Drawn from original research, these maps recreate the historic black settlement of Wheatville from 1880-1940. Founded in 1867 by James Wheat, the community of free people formed at the end of the Civil War on the far outskirts of the city. Residents, like Wheat, grew and harvested crops, kept livestock, and made their homes in this area just northwest of what is today The University of Texas’s campus. At the height of this black settlement, the community had two churches and a school. Black residents likely worked across the city in various sectors of Austin’s racialized workforce. Given the proximity of this community to UT, founded in 1883, it is also probably that some residents found employment in the creation and servicing of this flagship institution. As the maps suggest, black residents started leaving the area in the aftermath of the City’s 1928 Master Plan that forced black people to relocate to Austin’s east side—located on the eastern side of what is now the interstate highway. By 1940, many residents had relocated to other parts of the city, specifically the east side. Due to governmental policy keeping personal census data private for 72 years, census demographics for Wheatville from 1950 will be available in 2022.
These interactive maps provide residential data of Wheatville’s black inhabitants. However, black people were not the only residents of this area. Non-black folks owned property and lived there too. Census and deed records show that property and commerce defined some of the relations between residents within and across race. Little is known about the more social aspects of their relations. These maps seek to offer greater detail about this historic community as an effort to recall black life in Austin from its historical silence.
I have written in more depth about this historical community and this silence, here.
Maps researched and created by Isaac Womack with support from Julia Bordelon.
Instructional paragraph:
Open the layers tool in the upper left corner to explore the [census] data.
Show and hide maps by decade.
Colored dots indicate a household coded by race. Click a dot to see the address.
Optional: Demonstrate the functionality with a gif
e.g.