The first train in Austin arrived on December 26, 1871. The steam locomotive of the Houston & Texas Central Railway Company made a brief stop on the Waller Creek bridge before proceeding along tracks that were completed the previous day, on Christmas. (Image courtesy of the Austin History Center)
Modern Times Lecture Series
When The Railroad Came To Texas
Walter Buenger
Sunday, March 6, 2022 | 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM CST
**Doors at 2:00, Lecture at 2:30
In Person and Online!
Tickets
$10 General Admission
$5 Student
Free for NCHM Members
On the day after Christmas 1871, the first train pulled into Austin, the new terminus point for the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. This event connected the still relatively remote small capital city to the eastern portion of the state, and with the arrival of additional rail lines over the next decade Austin became a commercial hub for Central Texas.
Dr. Walter Buenger will take us for a ride through Texas rail history to illuminate the challenges that Texas faced in bringing rail travel to the state as well as the economic and cultural impact of the rail lines as they expanded through the 1870s and 1880s.
About the Speaker
Walter L. Buenger was born in Ft. Stockton, Texas, and he grew up there. Both sides of his family told stories that stretched back to the Civil War, but his father’s German Texan relatives had a decidedly more jaundiced view of that conflict than his mother’s Anglo kin. Those stories with their conflicting views of the past and his early years in the Trans-Pecos country gave him a lifelong interest in the nuanced history and varied cultures of the South and Southwest.
He left the Trans-Pecos for Houston and graduated from Rice University with a BA in 1973. After earning a PhD from Rice he began teaching in the Department of History at Texas A&M University in 1979, and he remained at A&M until 2017 when he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.
