2.4 - 7304 Knox Ln - public communication — original pdf

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Update On The Knox Preserve Margaret Thomas Knox passed January 20, 2022 allowing the development of the Knox Preserve subdivision to proceed. We’ve had several past articles in the newsletter on Mrs. Knox so I won't dive into her history here. But briefly for context, her husband James Knox inherited the property from his parents. His father, Capt. Warren Penn Knox, was prominent in Boy Scouting in Texas, acquired the property and after WWII started Running Rope Boys Ranch. Barring a thorough deed search, by 1946 the newspaper reports "W.P. Knox" buying the 184 acre property (The Austin American, 26 Apr 1946, Fri, Page 20). By 1947 Running Rope Ranch is up and running in the news. The farmstead (a core house that was extended over the years; out buildings; cleared fields) is extant in the 1937 aerials of Travis County that have recently become available. An oral interview of Margaret Knox for the book Austin Originals, 1982, puts the farmhouse at ca. 1900 at least. Based on the history of this area, could the property be older? Maybe. For example, Esperanza School, which was above Spicewood Springs, was a one room log cabin started in 1866 serving this area.1 The school was less than a mile from the Knox Preserve. Old aerial photos seem to indicate an older entrance to the property may have been off of Spicewood Springs Rd. not far from the school. Could the property be that old? We don’t know without a lot more research, but from the history of the school we know there was sufficient population in the community of Spicewood Springs in 1866 to warrant a school. The log cabin school was open until 1893; so close in time to the age of the Knox house quoted by Margaret Knox. The Thurms, a German family, settled on Bull Creek in 1855 on what is today’s Old Spicewood Springs Rd. at the bottom of what was known then as Thurm’s Hill. Their homestead was in today’s Bull Creek Park, roughly the 5300 “block” of today’s Old Spicewood Springs Rd; most of it was obliterated by Loop 360 construction; the current round of work is probably finishing off any potential sub-surface remains. All to say, settlement in this area goes back a ways and the Knox Preserve, with its own spring (called out on property plats as “Indian Springs”), close to Spicewood Springs, its namesake road and Esperanza School would have been a .. what’s the saying in real estate? Location, location, location. I’ve been in contact with Ms. Kalan Contreras, Historic Preservation Officer, City of Austin Planning Department, swapping history on the property. She attended the Historic Landmark Commission meeting September 4th where they are considering “initiation of historic zoning on the property”; the review includes not only the house, but potential archeology of the site in 1 Esperanza School was one of earliest one-room rural schoolhouses in Travis County. The one-room log cabin was built on the property of Richard McKenzie in 1866 above Spicewood Springs, today’s 3511 Starline Drive, and served children from neighboring farms in the period before public education. In 1893 when a larger Esperanza School was built at another site the log cabin structure was put to other uses. The cabin was later moved to the Zilker Botanical Garden and restored. Bull Creek School discussed in last month’s newsletter, later renamed Pleasant Valley School, also started as a one-room log cabin the next year, 1867. Spicewood Springs and its namesake community and road appear on the USGS topographic maps of Travis County surveyed 1895-1896. general. Everything is tentative at this point. An argument is being made to preserve the house, either on-site (possibly to an alternate spot on-site) or off-site to another location. The Knox Preserve is one of the last relatively untouched areas in Northwest Hills up on the mesa which is today our NWACA neighborhood so it would a be good if the developer would hire a firm to conduct a more thorough archeological assessment of the property as a whole. A cursory survey by UT was done in 1969 confirming prehistoric Native American presence on the property. While the wetland critical environmental feature (CEF; the springs area) will be preserved, once the bulldozers move in for development outside the CEF anything that is there is going to be lost. Fingers crossed. She Was a Late Archaic Resident of the Neighborhood There are scores of archeological sites – prehistoric and historic – within the bounds of our NWACA neighborhood. But one in particular has long captured my imagination; it is associated with a woman that called our neighborhood home some 1,600 years ago. In 1970 - 1971, the Texas Highway Department, today’s TxDOT, carried out archeological excavations along the route that would be disturbed by the building of Loop 360. These types of excavations are called “salvage excavations”; they are done ahead of the proverbial and literal bulldozer to try to salvage information associated with sites before they are destroyed. One of the discoveries made was a “cairn burial”, not far from Bull Creek, on the northwestern boundary of our neighborhood, under what is now Loop 360.1 What is a “cairn burial”? From Texas Beyond History, a public education website of the Texas Archeological Research Lab (TARL) at UT Austin: “The countless stone mounds dotting the low hills and flat-topped mesas of west-central Texas have perplexed landowners and archeologists alike for more than a century. Known as “cairns,” these mysterious arrangements of rock can be found by the hundreds—and perhaps thousands— along the rocky ridgelines and bluffs overlooking the broad valleys of the Brazos and Colorado rivers and the canyons of their tributaries. Area ranchers typically have referred to these large cairn clusters as “Indian burial grounds”—and with good reason. Many of the cairns have been found to contain human remains—men, women, and children who long ago were carefully interred in specially prepared graves.” So as opposed to a cairn used for navigational purposes (stacked stones still used for example to mark hiking trails) a cairn burial is a tomb dug into the ground, lined with and / or walls encircled with a row of vertical slabs protruding out of the ground, hence visible as a grave from the surface, then topped with a large slab and / or mound of rocks. That’s a generalization and their architecture varies just as European burials in Texas cemeteries vary from region to region and over time. So who was buried there? Because the skeletal remains were not complete only so much can be said about the person: probably a female, age at death 35 or older. Stature, indeterminate based on remains. No indication of death due to trauma, but again because of the fragmentary remains this too is uncertain. Indications were she had degenerative bone disorder, typically in load bearing joints, no doubt due to hard work in life. When did she live in our neighborhood? Based on materials in the grave (e.g. a dart point; no, not an arrowhead, see below) and radio carbon dating, she likely lived here about 1,600 years 1 This article was written from publicly available documents, I will however refrain from providing the specific location of the site. ago; what is called Late Archaic, between A.D. 380-570. For some context, she lived here before the bow and arrow had yet to be invented in North America. Again, from Texas Beyond History: “The bow and arrow replaced the atlatl [spear thrower] and dart [ dart point; what was found in or near her grave] … around 1300 years ago (A.D. 700). The new technology spread across much of North America around this time, although its precise origin is unknown.” She lived here before the bow and arrow was invented in North America! And while she would have lived here about 1,600 years ago, the site overall shows occupation from about 8,000 years ago through about 1,250 years ago; a roughly 7,500-year period. A question some will be asking: “What tribe was she?”. To quote Dr. Michael Collins2: "The present territory of Central Texas was not the long-term ancestral homeland of any indigenous group for whom an ethnographic account exists. The ethnographically well-known Comanche, Apache, Wichita, Kiowa, and even the Tonkawa arrived in Central Texas just before or during the early European contact period." I would additionally question if the concept of a “tribe” for that period makes sense; maybe a “band” or just extended family unit better fits. To conclude, while we don’t know a lot about this lady, like how she died, of this we can be sure of this early resident of the neighborhood: given the effort required for a cairn burial, she was obviously someone loved. 2 The Prehistory of Texas, p.217. Austin's own Dr. Collins is best known as the principal investigator and savior of the Gault site; dating back as far as 20,000 years, the Gault site predates previous scientific estimates of human habitation in the New World by thousands of years.