Tag Archives: pease park

The Passionate Concern of Dedicated Individuals

Guerrilla Interpretation, Heritage, History, , , ,

 

 

 

Jacob Fontaine house, now Freedmen’s Bar, Austin, Texas, ©2017 Ted Lee Eubanks

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Rev. Jacob Fontaine (1808 – 1898) lived his first 55 years as a slave. For a time, he and his wife lived on the Woodlawn Plantation, part of which is now Pease Park. With emancipation, the Rev. Fontaine became one of Austin’s most notable residents.

From this building on San Gabriel at West 24th, he operated a number of businesses, including The Gold Dollar, one of the state’s first black newspapers. Black newspapers such as The Gold Dollar served a number of purposes. Newspapers help freed slaves learn to read, keep up with current news that concerned them, and contact family members that were alienated by slavery.

For example, Rev. Fontaine place the following ad in the first edition of The Gold Dollar:

Aney one wishing to inquire for thir kinn send ten cents to the gold dollar…J. Fontaine.

This building is one of the few structures left from Wheatville, one of Austin’s freedom towns that arose after the Civil War. Wheatville corresponded to present-day West 24th Street to the south, West 26th Street to the north, Shoal Creek to the west, and Rio Grande Street to the east. In other words, Wheatville was wholly contained within the Shoal Creek watershed.

Rev. Fontaine and his family lived in the building from 1875 to 1898. Currently, the building is a bar and smokehouse, Freedmen’s Bar. The chandelier over its front bar was reportedly a part of the historic Pease Mansion, where Fontaine’s wife kept house during the 1870’s.

The University of Texas and its students have subsumed virtually all of Wheatville, an irony I assume would not be lost on the Rev. Fontaine. He tirelessly campaigned among African-Americans in Texas to support the establishment of a state university in Austin, a university that would not completely desegregate until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Shoal Creek Trail and Pease Park, Austin, Texas

Conservation, Great American Trails, , , ,

Shoal Creek @ Pease Park
We are Austin based and Texas bred. Shoal Creek is our neighborhood, a slim needle of a creek that splits the heart of Austin into two equal halves. Shoal Creek is dressed Texan, a rarely wet swath of white rocks and cedar trees. To be precise, the white rocks are Georgetown limestone, and the cedar trees are ash junipers. No matter. A Texan would understand.

Like many of you, we are concerned about our place on the planet. Shoal Creek, like so many that we have worked around over the years, is scarred from a history of disinterest and misuse. Our creek flows too little at times, the result of development impinging on the aquifer and springs. At other times the creek flows too much, as rainwater from surrounding neighborhoods rushes to the Colorado River rather than settling slowly into the soil. Our creek is polluted in places, with E.coli counts that spike due to animal waste from pets. In places garbage litters the bank.

Nothing about this differs much from most of America’s urban waterways. The creek’s ills are sins of omission, not commission. Water still runs in a creek bed that has somehow escaped the alterations and improvements that reduce a native waterway to a pipe. Shoal Creek still lives within its banks, waiting for the right moment to spring.

The resurrection of Shoal Creek is our commitment, and to that end we have begun to work with a variety of interests in Austin to advocate for the creek. One important beginning has been our relationship with the Pease Park Conservancy, an Austin organization that is focusing on the restoration of one of Shoal Creek’s iconic parks.

Shoal Creek @ Lady Bird Lake
For our part we have developed a new SmartTrail that interprets Shoal Creek from Lady Bird Lake to West 38th Street. For those not familiar with Austin, Lady Bird Lake shoulders the downtown district, and this new SmartTrail bisects much of what a tourist or visitor might be interested in: the Texas State Capitol, the University of Texas campus, Austin City Limits, and a bottomless serving of chips-and-salsa. The SmartTrail is available now for the iPhone and Android. Download the app, and then access the Shoal Creek and Pease Park SmartTrail.

To see the content of the SmartTrails, go to this webpage. There we have included a widget feed of two of our SmartTrails: the Indiana Beyond the Beach Discovery Trail, and the Austin, Texas: Shoal Creek and Pease Park SmartTrail.

We care about every place we have worked, all 50 states and a jumble of foreign countries. All matter. But Shoal Creek is home, our place. The time has come for us to help our place as well as the places of others. The time has come for Shoal Creek.

The following a gallery of Shoal Creek and Pease Park photos by Ted. Click here for a slide show of the complete gallery.