Austin's Montopolis Neighborhood

By Fred L. McGhee Ph.D.

Montopolis is a multiethnic neighborhood located approximately four miles southeast of downtown Austin. The area was long visited and occasionally occupied by various Texas Indian nations; the first documented European or American to settle here was Jessie C. Tannehill, who in 1830 built a cabin and townsite and gave the new community its pretentious name. Instead of establishing a permanent presence in Montopolis, however, subsequent European colonizers looked a few miles upriver to the new settlement of Waterloo, later to be called Austin. Rural and sparsely populated, the remainder of the 19th century saw the Montopolis area used primarily for plantation agriculture. In the 1920s, succeeding waves of Mexican migrants helped establish the modern neighborhood that exists today. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the City of Austin annexed Montopolis, although the area retains much of its rural character.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781439646939

Fred L. McGhee Ph.D.

Fred L. McGhee, PhD, is a historical archaeologist and well-known East Austin activist who served as the founding president of the Montopolis Neighborhood Association. Also a former board member of the Austin History Center Association, he has combined historical photographs from the history center and other government agencies with personal photographs and images generously provided by longtime residents and friends of the Montopolis neighborhood.

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Center.

INTRODUCTION

Annexed by the City of Austin relatively recently, the sleepy southeast Austin neighborhood of Montopolis is a tightly knit community nestled along the Colorado River amid pine and cedar forests, wetlands, rolling hills, and farmland. Long visited by various indigenous peoples, the area entered Euro-American history when Jessie Cornelius Tannehill (sometimes spelled Jesse), a Kentucky-born settler coming from Tennessee, established a townsite atop a hill along the Colorado River in 1830. He named the area Montopolis, Greek for City on a Hill.

The land containing today’s Montopolis community officially entered public records in 1832 when Santiago del Valle, a nobleman from Monclova in the Mexican state of Cohuila y Texas, was granted official title to the Travis County land at the mouth of Onion Creek. Del Valle paid 1,100 pesos for 10 leagues of land—roughly 35,000 acres—designated as lying between Onion Creek, or Burro Creek, and the Colorado River, southeast of Austin. Benjamin Milam was the impresario who handled the tract, and Samuel Williams, representing Don Santiago del Valle, was the attorney who filed for the land with alcalde Horacio Chriesman (Chriesman was one of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred). The deeds were signed on June 12, 1832. Del Valle’s grant includes the present-day communities of Montopolis, Del Valle, and Dove Springs, as well as others.

Del Valle’s land grant, written in Spanish, was recorded in the office at San Felipe de Austin, which is not the Austin of today. Del Valle never set foot in his real estate venture, subdividing it to men such as A.C. Horton, Nathaniel H. Watrous, Bartlett Sims, Michael Menard, and Thomas F. McKinney instead. Travis County did not yet exist; the region was part of Bastrop County and was populated by wild Buffalo and wild Indians, feared by the Anglo settlers.

Montopolis never developed into the metropolis that Tannehill had hoped. Against the vigorous protestations of Tannehill and others, subsequent Euro-American settlement began to cluster around the settlement known as Waterloo, located about four miles upriver and chosen as the new capital of the Republic of Texas in 1839. A small and crude ferry crossed the Colorado River between Montopolis and Austin, and the Old Bastrop Road, which ran from Bastrop to San Antonio and Austin, was little more than a dirt road that would turn into an impassable mud bog after moderate rain.

The period between the 1840s and the 1890s saw the gradual establishment of plantation agriculture in the Montopolis and Del Valle area. Pioneer settlers during this time period included John W. Cloud, James S. Shaw, James Bascom Norwood, James Baker, Neilam Soules, Robert Jones, and Lewis and William Hancock, who established themselves as small-scale planters and introduced slavery and, later, sharecropping into the area. The primary cash crop was cotton. Cattle husbandry was also popular, as the Montopolis and Del Valle prairie was a stop on the Old Chisholm Trail route, which drove immense herds of cattle from South Texas to Kansas via Gonzales and Lockhart.

John W. Cloud, who purchased his land in 1867, was the first commissioner of Precinct 4 on the Travis County Commissioners Court, and was instrumental in the location and construction of the original Montopolis Bridge in the late 1880s. He was followed in 1874 by William Givens, who moved to the area from Kentucky and built a small general store. The store proved successful, and by 1878, Givens also became the first postmaster for Del Valle. The Givens General Store, open day and night, became the heart of the Del Valle and Montopolis area in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Montopolis briefly had its own post office from 1897 to 1902, but the community’s population proved too small to support permanent postal service. With the new bridge in place, mail began to be routed to Austin or Del Valle instead.

With the introduction of a cotton gin in the 1880s, the agricultural economy of the area eventually grew, and the census of 1900 reported the population of Montopolis at 142 persons. Del Valle’s stood at 75. The Montopolis-Del Valle area had a common school district, Colorado District 36, which was renamed the Del Valle Independent School District in 1963. In 1907, District 36 had a one-teacher school for 9 white students and a one-teacher school for 108 black students. In 1952, when the City of Austin began annexing the Montopolis portion of the district, enrollment stood at about 600 students. The Montopolis boundary between the Austin and Del Valle Independent School Districts remains chaotic to this day; portions of Montopolis are part of the Del Valle Independent School District, while other areas are part of Austin’s school district.

The African American legacy of Montopolis is reflected in such institutions as St. Edward’s Baptist Church, the oldest black Baptist church still in operation in Travis County, and