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Austin’s First Electric Streetcar Era

As Austin considers building a new electric light rail system—streetcars, really—it is worth looking back to the city’s first streetcar era. For fifty years, from 1891 until 1940, Austin had an extensive network of electric streetcar lines, running from Hyde Park in the north to Travis Heights in the south, and from Lake Austin in the west to the heart of East Austin. The trolley cars were central to the lives of many Austinites, carrying them between their homes, jobs, and schools, shaping their decisions about where to live and work, and providing a site for racial contact and conflict at the height of the Jim Crow era. Austin was far from unique in any of this. Electric streetcars were one of the defining technologies of cities and towns around the world from the 1890s until at least the 1930s, and a look at Austin’s experience with streetcars will help us to see how global patterns played out in a local setting.

Austin’s first streetcars were propelled by mules, not electricity. They began operating in January 1875 and ran mostly along Congress Avenue from the train stations up to the Capitol. Austin was the railhead in the mid-1870s, the farthest point reached by the railroads, and though it only had about 10,000 residents, it bustled with activity. As the railroads extended further west, however, Austin became something of a backwater, and by the 1880s city leaders were looking for new ways to spark growth and development. They hit on the idea of building a huge dam to supply industrial power, and though the project eventually proved disastrous, it set off a speculative boom in the city in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Gated entrance to Hyde Park in Austin, Texas in the 1890s featuring a trolley car to the left of the entrance

One of those attracted to what Austin seemed to offer was Monroe Shipe, a developer from Kansas. After acquiring a plot of land north of town, which he rather grandly dubbed “Hyde Park,” he set about offering what he said would be the finest home sites in the region. But Hyde Park was too far from the center of town to be attractive to potential buyers; Shipe needed a way to bring it closer. In May 1889 he set out to do just that, securing a franchise from the city for the Austin Rapid Transit Railway Company and setting out to build an electric streetcar line running from downtown to Hyde Park.

Electric streetcars were the hot new technology in 1889. Thomas Edison and others had been trying for several years to devise a practical way to use electricity to drive streetcars, but it was Frank J. Sprague who in 1888 managed to pull together a working system. Working on a short deadline in Richmond, Virginia, Sprague designed and built a streetcar system that was rugged, efficient, and clearly superior to any of its competitors. One of his key steps was to power his cars from overhead wires tapped by the arm of a spring-loaded “trolley,” a name that was soon applied to the cars themselves. Sprague’s new system spread extremely rapidly, and within a few years hundreds of electric streetcar lines were up and running all over the United States. The new technology came along at just the right time for Monroe Shipe, and he jumped on it.

A map of Austin, Texas and its suburbs detailing the streetcar system of the city

Shipe’s franchise required him to have his line in operation under electrical power by the end of February 1891. He beat the deadline, he later said, by just one hour and forty-four minutes. The line was an immediate hit, no doubt initially in part for its novelty value. Over 2000 Austinites rode Shipe’s streetcars that first day, and the line continued to carry heavy traffic for months to come, many riders taking the loop all the way out to Hyde Park. Like many streetcar operators around the country, Shipe built attractions to draw riders at off-peak hours; though in other cities these often took the form of garish amusement parks (many with names like “Electra Park”), Shipe provided a more sedate pavilion and lake at the north end of his line (near 43rd and Guadalupe), perfectly placed to allow visitors to see how pleasant their lives could be if they bought a home site in Shipe’s development. With its tree-lined streets and carefully planned amenities, Hyde Park was a classic streetcar suburb, of a kind that began to appear all over the United States toward the end of 19th century. Rapid and convenient electric streetcars allowed city-dwellers to live much further from their jobs than had previously been possible, contributing to a shift in housing patterns and a greater separation between home and workplace. Shipe promoted Hyde Park as the “bon ton residence” of Austin, and especially in the early years sought to attract the upper stratum of Austin homebuyers.

