Before Austin existed, the north bank of the Colorado River near the mouth of Shoal Creek held a hamlet called Waterloo, and its first Anglo resident was a Tennessee hunter and blacksmith named Jacob Harrell. Harrell had come to Texas in 1833. In 1835 he pitched a tent near the mouth of Shoal Creek, and by 1838 he had replaced it with a split-log stockade and moved his family in. Waterloo stood farther up the Colorado than any other Anglo settlement, beside an old Indian trail and a natural low-water crossing of the river. In the fall of 1838 Vice President Mirabeau B. Lamar visited Harrell, ate breakfast in his cabin, and rode out after a herd of buffalo. According to historian Jeffrey Stuart Kerr's account of the founding, Lamar shot the largest bull with his holster pistol at the bottom of a ravine running down to the river, and when the hunters regrouped on the hill at its head he declared the spot should be the seat of future empire.
As president, Lamar backed the site. In 1839 a commission appointed by the Texas Congress bought 7,735 acres including Waterloo, and Edwin Waller's surveyors laid out a mile-square grid whose western limit was Shoal Creek. Harrell was elected mayor of Austin in 1847 before moving north to Brushy Creek, where he died in 1853.
Getting there
30.2655, -97.7512
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