Austin, San Marcos & the Lost Pines

A three-acre pool in the bed of Barton Creek, fed by the fourth-largest spring in Texas at 68 to 70 degrees, and shared with an endangered salamander found almost nowhere else.

The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.

Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.

Austin'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.

The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.

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.

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.

A 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.

A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

A 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.

East 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.

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.

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.