From National Folk to Mid-century Modern: Austin’s Historic Landmarks of 2021
BY MARY KAHLE, PRESERVATION AUSTIN SPRING 2022 POLICY INTERN
Austin designated five new Historic Landmarks in 2021, building upon its existing 600-plus individual landmarks and adding to Austin’s complex story of opportunity, segregation, creativity, and community service. In a recent Preservation Austin blog post, we touched on the categories of historic designation at the federal, state, and local levels, including a discussion of the crucial protection that local historic designation provides.
To obtain Historic Landmark designation, a building, cemetery, or other site must be fifty years old or older, retain historic integrity, and meet two of five criteria for significance. The city’s Historic Landmark Commission has oversight of any changes to the exterior or the site, including demolition, a review process that preserves a property’s historical significance for future generations.
Read on to learn more about the history of the five new Landmarks our city gained this year.
Posey House
CRITERIA: ARCHITECTURE, HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS
Photo: Zillow
Built in approximately 1924, the Posey House at 1304 Bob Harrison Street is an example of the National Folk style of architecture. The house abuts the southern boundary of historic Oakwood Cemetery, and it is included in the 2016 East Austin Historic Resources Survey as a contributing resource in potential local and National Register historic districts. Currently it is undergoing extensive rehabilitation to address the deterioration of various structural elements.
The Posey House tells the story of Austin’s working-class African American families during the Segregation Era. The home was built by Samuel Posey and his second wife Clara (there is some discrepancy about her name) while Samuel was working as a laborer for the Austin Gas Light Co. and the Kuntz-Sternenberg Lumber Co. The early 1920s construction date just barely predates the 1928 Austin City Plan, which formally segregated African Americans to East Austin by denying them services and amenities elsewhere in the city.
Eddie Posey, their son, earned a bachelor’s degree from Samuel Huston College (part of today’s Huston-Tillotson College) and served as vice president of the local alumni chapter. He later attended People’s Business College, an East Austin business school established for African Americans, where he was recognized as an “‘outstanding citizen’” in the 1955 graduating class. His civic involvement was also reflected in his contributions to the East Austin community as a Mason and a trustee in Wesley Methodist Church.
Eddie and his sister Eva lived in the home together from around 1947 until 1969. Eva worked as a cook and domestic worker, and Eddie worked shining shoes from the age of ten, eventually paying his way through college. He achieved modest fame for his decades-long career through a 1950 Austin American-Statesman article “College Grad Shines Shoes,” which referred to him as the “official shoe shine boy at the state capitol.” In the article, the college-educated Eddie Posey said that he made “‘enough to take care of [his] sister and [himself] comfortably,’” but nonetheless, the article underscores the fact that, despite his accolades, economic opportunities for African Americans remained extremely limited in the Jim Crow South. The Posey family sold the home in 1998, their seventy-five-year ownership reflecting the deep ties that characterize East Austin neighborhoods.
Threadgill House
CRITERIA: ARCHITECTURE, HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS
Photo: Preservation Austin
The Threadgill House at 4310 Rosedale Avenue uncovers the personal side of the life of Kenneth Threadgill, icon of the Austin music scene. Kenneth, his wife Mildred, and their children lived in this 1930s Tudor Revival style home from approximately 1945 until 1984.
Born in 1909 in Peniel, Texas (northeast of Dallas), Threadgill was the ninth of eleven children. His father was a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, traveling to and from New Mexico before settling in Austin in the 1920s. After he graduated from Austin High in 1928, Threadgill worked ushering and taking tickets at theaters in Beaumont and Houston; these experiences were transformative, for he became friends and eventually collaborated with singer, songwriter, and yodeler extraordinaire Jimmie Rodgers, considered to be “The Father of Country Music.”
After returning to Austin in 1933, Threadgill worked at the Gulf station on North Lamar that would come to symbolize his role in Austin’s history. Seeing opportunity when Prohibition ended that year, he bought the station, obtained the first beer license in Travis County (possibly after a stint bootlegging), and opened Threadgill’s Tavern. With Mildred’s teamwork, it soon became a popular locale for mom-and-pop dance bands and performers playing hillbilly blues and other “‘people music.’” Shuttered during WWII, when Threadgill worked as a welder for the war effort, it reopened afterwards and soon attracted an ever-widening group of performers, highlighted in the 1960s by UT student Janis Joplin in her earliest days on stage. Threadgill was a talented singer and yodeler in his own right, guest performing with artists such as Ernest Tubb and singing with his band the Hootenanny Hoots. Popular covers included the patriotic anthem “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” and – possibly in an ode to his own father – “That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine.” At least one of his daughters sang regularly at Threadgill’s with her friends, later recalling that Joplin occasionally swung by their home while in town to perform to have Mildred tame her unruly hair.
Kohn House
CRITERIA: ARCHITECTURE, HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS
Photo: Preservation Austin
The Kohn House at 5312 Shoal Creek Boulevard exemplifies the entrepreneurial spirit that animates Austin today. Located in the Allandale neightborhood, the home was built around 1938 for Adolph Kohn (1871-1948) and his wife Mollie, who lived in it for ten years. Most likely designed by Kohn, the eclectic limestone home has a distinctive two-story square tower toward its north end––one can imagine the residents peering out its windows and observing the dairy cow that lived beneath the massive oaks out front, or warily keeping an eye on Shoal Creek during a heavy rain. The property also has a side-gabled wooden accessory building to the rear, where a couple named Vera and Johnny Miller lived in their role helping the Kohns with cooking, gardening, and animal care. During the decade the Kohns lived in the home, it was a hub for Rotary Club and other civic and social gatherings.
