Wooldridge Square

Alexander Penn Wooldridge, born in New Orleans in 1847, came to Austin in 1872 from a Kentucky professorship. As president of the city's first public school board in 1880 he helped organize the school system, and in 1881 he chaired Austin's committee in the campaign to win the University of Texas, then served as secretary of its regents from 1882 to 1894. He headed the City National Bank from 1885. As mayor from 1909 he pushed street paving and lighting, larger police and fire departments and sanitation projects, and in 1924 he received Austin's first Most Worthy Citizen award.

What the plaque says

Wooldridge Square Edwin Waller designed the Republic of Texas' new capital city of Austin in 1839. Waller's plan included a 196-block grid (14 by 14) bisected by a broad north-south thoroughfare, Congress Avenue, running up from the Colorado River to Capitol Square. He also designated four blocks as "public squares," with the south side of this square also dedicated for churches. Three of Austin's first churches were built overlooking the square, including two of the first African American churches. Yet in those early years, the square itself remained unimproved by the city. In 1909, Austin mayor A.P. Wooldridge, animated by civic pride and backyard boosterism (he lived on the north side of the square), inspired the city to clean up the square and build a bandstand for public engagements. Designed by Charles Page, the bandstand was strategically placed over a tributary of Shoal Creek which bisected what was called Wooldridge Park. This waterway was later rechanneled underground. Over the next century, Wooldridge Square would host concerts and assemblies as well as notable speakers, such as Booker T. Washington (1911) and Minnie Fisher Cunningham (1910s). The first senate campaign of Lyndon B. Johnson (1941) was launched here, and scores of Texas political aspirants reached out to voters from the bandstand. The cultural commotions of the 1960s reverberated through this square as well. Civil rights marches often ended at Wooldridge with a flurry of speeches and rallies. In 1968, a benefit at the square introduced the world to the artistic rendering of an armadillo as a counterculture icon of Austin. As one of the city's original civic spaces, Wooldridge Square continues to be important as a recreation destination and as a place to gather. (1971, 2022)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — 0.4 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.7 mi
  The 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.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.9 mi
  A 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.
• Harry Ransom Center — 0.9 mi
  The 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.

More markers nearby

• Zachary Taylor Fulmore — steps away
• Third Site for Travis County Government — steps away
• Ira Hobart Evans — steps away
• Original Site of First Baptist Church of Austin — steps away