Historical Marker
Fiskville
Austin, Travis County · Texas
Erected 2004
Fiskville took its name from two pioneer settlers, Greenleaf Fisk and Josiah Fisk, and lay on Little Walnut Creek along old U.S. Highway 81, six miles north of Austin. By the mid-1880s it had a steam flour mill and cotton gin, a general store, a union church and a district school for sixty people; a dairy came by the early 1890s, when 120 lived here. Austin's pull ended its growth. The post office closed in 1901, the school district joined Summitt in 1953 and Austin in 1959, and the city annexed the community in the mid-1960s.
What the plaque says
Fiskville Two area pioneers were Josiah Fisk, who arrived in 1846, and Edward Zimmerman, who came in 1854; both brought their families to the farming lands outside Austin. Zimmerman became the first postmaster in 1873, when more than 150 people lived in Fiskville, a dispersed agricultural community along Little Walnut Creek. Most residents were farmers, but the settlement also supported several businesses. These included gins belonging to G.W. Corzine (Cazine), a former slave, and to Andrew Payton. The community and its schools eventually became part of Austin. The Fiskville Cemetery, Zimmerman's 1854 home and area street names serve as links to the early farming settlement. (2005)
Where it stands
30.35782, -97.70091 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Mount Bonnell — 5.0 miAustin's old lookout over the Colorado, named by an 1838 traveler, picnicked on by George and Libbie Custer, and reached by a 1939 flight of about 100 limestone steps.
- LBJ Presidential Library — 5.2 miA ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
- Harry Ransom Center — 5.6 miThe University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
- Bullock Texas State History Museum — 5.8 miThe state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.