The Homesite of Gordon and Margaret Catterall Mills
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Born in Galveston to Fred W. and Eizabeth Catterall, Margaret Catterall wed Maine native Gordon E. Mills in 1933. The couple moved to Austin, where Mills joined his father-in-law’s company, Aus-Tex Chili, a leading producer of regional cuisine canned goods, as General Manager. Mills also secured a contract with the U. S. government to produce rations for Allied soldiers during World War II. He was a charter member of Austin’s Chamber of Commerce and served as President of the city’s Better Business Bureau and Humane Society. Both Gordon and Margaret were active at St. David’s Episcopal Church, as wel as the Austin Symphony and the Austin Country Club. (2004)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Galveston-born Margaret Catterall married Maine native Gordon Mills in 1933, and the couple settled in Austin, where he managed her father's firm, Aus-Tex Chili, a leading maker of canned regional cuisine. During World War II, Mills secured a government contract to produce rations for Allied soldiers, while both he and Margaret threw themselves into civic life, from the Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau to the Austin Symphony and their Episcopal church.
Why it matters
The homesite ties a regional food industry to the wartime effort and the civic fabric of mid-century Austin.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The homesite of Gordon and Margaret Catterall Mills belongs to Austin's emergence in the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the Texas capital was growing from a modest government town into a city with real commercial ambitions. When the couple married in 1933, the country was in the depths of the Great Depression, and building a business and a civic life took nerve.
Margaret was born in Galveston, the great port city on the Gulf, and married Gordon Mills, a native of far-off Maine — a pairing that itself reflects how mobile Americans had become by the early 1900s. They settled in Austin, casting their lot with a rising inland city rather than the coast or the Northeast.
Their era was also the age of the branded, canned, regional food industry. Improvements in food processing and distribution meant that a local specialty could be packed, shipped, and sold far beyond the town that made it — and Texas chili, in particular, was becoming one of those recognizable regional foods.
People & events
Margaret Catterall, daughter of Fred W. and Elizabeth Catterall, married Maine native Gordon E. Mills in 1933, and the two made their life in Austin. There Gordon joined his father-in-law's company, Aus-Tex Chili, a leading producer of canned regional cuisine, serving as its general manager — a family firm in which marriage and business became intertwined.
The defining event of Gordon's career came with the Second World War. He secured a contract with the U.S. government to produce rations for Allied soldiers, turning a maker of regional canned goods into part of the vast wartime supply effort. It's a vivid example of how ordinary American businesses were mobilized to feed the fight.
But the Millses were more than their company. Gordon was a charter member of Austin's Chamber of Commerce and served as president of both the city's Better Business Bureau and its Humane Society. Together he and Margaret were active at St. David's Episcopal Church, in the Austin Symphony, and at the Austin Country Club — a couple woven into nearly every thread of the city's civic and cultural life.
Its place in the American story
This homesite ties one Austin family to two large American stories. The first is the rise of the regional packaged-food industry. Canned chili and similar goods carried the flavors of one place to tables across the country, and companies like Aus-Tex helped make a Texas specialty into something recognizable far beyond Texas — an early chapter in the branding of American regional cuisine.
The second is the home front of World War II. When Gordon Mills won a government contract to produce rations for Allied soldiers, his firm joined the enormous, coordinated effort that turned American factories and food producers into an arsenal and a pantry for the war. The story of a local chili company feeding troops overseas is exactly the kind of link between Main Street and the front lines that defined the era.
And in the couple's tireless civic involvement — chamber of commerce, better business bureau, humane society, symphony, church — you can see how mid-century American cities were built and sustained: not only by government, but by business people who took it as their duty to knit the community together.
If you visit
You're in Austin, so let this stop set your imagination rather than expecting a grand monument. Stand at the site and picture the mid-twentieth-century city around it — a growing capital where a family like the Millses could run a well-known food company by day and turn up at the symphony, the church, and the chamber of commerce by night.
The real reward here is the layered story behind a single address: a Galveston bride, a Maine-born husband, a family chili business, and a wartime contract to feed Allied soldiers, all connected to this one plot of ground. It's a reminder that some of the most interesting history hides behind the most ordinary-looking places.
Make it part of a wider Austin history walk. The city is full of markers tracing its business pioneers, its churches, and its cultural institutions, and the Mills story touches several of those threads at once — a good anchor for a day spent reading the capital's twentieth-century civic life off its streetscape.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Gordon E. Mills
- · Margaret Catterall Mills
Themes & tags
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