An émigré from Germany, Kohn bounced between Chicago, New York, and Houston before settling in Austin and eventually applying his baking skills in his role as pastry chef at the Driskill Hotel. George Littlefield, owner of the Driskill and a prominent banker, loaned him $2,000 to open the BonTon Bakery on Congress Avenue in 1902. The BonTon soon became famous for its Pan Dandy Bread (“Look for the Orange Wrapper”), and the forward-thinking Kohn proudly claimed that “the baker who wishes to give the public good bread day after day must take advantage of the latest ideas and methods.” He also felt strongly about the nutritional benefits of bread, lamenting in 1937 that “baker’s bread has been the target of a lot of unjustified and untruthful propaganda which has caused some persons who take their diets seriously to reduce the use of this most nourishing and useful food.”
Following his success in the baking business, Kohn ventured into real estate, purchasing in 1928 the 218 acres that would become the Shoalmont Addition in northwest Austin. In 1934 he founded Capitol National Bank, and began subdividing the addition in 1935. As in so many residential developments throughout the U.S. and in Austin, restrictive covenants on property deeds were placed on Kohn’s desirable new suburb which barred non-white Austinites from purchasing homes there. This practice endured nationally until 1945 when it was struck down by the landmark Supreme Court Case, Shelley v. Kraemer.
Travis County Fire Control Team Operations Center
CRITERIA: HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS, COMMUNITY VALUE
Photo: Preservation Austin
The unassuming house at 1037 Reinli Street belies the property’s endearing and significant history as the site of the Travis County Fire Control Team Operations Center. While its landmark designation is based on its historical associations and community value, its architecture also reveals important aspects of Austin’s history. It was built around 1939 in the Minimal Traditional style, which was “favored by FHA-loan-seeking developers toward the end of the 1930s.”
The TCFC was Travis County’s first fully operational fire department, tracing its origins to a group of Boy Scout Explorers who saw the need for a rural firefighting team after helping to quell a fire along Bee Cave Road in 1962. Their Scout leader Lee Basore and his brothers opened the family home on Reinli Street for the young troop’s operations, guiding them (with training and equipment provided by the Austin Fire Department and the National Forest Service) as they learned brushfire control and other skills needed to address the frequent fires that arose.
The operation’s location near the intersection of today’s North IH-35 and U.S. 290 East played a key role in its history, for although Reinli and the nearby streets were unpaved, there was quick access to the major roads serving this rural area north of the city limits. The property’s generous, creek-adjacent backyard was ideal for training exercises; other parts of the property and the various additions to it over the years provided storage for vehicles, protective gear, and communications equipment.
The Scouts held fundraisers and canvassed junkyards to repair the second-hand vehicles they bought, and supporters donated funds or in-kind goods, such as the pest control company that donated exterminator’s hose for their rebuild of a 1940 Chevy pickup. By 1969, the determined group’s range encompassed 900 square miles, and from then until its move to North Lamar in 1982, the TCFC’s role in the community grew to include volunteer firefighters, search-and-rescue teams, and professional paramedics, with the first female firefighters hired in 1974. In 2011, the TCFC was reactivated to assist firefighters in controlling the destructive fires in Bastrop, demonstrating once again its importance to the Travis County community.
Rubinett House
CRITERIA: ARCHITECTURE, HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS
Photo: Preservation Austin
Built in 1955, the Rubinett House at 3004 Belmont Circle was once home of Shirley and Jarrell “Tank” Rubinett, prominent members of Austin’s Jewish and business communities. It also exemplifies the work of prominent local architectural firm Lundgren & Maurer, which designed commercial buildings in addition to residences, including the Adams Extract building on South IH-35 (1955) and the round Town Lake Holiday Inn (1964). Built in the Mid-century Modern style, the home features horizontal lines, a low-pitched roof, Japanese-imbued exposed joists, and windows with large glass areas that integrate the outdoors into the interior. A 7’ stone wall and the home’s placement toward the rear of the lot provide privacy while still giving appealing views of the roofline from the street.
The Rubinett House is historically significant for several reasons. Located within the North Central Austin Historic Resource Survey area, it reflects Austin’s rapid growth after World War II. Most of Bryker Woods just to the west was already developed, but some lots closer to Shoal Creek remained, and in 1951 and 1955, these were platted in two phases to become the Belmont Addition. The Rubinetts built the home and lived in it for sixty years, raising their three children while achieving prominence in the business world. Jarrell founded the Austin Candy Company in 1949, the Austin Drug Company (a wholesale druggist) in 1955, and the Salvage Center in 1975; the latter became Special Sales and specialized in selling wholesale groceries. Like many Jewish businessmen of the mid-century, the Rubinetts operated their businesses in the city’s minority neighborhoods, including locations at East 5th St. and Manor Road, at a time when others refused to serve communities of color. Jarrell Rubinett was appointed to the board of directors of University State Bank in 1974 in honor of his business acumen, while Shirley Rubinett and son Gordon eventually took on more involved roles in the family business.
The Rubinetts’ contributions were not confined to business; they served in leadership roles at Congregation Agudas Achim, backed a 1982 citizens’ initiative to prevent landlords from discriminating against tenants based on sexual orientation, and supported endeavors that promoted education and understanding of Judaism. Their contributions were celebrated at a 2004 gala at Congregation Agudas Achim, where Mayor Will Wynn issued a proclamation in their honor.
MARY KAHLE IS PRESERVATION AUSTIN’S SPRING 2022 POLICY INTERN. SHE IS A GRADUATE STUDENT IN PUBLIC HISTORY AT TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY.