It started with a street sign. It ended with a stroll around the grounds of an abandoned Civil War fort in South Austin.
You didn’t know Austin — far from any battlefield — played a part in Confederate defenses? In fact, slave labor built three forts around Austin to ward off possible invasions from the south, north and east.
Now I’m no Civil War buff, but why hadn’t I heard of Fort Magruder while reporting on the people, places and scenes of our fair city? Questions to longtime residents drew blanks. Published references were few and far between.
Six months ago, though, while looking into Travis Heights for a Real magazine profile, I stumbled across a history of South Congress Avenue in an online report first published in the 1990s when improvements were considered for what would become known as SoCo.
(Years earlier, architect Emily Little had given me a print version of the report, but clearly I didn’t read it too carefully. A clue ignored.)
Anyway, that report showed the precise location of trenches and a dugout near the northwest corner of South Congress and Ben White Boulevard. The fort’s plan — which looks something like the silhouette of the Starship Enterprise — lay alongside Wadford Street below Dunlap Street. Wow! It existed, I thought.
Two weeks ago, taking time off from another project, I requested materials on Fort Magruder at the Austin History Center.
Two yellowed pages referred to “Fortview,” an 1875 subdivision laid out around the fortifications.
One reproduced the original subdivision plat and the other was a 1956 newspaper article about the City of Austin charging a “tap fee” to link the rural area to its urban sewer system.
(Consider that in my lifetime, this area at the headwaters of East Bouldin Creek was way out in the country. Now condos and apartments south of there boast of “downtown living.”)
The gold mine of material, however, is a bound 1995 Texas Department of Transportation report written by John Clark Jr. and David Romo. This survey of archeological and archival evidence was put together quickly, since TxDot was already in the process of turning Ben White into a freeway.
The fort was built in December 1863 and January 1864 as Confederate leaders panicked about Union incursions into Texas. Major Gen. John Magruder, who earlier had battled Union Gen. George McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia, was then in charge of the military district that included Texas.
When Galveston, the state’s main city and port, was briefly captured by Union troops, Confederate soldiers retreated inland. Even after it was recaptured, Texas leaders wavered on how to defend the capital city.
In November 1863, Union forces took lightly defended Brownsville, and it appeared as though an expeditionary force would sweep up from the Rio Grande Valley.
As many as 1,000 slaves were drafted from as far away as La Grange to build defenses on the San Antonio to Austin road, which became South Congress Avenue. Neither plantation owners nor Austin residents were happy with the arrangements.
Local white women called the billeting of the slaves in an Austin church “barbaric.” As usual, the African Americans got the worst of it.
“They were half froze since the winters of 1863 and 1864 were cold ones,” wrote engineer Major Julius Kellersburg. “We had 11- to 12-degree weather and naturally no winter clothing.”
During an interview conducted in the 1930s, former slave John Walton remembered panic in the face of what seemed like an imminent Yankee attack. The emergency ended when Union troops focused instead on reaching the Texas interior via the Red River.
After that, the northern boundary of Fort Magruder’s grounds turned into Post Road Drive, while the southern line became Radam Lane, south of Ben White. East-west, the full fort stretched from South First to South Congress. The unfinished defenses filled with trash.
A Chamber of Commerce pamphlet from the 1930s reported: “These large trenches and the dugout are still plainly visible.”
The TxDot conclusion after the 1990s excavation: No Civil War-era artifacts were found. The only remaining 19th-century structure near the site, a house occupied by transients, burned to the ground.
(About the time I started asking questions in 1992, reporter Stuart Eskenazi wrote a focused piece about TxDot’s early archival work on Fort Magruder for the American-Statesman, but I didn’t run across his article until this week. Reporters: Always start your research in your own archives.)
Last week, I walked our dog down to Fort Magruder. Although there’s a man-made cut in the knob above Dunlap Street, there are no signs of trenches or earthworks. A busy P. Terry’s hamburger joint and a new rehabilitation hospital join a few residences and a construction project atop the former fortifications.
No historical marker. No physical clues except the alley-like Fort Magruder Lane.
Next to the hamburger stand, I tried to imagine the shivering laborers and the guards posted on earthworks looking south down what must have been a rugged trail to San Antonio. Any historical reverberations were at this point extremely faint.
Wait! The TxDot report included a turn-of-the-century map showing two other Confederate forts.
One rose at College Hill somewhere around the corner of West 15th Street and West Avenue. The other, called Fort Colorado, and later Fort Prairie on maps, stood off Webberville Road just east of Heflin Lane, near the wooded area where Austin Wildlife Rescue now operates.
To my knowledge, neither site has been excavated. Note All three forts are marked on the map above that was included in the TxDot study.