Abilene in 1883
Abilene came into being as the Texas and Pacific Railway rapidly built its way from Fort Worth across West Texas. As the railroad industry recovered from the Panic of 1873, New York financier and railroad magnate Jay Gould organized a syndicate to provide new investment muscle for the T&P, and he put engineer and former General Grenville M. Dodge in charge of construction. Work began in Fort Worth on… [More]
Alvord in 1890
The Fort Worth and Denver City Railway reached Alvord, about 13 miles from Decatur, early in 1882 as a part of the company’s pell-mell rush to meet the construction crews from Denver in the Texas Panhandle. The small Wise County town had begun life as Nina, a tent city on the railroad about fifty miles north-northwest of Fort Worth. It was named Alvord in honor of the president of… [More]
Austin in 1873
Austin had been designated the permanent capital of the state just a few months before Augustus Koch, one of the most prolific of the itinerant city-view artists, arrived in town in January 1873, and the city was experiencing a boom. The view that Koch proposed to the editor of the Daily Democratic Statesman would be a tangible expression of the city’s new-found pride as the population grew steadily and… [More]
Austin in 1887
Koch paid a return visit to Austin in 1887. The city was much larger by then—in the ensuing fourteen years, the population almost doubled to well over 11,000—and Koch reflected that in a print even larger than the one he had made of San Antonio. The eye easily traces the new growth in a diagonal line from lower left to upper right: from the reconstructed bridge over the Colorado… [More]
Bastrop in 1887
During what might have been his fourth tour of Texas, Augustus Koch paused to sketch a bird’s-eye view of Bastrop, a small city of approximately 2,000 persons about thirty miles southeast of Austin. The city is located on the east bank of the Colorado River on a bluff that is generally level until it rises gently to form the low hills east of town, home to the remnants of… [More]
