The Wells Branch Homestead - Austin, TX
N 30° 26.525 W 097° 40.747
14R E 626833 N 3368514
"Today, as the rustic center piece of Katherine Fleischer Park, the covered wagon and cabin sit in the middle of some 8,000 residences occupied by 20,000 people."
Waymark Code: WM1P0
Location: Texas, United States
Date Posted: 09/19/2005
Views: 105
The old log cabin on the northern edge of Travis County is an island of Texas past surrounded by Texas present.
Whoever built it knew that going to Austin for supplies meant a day-long wagon ride. For the most part, the family that called the cabin home fended for themselves when it came to acquiring food -- or staying safe from hostile Indians.
More than 130 years went by before the city came to the cabin, a figurative brush fire of urbanization that threatened to obliterate not only the historic structure but the way of life it represented.
The cabin may have been built in the late 1840s by Ohio-born Nelson Merrell, who settled on Brushy Creek in Williamson County in 1837. A couple of years later he headed a Ranger company that protected the Republic of Texas’ new capital, a village named Austin. After statehood, in 1846 Merrell moved to Walnut Creek in Travis County. His land included the present site of the cabin, though no proof exists that he built it. A mile or so from the cabin, the former ranger did start a community named in his honor, Merrelltown.
If Capt. Merrell built the cabin, he did not have it long, selling the land in 1851 to J.P. Whelin. (Merrell eventually moved back to Williamson County, where he died in 1892.) Whelin held the property only a short time before conveying it to someone else. That owner, in turn, sold it to John M. Gault in 1853. His family held the land for nearly 40 years.
“I don’t think Merrell built this cabin,” Todd said. “It was probably built by the Gaults.”
Todd, long retired, comes to the cabin twice weekly to meet with school children and tell them about its past. Among the lessons the affable Todd imparts:
The homestead is both a symbol of change and link between past and present
Pioneer values like ingenuity, resourcefulness and recycling have endured
Texas always will be a frontier as long as imagination survives
And he also tells a ghost story.
“When I first looked inside this cabin,” Todd began, “it had no doors and was full of hay. In the corner of the original cabin, an old cow had fallen through the floor and died. It didn’t even smell bad, mostly just bones.”
Not long after the cabin’s restoration, Todd sat on the porch one day making a pioneer-style broom when he heard a funny noise. -
“The property was still being leased for cattle-raising,” Todd said. “I got up and looked around, but no cows.”
Todd returned his broom-making.
“Then I heard it again. Sounded like a little calf under the cabin.”
Again, Todd left his folk project to investigate.
“I looked all around,” he continued. “Maybe my eyes were going, but I still didn’t see anything. But I definitely heard a cow or calf. Most old houses have people ghosts. I tell the kids that this cabin has cow ghosts.”
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