Splitrock (Burns-Klein House)

🏛️The era

In the 1890s, Austin was a growing state capital still finding its edges. The great pink granite Capitol had been completed only a few years earlier, in 1888, and the city was hungry for the stone, brick, and skilled hands that build a rising town. Shoal Creek, tumbling down toward the Colorado River, marked a kind of western frontier of settlement — a place where a few acres on a wooded bluff were still countryside within reach of downtown.

This was the Gilded Age, when American cities pulled in immigrants and tradesmen to do the exacting work that stone and marble demanded. A skilled stone cutter was a valuable man in a capital busy raising monuments, courthouses, banks, and the memorials of the newly prosperous.

The house at the heart of this story was built at the meeting point of two worlds — rural and urban. When it went up around 1892, it looked out over open ground toward a city that would, over the next several decades, rise up and surround it completely.

👥People & events

The house begins with Thomas F. Burns, a Scottish immigrant who married Arbanna J. Nelson in Travis County in 1876. In 1891 he bought three and three-quarter acres along the west bank of Shoal Creek, and lumber marked 'Sutor & Co.' helps date the house he raised there to about 1892. By 1900, Thomas and Arbanna were sharing it with six children.

Burns made his living in stone. Listed as a stone cutter and the owner of a marble shop, he was the kind of craftsman a growing capital depended on — and the trade ran in the family. His son Frank C. Burns went on to own the Capitol City Marble Co. on West 6th Street, carrying the family's chisel-and-polish livelihood into the next generation. Thomas added another acre to the homestead in 1901, a small sign of a household on the rise.

The deed then passes like a relay baton through Austin's growing establishment. In 1911 Burns sold to Hippolyt Dittlinger, the New Braunfels roller-mill owner, whose niece Anita Dittlinger Quinlan and her husband James raised three children here from 1912 to 1939. When the Quinlans left for Fredericksburg, they subdivided the surrounding land into eight city lots along Splitrock Avenue — the very act of a rural homestead dissolving into a neighborhood. In 1945, Anita sold to Joe H. Klein, Jr. and his wife Jayne.

One charming detail captures the whole transformation: the house was originally built to face east, toward the distant city. When Splitrock Avenue became a proper street in Pemberton Heights, the front door effectively switched sides — the west face became the front, as if the house itself had turned to greet the neighborhood arriving at its back.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Splitrock is a case study in how American cities grew — not by wiping the countryside clean, but by flowing around the stubborn things that were already there. A single vernacular frame house, a story-and-a-half with a center passage and rooms marching down each side of the hall, survived largely unaltered while a whole neighborhood assembled itself around its bluff.

It also tells the immigrant-tradesman story that built so many American cities. Thomas Burns arrived from Scotland and made his mark, literally, in stone — and passed a skilled trade to a son who ran his own marble company. That arc, from immigrant craftsman to established family firm, played out in capital cities and boomtowns across the country during the Gilded Age.

And there is the deep-time detail of the live oaks. The property's centuries-old trees — one of them a City of Austin registered tree — were already old when Burns bought the land. They are a reminder that the American landscape has its own long memory, older than any deed, that a growing city can either erase or, as here, choose to keep.

🧭If you visit

This is a private home, so admire it from the public way and give the residents their peace — but even from a respectful distance, the details reward a slow look. Notice the story-and-a-half frame form, the dormers tucked under the roof where attic bedrooms once were, and imagine which way the house was first meant to face: east, toward a city that was then just a view.

The real showstoppers are the live oaks. These are trees that were likely mature before the house was even a plan, and one carries official recognition from the city. Standing beneath oaks like these, on a bluff above Shoal Creek, you get a fleeting sense of the quiet, rural setting the Burns family knew before Austin caught up with them.

Fit this into a walking exploration of the Pemberton Heights area and the Shoal Creek greenbelt. It's a lovely counterpoint to downtown's granite grandeur — a small, human-scaled survivor that lets you feel, in one shaded spot, more than a century of a Texas capital growing up around a stone cutter's home.