The Austin City Railroad Company, the operators of the old mule car line, resented Shipe’s intrusion into the Austin transit business and fought back hard during the early months of Shipe’s operation. Then in May 1891 a fire struck the old company’s barn, destroying many of their cars and killing thirty mules. The owners, described as “a syndicate of Chicago and Boston capitalists,” leaned toward liquidating their remaining property, but decided first to see what they might salvage. According to the Austin Statesman, whose boosterism in those years knew few bounds, once they visited the city, the northern investors were so impressed by Austin’s “brilliant future” that instead of selling out they decided to invest in rebuilding and electrifying their system. By the end of 1891 the two companies had merged into a fully electrified system whose twenty cars ran on fifteen miles of track that reached through most of the city north of the river.

Soon after he had engineered the merger, Shipe withdrew from the streetcar business. He knew the real money lay not in collecting nickel fares, but in using the availability of streetcar service to boost the value of the land he was trying to sell. It was a wise move. After the early 1890s, Austin’s streetcar companies struggled financially; though they experienced occasional periods of profitability, generally after receiving an infusion of outside capital, these were inevitably followed by stagnation, losses, bankruptcy, and reorganization. In 1902 the Austin Rapid Transit Railway Company gave way to the Austin Electric Railway Company, followed in 1911 by the Austin Street Railway Company and in 1921 by Austin Transit.

Black and white image of a trolley car moving down Congress Avenue towards the Texas State Capital Building

Austin itself struggled, too. The dam, completed in 1893, never produced enough power to attract industrial customers, and the city was saddled with an enormous debt and little way to pay it off. Then in April 1900 the dam failed in a flood, leaving the streetcar system without power. Mules were pressed into service for several months until the streetcar company could erect its own steam powered generators at 4th and Pressler Street on the west side of town.

Shipe found that the market for high-end house lots in Hyde Park had declined as well, and he began to aim his pitch a little further down market, offering lots on favorable terms of just $2 per month. On one point, however, the pitch remained the same: as Shipe’s advertisements stated in bold letters, “Hyde Park is Strictly for White People.” Racial lines were hardening in the 1890s, and the advent of electric streetcars and streetcar suburbs made it easier to enforce a separation in housing patterns.

Black and white photograph of large groups of pedestrians crossing Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, Texas

The turn of the century also witnessed a wave of Jim Crow laws mandating segregation on public transportation. City councils across the South passed ordinances requiring separate seating on streetcars, with blacks forced to the back. The streetcar companies generally opposed such laws, saying they imposed new costs without providing any new revenues, made it more difficult to respond to shifts in demand, and forced drivers and conductors to enforce policies that were likely to arouse opposition. In many cities, black citizens boycotted the segregated streetcars in favor of informal “hack” lines of wagons and carriages operated by black drivers. The Houston Electric system was hit especially hard; after the city passed a Jim Crow law in November 1903, black ridership plummeted. A few months later, the white streetcar drivers went on strike, further crippling the system. When frustrated whites asked the black hack drivers for a ride, they were politely told that the city ordinance prohibited letting blacks and whites sit together, and that the hack wagons did not have the required separate compartments.

The Houston streetcar boycott fizzled out toward the end of 1904, but others followed. In March 1906, the Austin city council passed an ordinance requiring segregated seating on all streetcars. The law was not set to take effect until June, but blacks began their boycott immediately, and by April the Austin streetcars reportedly carried almost no black riders. Black drivers soon started up mule-drawn hack lines, and local black leaders even talked of acquiring a “large auto passenger bus” to carry black riders. But despite determined efforts, the boycott collapsed in June, and black riders seemingly resigned themselves to taking their places in the back of Austin’s streetcars. Public transportation remained a racial battleground in the South, however, as the story of Rosa Parks and the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott makes clear.

