Collection
Cedar Choppers
The cedar-cutting families who lived in the rough hill country west of Austin from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth, supplying fence posts and shingles to the growing city. Their settlements long predated the Eanes School and most of the modern subdivisions, and their descendants are still part of the community.
For roughly a hundred years before West Lake Hills incorporated as a city, the hills west of Austin were home to the cedar choppers — extended families who lived in rough cabins on the limestone ridges, cut Ashe juniper ("cedar") into fence posts and shingles, and hauled the loads down by wagon to the markets of Austin. The name was used both descriptively and dismissively; the families themselves were proud working people whose oral and material culture shaped the area long before the suburbs arrived.
They show up throughout this archive — in Emmett Shelton's recordings of the 1930s nightclub era, in James Short's and Dan Molberg's school-bus stories, and in the names that still survive on local roads.
This collection groups the stories, photographs, and contemporary accounts that document them.
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