Cartography

West Lake Area Over Time

A timeline of places — ranches, roads, dams, schools, and buildings. Drag the timeline to scrub from the original land grants of the 1860s through the present, or filter by category to follow a single thread of the geography.

Showing pins through 2020

Drag to scrub history

Layers

Click any pin to read its story. Real coordinates from the place records — the surveyor's-paper canvas is a placeholder while we wire georeferenced overlays.

1 mile

Coordinates come from the place records. The surveyor's-paper canvas is a styled placeholder — georeferenced historical map overlays (1944 Westlake survey, 1870 land-grant maps) will land in a later phase.

Maps in the archive

Catalogued surveys, land-grant maps, and plats. Each links to a full record with provenance and rights. Scans replace placeholders as documents are digitized.

1870 · land_grant
Austin Area Land Grants, ca. 1870
A consolidated map of land grants in the Austin and West Lake area, compiled circa 1870 from the patents recorded in Travis County. Shows the Davenport tract and adjacent holdings before any subdivision.
1944 · survey
Survey of Westlake Hills, 1944
A hand-drawn surveyor's plat of the West Lake Hills area, drafted shortly after the Tom Miller Dam was completed and Lake Austin took its modern form. The 1944 survey is the canonical reference for parcel boundaries inherited from the original Davenport and Eanes-area land grants.