Black and white photograph of Congress Avenue in downtown Austin, Texas with a view of the State Capital Building in the background

Both Austin and its electric streetcar system continued to grow in the early 20th century. After the new concrete Congress Avenue Bridge was built across the Colorado River in 1910, streetcar lines were extended into South Austin and the new suburban development at Travis Heights. Lines were also extended further into East Austin, until by the mid–1920s the system reached its peak extent, with 23 miles of track to serve a population of about 40,000. By then, however, the streetcars were coming under increasing competition from automobiles, and farebox income was insufficient to keep the streetcar system in good repair. Many cities began to shrink their networks of streetcar lines, and in 1933 San Antonio became the first major city to junk its electric streetcars in favor of buses. Austin followed in 1940. In a ceremony presided over by Mayor Tom Miller, Austin’s electric streetcars made a last nostalgic run along the Main Line up Congress Avenue on 7 Feb. 1940 before giving way to shiny new buses. The remaining rails were pulled up in 1942 during a wartime scrap metal drive.

I first began delving into Austin’s streetcar history while teaching an undergraduate seminar on “Electrification.” I encourage my students to explore the rich local history of electrical technologies and their social impacts, and they have turned up some fascinating stories. In fact, much of what I said above about the 1906 black streetcar boycott was drawn from an excellent paper my student Kevin Stewart wrote a couple of years ago. I have also learned a lot just by talking with Austinites. I recently gave a talk about Austin’s streetcar history at the Neill-Cochran House Museum in West Campus, and struck up a conversation there with Virginia Wallace, a longtime Austin resident. Her stepfather was a streetcar driver, and she described how handsome he looked in his uniform. She also told how, sometime after the ceremonial “last run” in February 1940, he let her ride with him as he drove the last streetcar to the old car barn on Pressler Street to be retired. With that Austin’s streetcar era—or at least its first streetcar era—came to an end.

Check out more of Professor Bruce Hunt’s contributions to Not Even Past:

“City Lights: Austin’s Historic Moonlight Towers”

“The Rise and Fall of the Austin Dam”

“The Atomic Bombs and the End of World War II: Tracking an Elusive Decision”

Photo Credits:

Streetcar along the entrance to the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin
Citation: [Gated Entrance to Hyde Park], Photograph, 1894; digital image, accessed March 18, 2013), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas.

A 1925 map of Austin with the streetcar lines highlighted (Image courtesy of Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection)

Streetcar on Congress Avenue, 1913
Citation: Congress Avenue with street rail, Photograph, 1913; digital image, accessed March 18, 2013, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas.

Streetcars run along Congress Avenue on their “last run” in Austin, February 7, 1940
Citation: Ellison Photo Service. Street Railroad Downtown, Photograph, February 7, 1940; digital image, accessed March 18, 2013, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library, Austin, Texas.

Congress Avenue after the streetcar lines were removed, 1943 (Image courtesy of the U.S Government)

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Bruce Hunt on Technology & Science in the 19th Century

Albert Einstein is perhaps the most recognizable figure of modern times. In 1999 Time magazine picked him as its “Person of the Century,” and in the public mind he certainly stands as the iconic scientist. He is generally pictured as an otherworldly genius, inhabiting a cosmic realm far above the mundane affairs of ordinary life, and in some ways he was. Yet when Einstein hit on his most famous and revolutionary idea, his Theory of Relativity, in 1905, he was working as a patent examiner at the Swiss Federal Patent Office in Bern, spending his days scrutinizing the designs of electrical machinery. How are we to reconcile our image of Einstein as the pure thinker, advancing scientific knowledge of the universe simply through the unfettered exercise of his mind, with the fact that he came up with revolutionary ideas while working in the thoroughly practical and technological setting of a patent office?

In Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein, I’ve tried to show that Einstein’s situation was really not so anomalous and that physics and technology had been tightly intertwined for more than a century before he went to work in the Swiss patent office. In fact, many of the most important advances in physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — including aspects of Einstein’s own relativity theory — had deep roots in the technologies that, in the same period, had so profoundly transformed material life. When the nineteenth century began, everyday life in even the most prosperous and technologically developed parts of the world hardly differed, in many basic ways, from that of the ancients. People still relied on their own muscles, or those of their horses and oxen, to carry their loads and pull their plows; on the wind to drive the sails of their ships; and on falling water to turn their mill wheels and grind their grain. By the end of the eighteenth century, there had been some first efforts to harness the power of steam, but at first it was used for little more than pumping water out of some mines in England. Transportation and communications remained, by later standards, woefully slow; a message could travel no faster than the person who carried it, and it typically took weeks or months for a traveler to cross an ocean or a continent.

By 1905, when Einstein first began to formulate his new conceptions of time and space, the world was very different. Steam engines and turbines were driving giant factories and power plants, and networks of electrical lines were spreading power and light through cities around the globe. Railroads and steamships had reduced travel times from weeks or months to a few days; the first automobiles had begun to appear on the roads and the first airplanes in the skies. Communication had not just been sped up, but had become almost instantaneous; a vast network of telegraph cables circled the globe, and telephone lines now carried distant voices right into one’s home. Wireless telegraphy had begun to appear, and the advent of radio broadcasting was just around the corner.

Along with these technological changes came equally sweeping transformations in the scientific understanding of matter, heat, energy, and electromagnetism. But the relationship between this new scientific knowledge and these new technologies was not always quite what one might expect. Today technology is often seen, or even defined, as simply “applied science,” as abstract knowledge cast into the form of concrete and useful devices. When we look more closely at some of the most important technologies of the nineteenth century, however, we find that the arrow of influence ran in the opposite direction, from technology to science. Historians of science and technology have often remarked that the steam engine did far more for science than science ever did for the steam engine. When Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engines in the years around 1700, they were guided in part by ideas of their own about heat and pressure, but they didn’t draw on any store of solid scientific knowledge about work and energy, for no such body of knowledge yet existed. Even James Watt’s famous improvements in the efficiency of steam engines were based more on inspired tinkering and careful experimentation than on a knowledge of anything resembling the modern laws of thermodynamics. The first steam engines did not emerge from an understanding of the fundamental laws of heat and energy; rather, those laws themselves emerged from the efforts of Sadi Carnot and others in the nineteenth century to analyze the workings of the steam engines they already saw around them.

Much of my own research concerns the history of electrical science in the nineteenth century, and here we find a very similar story. Beginning in the 1820s, electrical inventors took up a few basic scientific discoveries, particularly Alessandro Volta’s electric battery, and began to make them into practical devices, guided more by trial and error than by any deep scientific understanding. By the 1830s, they were building working telegraphs, and within a decade entrepreneurs in both Europe and America were spreading their networks of wires across the countryside. Soon they began to run into puzzling phenomena that scientists had never encountered in their laboratories, and a rich new field of scientific research began to open up. This was especially true after British telegraphers took to laying insulated cables beneath the sea, first across the English Channel in 1851 and then, in an especially bold attempt, across the Atlantic in 1858. The “retardation” and distortion that electrical signals suffered in passing along a cable pointed toward an influence coming from outside the wire itself — from what British physicists began to think of as the electromagnetic “field” that, they said, filled the space around charges, currents, and magnets. Field theory cast all of electromagnetism into a new and clearer light and proved immensely useful not only in telegraphy, the technological ground from which it had grown, but also in the design of motors, dynamos, and the rest of what became the electric power system.

When Albert Einstein was hired by the Swiss patent office, it was largely for his expertise in field theory, which was important in evaluating designs for electrical machinery. When he formulated his Theory of Relativity, he drew on field theory and on puzzles that had come up with the design of motors and dynamos. Of course, Einstein’s ideas would carry him into much wider realms, but it is worth bearing in mind how deeply his work, like that of his nineteenth-century predecessors, was rooted in the technological context of the time.

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