancock (or Handcock) brothers, beginning around 1845, owned a huge tract spanning the creek, which stretched from what is now 45th street north about 2 miles to include the Allandale neighborhood. George Hancock apparently owned the southern and eastern part and John’s half was on the other side of the creek and to the north. This land was far outside the city limits at that time. John Hancock was a congressional representative. After he died, his family moved “into town” and sold the land, about 1896.
  In 1846, Louisa Maria White, the daughter of Gideon White, who as mentioned above was killed by Native Americans, married Edward Seiders, who was in the livery and grocery business. They took up residence in the cabin by the springs where her father had lived. The springs thereafter started to be called Seiders Springs, and the nearby oak grove was known as Seiders Oaks.
  In the 1850s, Governor Elisha M. Pease acquired a 365-acre tract west of downtown, including some of the Shoal Creek watershed, which he named Woodlawn Plantation. After the Civil War, General George Armstrong Custer, commanding the 2nd Wisconsin and the 7th Indiana Cavalry, was assigned to Austin in late 1865 and early 1866 as part of Reconstruction  and intended to use Governor Pease’s house, named Woodlawn, as his headquarters. Pease was out of the state at the time. The citizens of the city did not allow it. Custer’s men camped on the banks of Shoal Creek in the area that would become Pease Park. Some of them died of cholera and were buried by the creek.
  Pease Park, originally twenty-four acres and part of Woodlawn Plantation, was given to the city in 1875 by former Governor Pease.
  Austin's first bridge was built on Pecan Street (now 6th Street) across Shoal Creek in 1865. It was a narrow iron footbridge, built by the United States Army, and could not carry wagon traffic.  In 1887, a new, larger bridge across Shoal Creek was built to match the full 80-foot (24 m) width of Sixth Street and permit wagons to cross; this West Sixth Street Bridge is still in use today, and has since been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
  In the 1870s, Edward Seiders still owned the property around Seiders
caption: City of Austin historical marker
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