Saving Austin’s History

Last year I had the pleasure of working with the staff from PBS's History Detectives for the upcoming History Detectives Special Investigations: Texas Servant Girl Murders.  The cast and crew came to Austin last summer; they did a number of…

Unidentified albumen print. One morning before dawn in the summer of 1883, a strange persistent cry echoed through a west Austin neighborhood and caught the attention of two women, Sophia Phillips and Sallie Mack, both of whom lived nearby. They…

Once there was a killer in nearby Austin who was still at large.  He had chloroformed his victim (rather humanely, I thought) before chopping her head off with an axe.  Fear that ‘dat debblish axe-man’ might strike again, in only…

Materials in Travis County Archives Collection. The mission of the Travis County Archives is to serve the government and the community of Travis County by documenting, preserving, and making available its records and history. The Travis County Archives documents the…

  Austin native Henry B. Barnhart, was a successful attorney in 1885.  He was appointed Travis County Attorney in 1886.  An 1887 description of Barnhart’s career included the following passage: With uncompromising firmness, he has made successful war upon evil…

I've often been asked if I know where Eula Phillips is buried and my answer has always been that I don’t know the exact location, just that she was buried in an unmarked grave in the oldest section of Oakwood…