By Bo McCarver, Ph.D.

In the decades after Sam Houston centered the capitol of the new nation of Texas at Austin, the area east of the new city was settled mostly by immigrant Swedish farmers. They established a number of large farms on the rich plain of Blackland soil that was well suited for growing cotton. This use dominated the area until 1900 when population growth fostered subdivision of several nearby farms for urban housing along Glasscock Avenue. (The street was renamed Manor Road in 1940 because it had become the primary route to the town of Manor.)

Swedish tradesmen built many of the houses in these new subdivisions. The wooden frame homes were designed for practicality and accommodated large families with multiple bedrooms. The homes featured numerous, double-hung windows and high ceilings. They had foundations constructed of cedar peers, the most abundant hardwood in the area. These piers “floated” in the continuously swelling and shrinking Blackland soil, a condition that required frequent leveling to prevent windows and doors from sticking. These houses preceded the era of electrification and were later wired. Many of the houses are still identified by double rows of positive and negative wires laced between ceramic insulators in the attics – and a single wall outlet in each room. Despite these inherent structural defects, many of the original Swedish houses remain in service after a century with only natural disasters, neglect or electrical fires from overloading the fragile electrical wiring bringing about their demise. They were not built in tracts but were dispersed equidistant from each other throughout the subdivision. The Swedes preferred the privacy afforded by space, a remnant of their farm heritage.

In 1927, Austin adopted a city plan that called for displacing blacks from the area west of the capitol to the east. This displaced many of them into a corridor that the plan also designated for future growth of the University of Texas. In subsequent years, displaced blacks came to dominate the area’s population and oral histories suggest that the name “Blackland” evolved to have two meanings: one for the rich, black farming soil and the other for the majority black population. In 1956, the City of Austin abandoned the 1927 plan as racist. The administration of the University of Texas, however, continued to cite the plan as the basis for its frequent eastward annexations as late as 1992.

Like the Swedes before them, the new black migrants used the practical materials available; a few brick and stone structures appeared but the dominant style was smaller, wooden frame houses with lower ceilings - with electrical and plumbing accommodations designed into the original plans. Many of these were later “added on” (mostly oblivious of city codes) as families enlarged. Most “garages” were actually additional sleeping rooms and storage. These modest houses filled in the lots between the existing Swedish houses. During this era, the neighborhood became inscribed by the addition of major roadways – East Avenue (I-35), Chestnut Avenue (Holy Cross Hospital) and 19th Street that later was renamed Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.

As the black population resettled into the area, UT continued to pursue its eastward development. The history of these annexations produced a pattern that the Austin real estate community found predictable and profitable: as properties just east of the most recent annexation devaluated and blighted, they were purchased by speculators at low cost and rented cheaply with minimal maintenance. The low overhead increased the profit of speculators who eagerly sold to UT at the next annexation. For tenants of these houses the news was good and bad: the rents were cheap but the stars could be observed at night through the ceilings and roofs.

In 1981, at the outset of the sixth UT annexation, the Blackland Neighborhood Association formed with the explicit goals of defending its boundaries and ending UT’s eastward encroachments. After two years of organizing, futile negotiations and press wars, the association formed the Blackland Community Development Corporation (BCDC) with the intent of building affordable housing in the area and actively opposing UT’s development with development of their own. An empathetic city council awarded the non-profit corporation a half-million dollar grant and the corporation began to purchase lots. Despite heavy opposition by the UT administration, the neighborhood corporation built 11 units of affordable housing and cut the ribbons in 1986. Shortly thereafter, the UT administration demonstrated its resolve by bulldozing 25 single-family units they had purchased in the area between Comal and Chicon.

The infuriated neighborhood leaders politicized their struggle and ran a protest candidate against State Representative Wilhelmina Delco whom they felt had supported UT’s annexation. They also solicited the support of Governor Ann Richards who pressured the UT regents to end their policy of land acquisition in the area. The neighborhood was joined in its struggle by UT students, affordable housing advocates and an organization of homeless persons. A compromise was reached in 1994 that limited UT expansion to Leona Street with the exception of a strip along Manor Road to Chicon Street. The struggle had boiled for 12 years.

As part of the agreement, UT divested in two phases its real estate east of Leona Street to BCDC and donated and moved a number of its houses from west of the Leona Street line to the east side. BCDC then used city housing funds and volunteers to remodel those houses to provide shelter for homeless families, giving first priority to families previously displaced by UT. This “transitional housing” program also provided social services to the families. About a hundred families mostly single-parent; have been assisted by the program since its inception. Blackland is the only community in Texas that hosts such families in dispersed housing throughout its neighborhood.

Presently the neighborhood corporation owns and rents 35 houses, including nine built in 2003 to replace those bulldozed by UT. With those battle scars finally healed, there still remain a number of vacant lots and dilapidated houses in the neighborhood and the non-profit corporation continues to target those in it strategic development plan.

The architecture of the small neighborhood has evolved to be highly reflective of a hundred years of migrations, displacement and struggle: on each street each house presents a unique, individual effort to provide family shelter, given the social, economic and political circumstances at the time of its construction. Because very few were built under the same historic conditions, the resulting array may appear eclectic and hodge-podge to those accustomed to tract housing. To most Blacklanders, however, the diversity is not only tolerated, but celebrated. The homes have stood proudly through time to serve new generations of families - and still hold promise for those that follow.

Like rows of well-worn, comfortable shoes, Blackland’s modest homes reflect a history of struggle, grief and joy. They line the streets like a living library of common people, teeming with sociology, each with its own story, yet unfinished.