The wisteria was the first to go. The massive vine in front of the stone cottage across the street had long summoned spring with its drape of lavender flowers. Sometimes I’d come home to find a neighbor standing in front of it, taking in its scent. Sometimes I’d slip over to snap pictures of it in full bloom. Then one day I pulled up the hill after work and the wisteria was gone. Uprooted. A giant hole gaped where it had stood. Down the driveway, the trees were wrapped in plywood.
I knew the house would be next.
The neighborhood called it the Senator’s House. It was all charm and old Austin. Its walls were the same limestone as the Alamo, as the inner walls of the Capitol, as the orange-roofed buildings across the University of Texas campus. A giant chimney rose from one side, and the front door was painted a stately deep red. The casem*nt windows hearkened back to an earlier time, and at the edge of the scrubby yard, a band of crape myrtles bloomed hot pink every August.
I loved that house, and I wasn’t alone. The first house in the area, everyone knew it, and so often when someone would visit, they would stare across the street and say, “Oh, that house.” It was a version of Austin that was becoming increasingly difficult to find—tiny and old and so very Texas with its stone embedded with ancient sea creatures. It looked like an Austin that had a musician on every block and a cooler keeping the beer cold on the porch.
**
The senator who gave the house its informal name was Carl C. Hardin, Sr, a Democrat from Stephenville who served in the Texas legislature for 28 sessions. He didn’t build the stone cottage, but he lived there from around 1950 until his death in 1965. His bio at the Texas State Cemetery, heralds his “good, and wholesome, legislation.” After 25 years here, I’ve grown to distrust what Texas politicians consider good and wholesome. Senator Hardin was rumored to have lived in the cottage with his mistress.
A few miles away near campus, his wife, Stella Davis Hardin, had purchased a boarding house in 1937 and over the years expanded it to an all-female dormitory that encompassed six buildings. She seems to have been a feisty woman, repeating her motto of, “This is my house with my rules: if you are to live here, you are to follow my rules” often enough that they memorialized it. When she opened her dormitory, there was limited housing for female students at the university. (And UT wouldn’t admit its first Black student for more than a dozen years.) Whether it was her intention or not, her dormitory may have made education possible for some who might not have been able to access it. It is still operating today.
Of course, I may have the stories wrong. It’s been almost 90 years. But it looks like Carl Hardin retreated to a house in what was then the outskirts of town, a neighborhood edging the farmland to the east. And his wife stayed at what became known as the Hardin House, where that all those Texas daughters were required to dress appropriately for dinner.
**
One morning the men arrived to remove the stone from the Senator’s House. I knew it was coming, but it was still painful to watch. They held long sticks and one after another they dug into and pried at the seams until the stone loosened and came down. Sometimes one stone dropped at a time. Sometimes part of a wall avalanched to the ground, the men leaping backwards and whooping. It didn’t take long. By the time I was back from a walk, the façade was half gone. By the end of the day, even the grand fireplace was reduced to rubble. Only the wood frame remained.
**
There had been talk of trying to save the Senator’s House, but for years it had sat empty between owners, a bank allowing it to surrender to entropy. Windows were broken and a screened door lay on the patio. A house cannot withstand emptiness.
Still, a neighbor around the corner contacted us and asked if we wanted to apply for historic designation for the house. “I’m a lawyer,” he said. “I can help with the paperwork. It worked for some friends of mine over in Travis Heights.”
He gestured to the neighborhood to the west of us, part of our neighborhood before the highway came through, where those oval historic plaques are mounted next to doorways. Though realtors like to call our area Travis Heights East, the two neighborhoods have little in common.
I said I was interested. My husband, Chris, wasn’t. He wondered who we were to tell someone else what they could do with their property. He wondered what constituted a valid use of the land.
“It’s the oldest house on the street,” I said.
“It’s falling apart,” he countered.
“It could be beautiful again,” I told him. “Just look at it.” The limestone. The fireplace. The sweetness tucked into that wide, scruffy yard.
He shook his head. As is often the case, he had accepted the inevitable before I had. And in the end, it’s a lot of work to apply for historic designation. I was busy with my job and my own home and my life, as we always are. The requirements of the day beat out the demands of history.
**
Side note: Someone recently told me that Naomi Judd, the late country music superstar, had lived in the Senator’s House during her time in Austin in the 1970s. Judd was a single mother and nurse who started making connections in the Austin music scene. She hung out with Jimmy Vaughan and the dated a musician from Asleep at the Wheel. Her adolescent daughter Christina changed her name to Wynonna, embracing the suggestion of Asleep at the Wheel’s lead singer, Ray Benson. She borrowed it from their song, Route 66, and its line “Don’t forget Winona.”
I learned all of this from skimming through the memoirs of the Judds—those Judd women are prolific memoirists—in search of proof of her time on our street. I hit Google hard and spent a lovely hour at the Austin History Center pulling city directories from the wood shelves. No luck. That rumor remains rumor.
**
Four modern houses replaced the Senator’s House in 2019. They are tall and gray except for one that sports the old home’s limestone on its front. They have tiny yards and a shared driveway and they were purchased by singles and couples still in the early years of launching their lives. No one looks across at the new houses and says, “Oh, that house.” But sometimes a friend visits and asks what happened to the charming little place that used to be there. Couldn’t anyone save it?
It’s never that simple. I’m still trying to understand how the past and the present speak to each other in this radically changed city. How we honor what was without trying to freeze a space in time.
I wanted the little stone cottage to remain standing across the street. I wanted someone to buy it and fix it up and love it as it deserved to be loved. But I also admit that the people who moved into the new houses have offered a burst of youthful energy to our street. They’ve planned weddings and walked big loping black labs in the morning and pushed babies in swings on their front porches. They’ve held a toddler’s birthday party, the shrieks of children sharp in the air, with a bouncy house that spanned the driveway.
I believe that a neighborhood needs to know what it once was. It also needs the space to evolve into what it might become.
**
When the much-awaited solar eclipse arrived in Texas in April, bringing along hundreds of thousands of visitors, Chris and I wandered into our yard to watch. It was a cloudy day, a disappointment I felt more for those who had traveled to see it than for myself. We held our special eclipse glasses and waited for the show to begin.
Across the street, our neighbors had stepped into their front yard too. We walked over to join them. Their daughter was in the preschool up the street and they were taking breaks from their work-from-home jobs. They waved us up when we appeared on the curb. We chatted, pointed at the sky, oohed together when the clouds parted temporarily. One of them offered us a striped yoga blanket to lay on the ground.
There we were on the land where the first house in the neighborhood once stood, where a Texas senator had lived and a country music superstar probably hadn’t, where an old home might have been saved and wasn’t, where new people trim the crape myrtles in the winter.
Soon other neighbors came out to join us, and we all donned our disposable glasses. It got dark. It got light again. History was happening and we experienced it together, staring at the sky.
Thanks for reading A Hill in Austin ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
