Historical Marker
Rosewood Park
Austin, Travis County · Texas
Erected 2018
The auditorium beside the park has its own history. The USO opened it on April 10, 1944, as a recreation building for Black service members in Central Texas, and later that year it was named for Doris Miller, the Waco cook who won the Navy Cross at Pearl Harbor. After the war it hosted Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Little Richard. A 1971 addition housed memorabilia from L. C. Anderson High School after the city closed the school. Austin's council designated the building a city landmark in October 2026.
What the plaque says
Rosewood Park In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African American enclaves were spread throughout Austin, but the 1928 Austin City Plan codified segregation of communities of color to the east side of the city by restricting utilities and services elsewhere. As a result, the city established Rosewood Park as a recreational facility for African Americans. The land for Rosewood Park was carved from the 40-acre Boggy Creek homestead of local merchant, Rudolph Bertram, and his family, including a two-story limestone house built in the 1870s. Rudolph's daughter, Emmie Huppertz, sold 17 acres to the city in 1928 to establish the first public park for African Americans in Austin. When Rosewood Park opened in 1930, it featured a swimming pool, clubhouse (the remodeled Bertram-Huppertz home), and baseball diamonds. Segregated sports leagues, concerts, pageants and holiday festivities were frequent and popular uses for the park. Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, has been celebrated here each year since the park opened. During the Great Depression, the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided partial funding for park improvements ranging from roads and lights to the bandstand. During World War II, the city's recreation department provided African American servicemen stationed in central Texas with dances, picnics, and sing-alongs, culminating in construction of Doris Miller Auditorium in 1944. After the war, the auditorium was a popular stop on the "Chitlin' Circuit" of African American performers. In the summer of 1963, Austin city pools and parks integrated. Today, Rosewood Park continues to serve as the heart of the neighborhood and as an important space in the cultural history of Austin. (2018)
Where it stands
30.27078, -97.71426 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- George Washington Carver Museum — 0.6 miEast Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
- Texas State Cemetery — 0.8 miA hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
- French Legation State Historic Site — 1.1 miA raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
- LBJ Presidential Library — 1.4 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.