Oak Hill
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
First settlers arrived in area in 1840s. The community founded here in 1856 was called Live Oak Springs; in 1865 it was renamed Shiloh. Later schools known as Live Oak and Oatmanville Gave names temporarily to the settlement. It has been known as Oak Hill since 1900. Limestone quarries were opened, 1882, to supply stone for capitol building in Austin. By 1886, ten carloads of stone were shipped daily over railroad which joined quarries with capitol grounds. It is estimated that one-third of capitol's walls are line with limestone from Oak Hill quarries. Incise on base: Sponsored by Oakhill-Cedar Valley Pioneer Association
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
First settled in the 1840s, this community west of Austin cycled through several names — Live Oak Springs, Shiloh, Oatmanville — before settling on Oak Hill around 1900. Its lasting mark on Texas came from the ground: limestone quarries opened here in 1882, and a dedicated rail line carried ten carloads a day to the capitol construction site in Austin. By local estimate, a third of the capitol's walls are lined with Oak Hill stone.
Why it matters
Oak Hill is a reminder that great public buildings rise on the backs of quarry towns and rail spurs whose names most visitors never learn.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Clay Pit Bucket Tower
Austin, TX
In 1902, entrepreneur A. J. Zilker built an aerial cable conveyor whose towers carried buckets of clay from pits south of the Colorado River up to a brickmaking plant in early-20th-century Austin. Brick was the building material of a fast-growing Texas capital, and Zilker's works fed that boom until the Butler Brick Company leased and expanded the operation around 1912. This surviving bucket tower is a rare relic of the machinery that once moved raw earth across the river into the walls of a city.
Walter and Mae Simms House
Austin, TX
Architect Roger Q. Small designed this 1935 Austin residence for Walter and Mae Simms, whose Simms Fish Market had trucked Gulf Coast seafood to Central Texas hotels and restaurants since 1915. The simplified Classical Revival house tucks a five-bay garage beneath its main floor behind a rough-cut limestone façade—an integration of the automobile into the home that would not become common until after World War II. Its butler brick walls and tall multi-light windows mark it as a refined product of its era.
Site of John Bremond & Company
Austin, TX
New York native John Bremond opened a dry goods store here as early as 1847, and by the 1860s he and his sons had built John Bremond & Company into a cornerstone of Austin commerce. The family helped launch the city's first hook-and-ladder company and championed the railroad that reached Austin in 1871; a back room even birthed what became the State National Bank. The firm later roasted and shipped its own coffee statewide before closing in 1967, its old limestone building reputedly Austin's oldest commercial structure at its 1979 demolition.
Sixth Street
Austin, TX
Laid out as Pecan Street on Edwin Waller's 1839 plan for the new capital, this thoroughfare drew a diverse population and grew into a commercial heart of nineteenth-century Austin. Its flat ground and safe distance from the flood-prone Colorado River made it ideal for shops, saloons, stables, and lumber yards, often with owners living above their businesses. Renamed Sixth Street in 1884, it accumulated Austin's largest concentration of Victorian commercial architecture, and restoration efforts begun in the 1960s revived the district.