Waters Park once city’s destination for picnics and baseball
Waters Park once city’s destination for picnics and baseball
Written by Karen R. Thompson Monday, 07 May 2007
Sunday afternoons in the spring at Waters Park around 1900 were like a scene out of The Music Man. Austin families arrived by train to picnic. Buggies with young ladies and their gent circled the park while musicians played in the gazebo.
Young collegiates from the newly established University of Texas enjoyed a game of baseball as their girlfriends, nibbling on cotton candy sold in the concession stands, watched from the grandstand.
None of this would have happened, though if the Austin and Northwestern Railroad had not purchased five acres of land in 1882 to establish a park.
Originally called Summers’ Grove, the park was built on land purchased by Silas B. and Parthenia A. Summers in 1872, eight miles north of downtown Austin, on the old Upper Georgetown Road at its crossing of Walnut Creek in northern Travis County.
Summers sold the right-of-way to the Austin and Northwestern Railroad in October 1881. The population of Austin grew from 650 residents in 1875 to an astonishing 11,102 in 1880. The phenomenal growth of the city influenced the railroad’s decision to develop the area into a five-acre park and swimming pool.
When the railroad opened its picnic grounds at Waters, excursion trains from Austin began running on Sundays. Courting in Waters Park in 1900 usually involved a horse and buggy, or the train on Sunday. If you needed transportation during the week in Austin, J. D. Banton’s Moving & Excursion Car was pulled by four horses, and the open air car could carry up to six couples.
The park consisted of a baseball field, a swimming pool, a gazebo, picnic grounds, and concession stands. P. Stockman operated the nearby railroad “section” house.
The Watters post office (spelled with two “t”s) was open from 1883 until 1905 when the mail was transferred to the McNeil post office, which had opened in 1888 and is still in operation.
The railroad, a narrow-gauge line, transported granite blocks from Granite Mountain near Burnet to the Austin construction site of the new state capitol. Large granite blocks which fell from the train are still visible in the vicinity of Waters Park.
By 1885 the community had a church and a one-room district school. Commercial establishments included Andrew Peyton’s saloon, the Ernest Mueller store, and a gin run first by Carl Mueller, then by James H. Rogers, who also ran a store in the park.
The town developed in the 1880s and 1890s into a flourishing village based on tourism and cotton production.
World War I took its toll on tourism, following that war; the Great Depression depleted the residents of Waters Park. The school students were transferred to Summit School about a mile south of the area. Soon most of the dilapidated buildings collapsed. Little remains today except Waters Park Road, the dam over the creek and portions of the baseball field.
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