The 15th Annual
Heritage Homes Tour
Duval Street in the 1920s
Mother's Day Weekend
Saturday, May 12, 2007
10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Advance Ticket Sales are now closed. Day of tour tickets are available at 3312 Duval Street from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm.

Some of the Duval Street neighborhoods’ most handsome residences date back to the Teens and Twenties, when the area was still on the outskirts of town. Automobiles and the prosperity of the Twenties were factors in the expansion of Austin’s fashionable suburbs. The Country Club served as a magnet in attracting well-to-do families to exclusive neighborhoods like Hancock’s Aldridge Place and the Country Club suburbs featured in this year’s tour.
Lewis Hancock (1857-1920), founding father of the Hancock neighborhood, was the son of San Jacinto Battle veteran George Hancock. Lewis graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School and in 1882 became vice president, later president, of the newly formed State National Bank, known as Bremond’s Bank. He inherited his father’s store at Sixth and Congress in 1879, and sold the lot to Scarbrough’s in 1905. Lewis served as mayor from 1895 to 1897, and built the 1896 Hancock Opera House.
Having become interested in golf while traveling in Scotland, he organized the Austin Country Club in 1899 and served for 20 years as its president. In 1913 the Austin Country Club expanded its nine holes to 18 on land east of Red River. Governor Pease’s daughter Julia was one of the first lady golfers. Former caddie Harvey Penick began his professional career here at the age of 18 in 1923. Several prominent national figures were early members of the club, including T.W. Gregory and David Houston.

The oldest home on the tour, and the first house built in Sidon Harris’ College Court Subdivision, is a 1912 Craftsman Bungalow, the Ettlinger House. It is surrounded by a number of historic bungalows and Victorian homes built between 1912 and 1930. The Grooms Addition’s 1913 Finch-Krueger House, also on the tour, is one of the most intact Prairie School houses of the period in Austin.
In 1926, on 20 acres of land purchased from the Hancock Estate, Lutherans built Concordia’s first building, Kilian Hall, in a modified Mediterranean Romanesque style. Concordia would serve first as a boys’ high school, then a junior college, currently Concordia University, and is shortly destined to become an urban mixed-use development.
Cotton broker Edgar Perry built his Italian Renaissance villa in 1928 at 41st and Duval, near the site of an old limestone quarry he converted to a terraced sunken garden. The Perry Estate, a National Register property, is currently home to two schools. Other wealthy Austinites were drawn to the area soon after Perry built his mansion. Tom Miller, Austin’s mayor from 1933-49 and 1955-61, lived on nearby Park Boulevard.
In 1927, the Cashway Bakery and Grocery was established in the red brick building still standing at 40th and Duval. By 1935, the Checker Front grocery, a butcher shop, barbershop, beauty salon, and service station were located on 43rd just west of Duval, a corner that still thrives with small, local businesses.
The City purchased the golf course in 1946. In 1962 the back nine holes were sold and the land converted to Austin’s first mall, the Hancock Shopping Center. The present Hancock Recreation Center and adjacent Hancock Golf Course continue to serve Austin residents.

Compiled by Phoebe Allen

---

3215 Duval St.


3300 Duval St.


3312 Duval


3110 Harris Park


3215 Fairfax Walk


3215 Sparks


All images courtesy of
Shoehorn Design.