So,
what happened to
the Milk Bottle Motel?
I know, I’m the reporter, but I can’t exactly answer this question, since I’m
not sure exactly where it was. It was somewhere on FM 969, probably on the
Bastrop County side and thus past Webberville, maybe near the Zendik Farm,
definitely before the Colorado River bridge where John “Squatty” Jenkins
breathed his last. I doubt it was really a motel at all; was it the famous
White Egret Farm, where the herdskeepers reportedly talk not to, but with,
their goats?
But in front of whatever it was, there was an enormous — like, say, 30 foot
high — milk bottle, advertising the eponymous lodging establishment. All I
know is it was there not more than two months ago, but you can drive all the
way from UT to Bastrop on FM969 today, and there ain’t no milk bottle. Nor any
listing in any relevant directory for a Milk Bottle Motel.
Maybe I just imagined it. That only seems right, since sometimes it feels like
you’ve only imagined Webberville, that somewhere around the Travis State School
is an invisible gate, and another near Hwy71 and the charms of the Bastrop
highway strip. In between, you depart Central Texas and enter Wackyland, where
every road sign points to a curious footnote, an unsolved riddle, or just a
good story.
See that park? That’s the one where they had the big kickback scandal and the
contractors went to jail. See that bridge? That’s where the world’s foremost
authority on Texana (that would be Jenkins) was mysteriously shot dead, or shot
himself dead, in the river. See that granite marker? That’s where Josiah
Wilbarger, after being scalped by the Comanches, ceased his flight because his
sister instructed him to in a vision — whereupon Sarah Hornsby, wife of the
patriarch of that multifarious clan, was awakened by a very similar vision and
directed her husband to go fetch poor Wilbarger, who ended up living for many
years. (This “legend of Hornsby’s Bend” has been retold countless times and was
even turned into a ballet.)
About 1,500 people, more or less, live in and along the “969 corridor” —
including both Webberville and Hornsby Bend, along with places without names,
and those that once had names but are no longer populated places, like Fort
Prairie and Dunlap and Hell’s Half-Acre, later known simply as Half-Acre, and
John’s Town, earlier known simply as John. Many of the locals are working
farmers, ranchers, or both, who manage to get by, not extravagantly, but well
enough to pay the bills. Like most rural communities on the edge of urban
sprawl, Webberville sends a number of its citizens to Austin every day for
work.
Austin has returned the favor by sending its visionaries and eccentrics out
toward Webberville. These Colorado River bottomlands have long attracted
nonconformists like pins to a magnet, and today’s Webberville strip is
bookended by green-building avatar Pliny Fisk and his houses made of straw at
one end, and the Zendiks on the other. In between lie organic farmers, herbal
apothecaries, unreconstructed roadhouses with names like the Why Knot? Party
House, houseless chimneys standing tall and erect in the middle of the sorghum
fields, signs advertising non-existent subdivisions and plate lunches for sale
somewhere deep in the woods, stretches of river that demands floatation upon a
homemade wooden raft, clapboard churches with the crosses gone crooked, and, it
goes without saying, ghosts.
And so it has always been.
A friend and student of local history, whose people hailed from Fort Prairie,
sent me a note that read, in part: “On the topic of Webberville, I have heard
that the founding male was a Caucasian who had a Negro wife. I suppose the
place has been hexed from thereafter.”
This wasn’t unprecedented in pre-annexation Texas, especially not under
Mexican rule, where legal restrictions on free blacks and mixed marriages were
minimal. But it was still pretty singular among the transplanted Southerners
who became the “Texians.” According to pioneer chronicler Noah Smithwick — who
served as both postmaster and judge in the community known as Webber’s Prairie
— Dr. John F. Webber, like many Southern men, had gotten a slave girl in
trouble, but being famously honest and decent, purchased mother and child from
their owner, legitimized their union, and set out for the remotest reaches of
Austin’s Colony, arriving in today’s Travis County in 1830. They may have been
the first non-native settlers in the county; Webber’s Prairie is the consensus
choice for the first settlement.
