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…

I am not the first to delve into this mystery.  The first time I opened the drawer of the microfilm cabinet and saw all the small cardboard boxes of microfilm packed snuggly inside, I noticed that the boxes labeled 1885…

  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…

The Hancock Inquest is a fascinating document filled with peculiar details, opinions and suspicions about the murder of Susan Hancock that were never published.  I thought it would be worthwhile to transcribe the handwritten document in full in order to…

Austin, Texas is the seasonal home to a large population of Mexican free-tailed bats who spend their summers under the Congress Avenue bridge on the edge of downtown.  According to Wikipedia it is the largest urban colony in North America,…