Places
Historic places and landmarks — the ranches, roads, bridges, schools, and churches that shaped the geography of Westlake.
Bee Cave Road
The principal east-west route connecting Austin to the hill country settlements west of the Colorado River. Paved in 1931, the road's improvement opened the West Lake area to year-round travel and made the surrounding ranches viable for new businesses.
Camp Craft Road
A north-south route running along the eastern bluffs of the West Lake area, named for the family that ranched the surrounding hills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Davenport Ranch
A ranch tract granted in 1854 along the bluffs of the Colorado River, foundational to the early settlement of the West Lake area. The land later became one of the first major residential subdivisions in the modern town.
Eanes-Marshall Cemetery
Family cemetery of the Eanes and Marshall families, two of the founding families of the West Lake area. Photographs of the cemetery — Bruce Marshall walking the grounds, Marshall and Dorothy Depwe reading tombstones — are among the most-cited images in the Eanes History Center collection.
Eanes Rock Schoolhouse
The 1928 stone-built schoolhouse that succeeded the original Eanes Frame School. For four decades it was the educational and social heart of the West Lake community — generations of Eanes-area children, including the families documented in the EHC collection, were taught here.
Eanes School
The original one-room schoolhouse of the Eanes community, established in the 1870s on land donated by Robert Eanes. Generations of West Lake families learned to read in this building before it was retired in favor of the modern Eanes ISD campuses.
Lake Austin
The reservoir created by the Tom Miller Dam, completed in 1940. Its eastern shoreline forms the visible boundary of West Lake Hills and shaped the region's modern residential development.
Moose Head Lodge
A roadhouse on Bee Cave Road that, after the 1931 paving of the road, became one of central Texas's most popular nightclubs during the Prohibition era. Later operated as the Cedar Crest Night Club and, in its present form, as County Line on the Hill.
Rollingwood Park
An eleven-acre community park at the heart of Rollingwood, donated piece-by-piece by the Western Hills Optimist Club beginning in 1968. Houses ballfields, a pavilion, and the George B. Hatley memorial gate. Subject of the city's first formally written park-history article.
Smith Creek
A small creek in the West Lake Hills area, used by the Eanes Rock Schoolhouse for school picnics in the 1930s. Photographs of students perched on the creek's rocks survive in the EHC collection.
Tom Miller Dam
Completed in 1940 as part of the Lower Colorado River Authority's program of dams across the Colorado River. The Tom Miller Dam created Lake Austin and stabilized the western shoreline that became the eastern boundary of West Lake Hills.
Westlake High School
The flagship high school of the Eanes Independent School District, opened in 1969 to serve the rapidly growing communities of West Lake Hills, Rollingwood, and the surrounding Eanes ISD attendance zone.
Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church
A founding congregation of the West Lake Hills religious community. The Eanes History Center holds biographical material on Gertrude and Winnie Johnson, two of the church's founding members, recognized with Honorary Life Memberships in the Women of the Church.