It’s a cool December night in downtown Austin. The year: 1895.
A light, misty rain is falling, illuminated in the gas street lights along Congress Avenue. It’s election season, and tonight is the final night of campaigning for mayoral candidates. The big push before Election Day.
Brass bands are trumpeting the candidates. Louis Hancock, founder of the Austin Country Club, rallied about 1,000 people at the corner of Sixth Street and Congress Avenue, simply called the Avenue back then.
Streetcars screeched by, tin trumpets sounded and Monroe Martin Shipe greeted his supporters. Shipe had been the man who got those streetcars rolling.
And Shipe had a good reason to invest in those streetcars: They brought people from downtown to Austin’s first suburb: Hyde Park.
Shipe wouldn’t go on to win the mayoral election. He landed 1,040 votes, enough for third place. Hancock won with 1,640.
Both men, however, would leave a timeless imprint on the city.
Shipe: Chasing His Business Dreams
Shipe was born in rural Paris, Ohio, in 1847. He graduated from Canton Academy, and entered a business venture with his brother, traveling the nation.
At one point, Shipe was in Florida managing an orange grove. But he soon found prosperity, influence and success in Abilene, Kansas, a growing town where Dwight D. Eisenhower would attend high school a few decades later.
Abilene had been a wild west town where the sheriff had survived two assassination attempts before a third killed him. Wild Bill Hickok took over as sheriff there in 1871.
By 1887, Shipe had built and started operating the city’s streetcar line. Meanwhile, a new railroad was completed through Abilene. The city was booming, but its economy quickly withered when the cattle market collapsed, leaving Shipe and other businessmen empty handed by 1889.
Seeking opportunity, Shipe moved to Austin.
He quickly became part of Austin’s top social circles. The city was growing quickly.
Shipe helped promote a bond referendum to build a dam and power plant on the Colorado River. Voters strongly backed it. But the dam never produced enough power to drive the promised economic development. Years later, the dam burst after a storm in 1900, killing 18 people and destroying a hundred houses.
Shipe pushed for street lights and streetcars throughout the city, before running for mayor in 1895. Meanwhile, his burgeoning Hyde Park development had failed to become a magnet for the elite.
Shipe and his company, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Land and Town Co., shifted gears and aimed to attract the growing middle-class, a successful move that put it on track to be one of Austin’s most popular neighborhoods for more than a century.
Before Hyde Park
The area that became Hyde Park had been home to Native American tribes. But white inhabitants continued to push the tribes farther away from the city’s core.
The state built the State Lunatic Asylum, later renamed the Austin State Hospital. And the area due east of it was surveyed in 1840 and was later conveyed to Joseph Lee who later sold 206 of his 369 acres to a group of investors in 1872.
That group set aside 85 acres to the Capital State Fair Association in 1885. The Association put up exhibit buildings, livestock pens, two racetracks and a 3,500-seat grandstand.
But the fair never generated enough income and closed less than a decade later.
The property traded hands twice more before the 206 acre tract was sold to Shipe on May 13, 1890 for $70,000. Shipe shifted the land to the company he founded, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Land and Town Co. in 1890 for $180,000.
That same year, Shipe convinced the city to give him exclusive franchise rights to operate an electric streetcar system. That gave him the power to extend the line north to the State Insane Asylum at 40th Street and spur development in the area.
Such streetcar extensions were increasingly popular nationwide at the time, creating streetcar suburbs. Few remain active.
Shipe quit his job as president of the Austin Rapid Transit Railway Co. in 1891 and put his efforts into promoting Hyde Park.
He built his own house in Hyde Park shortly after.
But Shipe would never see the heyday of his development. He died in 1924, which was the start of Hyde Park’s most rapid phase of growth.
Dozens of bungalows shot up to house middle-class families between 1924 and 1935, helping create the warm, neighborhood character it has today.