Waller Plan

The 1839 Austin city plan (commonly known as the Waller Plan) is the original city plan for the development of Austin, Texas, which established the grid plan for what is now downtown Austin. It was commissioned in 1839 by the government of the Republic of Texas and developed by Edwin Waller, a Texian revolutionary and politician who would later become Austin's first mayor.

History

In January 1839 the Congress of the Republic of Texas appointed a committee to select a site for a new planned capital for the republic. Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar instructed the committee to consider a site along the north bank of the Colorado River that he had visited the previous year. The committee was pleased with the site's scenery, resources, and central location within the country, and it approved the site in April, purchasing a parcel of 7,735 acres (3,130 ha) of land that included the village of Waterloo. Shortly before the site selection was publicly announced, President Lamar appointed his friend Edwin Waller to oversee the surveying of the new capital city and to develop a city plan for its layout. Waller had been an early Anglo-American settler in Mexican Texas, fought in the Texas Revolution, and participated in the Convention of 1836 as a delegate from Brazoria, where he held various political offices.

City plan

Waller selected a 1-mile (1.6 km) square tract on the north shore of the Colorado, sitting roughly between the mouths of two smaller streams entering the river (now known as Shoal Creek and Waller Creek). Assisted by surveyors L. J. Pilie and Charles Schoolfield, Waller divided the 640-acre (260 ha) tract into a grid plan fourteen city blocks wide, with the blocks separated by broad 80-foot (24 m) streets. Waller organized the grid around an open four-block town square meant for the Texas Capitol, with major avenues intersecting at the Capitol Square, and four smaller public squares in the quarters of the surrounding city.