Over the next 21 years, the Webbers caused consternation among both white
society and the slave community, and “were constrained to keep to themselves,”
Smithwick wrote. “Still, there wasn’t a white woman in the vicinity but knew
and liked Puss, as Webber’s dusky helpmeet was called, and… if there was need
of help, [the family] was ever ready to render assistance without money and
without price.”
Eventually, after Webber et al. had stemmed the threat of Indian
depredations — recounted by pioneer chroniclers with much gusto and talk of
scalps and entrails — a new round of settlers, apparently uppity and
nouveau-riche, turned up on the Prairie and made harassing the Webber
family their main order of business. In 1851, Webber sold his lands to Col.
John Banks and moved to Mexico — following the lead of another group of early
settlers of Webber’s Prairie with unconventional attitudes toward marriage,
Lyman Wright and his band of Mormons, who settled in the area in 1839, and
built houses that until quite recently still stood, before heading for the
border.
Banks then founded the prosperous river port that became Webberville,
including the aforementioned Hell’s Half-Acre, crossroads of the local liquor
trade, overseen by storekeeper Joseph James Manor, whose name survives today
attached to the Webberville cemetery. The upstart town of Manor — founded by
the brother, James Joseph Manor — snagged the railroad after a Colorado River
flood in 1857 and walloped Webberville, which at the time was half the size of
Austin and had a hotel, furniture and broom factories, and two boarding
schools. That was about it for the town’s fortunes; by 1925, the last store and
ferry terminal were gone.
One thing that remained
was the Webberville Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, founded as a house of
worship for free blacks in 1868 on land donated by the Duty family, among the
original Webber’s Prairie pioneers. The land was entrusted to the congregation
“and its successors forever,” which the Duty heirs interpret to mean that if
one soul wishes to pray there, the church must remain open and its land not be
sold. And so it’s still there, rebuilt several times, though you’d probably not
know this unless you looked very closely.
“We have members whose families came from out there years ago and now live in
Austin,” says Rev. W.B. Routt, Sr., pastor of the church. “The folks who still
live out there are some of the children of the ancestors that founded the
church.” When Routt — who earned his keep as a trucker and has never been paid
for his Webberville ministry — became pastor in 1975, the church had no indoor
plumbing. Memories differ on whether it had electric lights. It has since much
improved and even has stained glass windows, but is still about as textbook a
country church as one could imagine.
Which is what they say about things like the Williamson County Courthouse,
too, but no one’s ever going to mistake its surroundings for pioneer Texas. Out
here, you just might. There are trailer homes with propane tanks and barbecues
aligned like cufflinks (and disconcertingly near to each other), Japanese
pickups, and Ortho products for sale at the feed and seed. But these are feeble
symbols of modernity compared with, say, a golf course, a strip center, a
fast-food restaurant, a development of garden homes each with lanai and bonus
room. There is one actual mid-Eighties subdivision, in the Decker Creek area,
and naturally there’s a story behind it too — it was supposed to be a big ol’
sprawling master-planned community thing a la Harris Branch, in
anticipation of which the people living nearby all got annexed by the City of
Austin, only to be de-annexed after the land deal went into the tank, leaving
such amenities as clean water and road repair in limbo.
With its near-absence of exposed limestone and miles of black, plastic gumbo
soil — perfect for growing coastal hay, which is basically economy-size
bermudagrass — Webberville conveys a pastoral fecundity that’s unusual to see
less than 20 miles from the Capitol, in a landscape that’s unusual to see
anywhere in Texas. Over the years, too many chroniclers have written too many
hokey lines about Webberville being untouched by time, but it’s definitely been
untouched by the boom, which seems to substantiate the notion that an active
resource-based economy is the best deterrent to urban sprawl. Even with the
inherent difficulty of modern farm life, no one along FM 969 seems itching to
sell their lands to the first developer that comes along, unlike in Williamson
County, where every loose acre seems up for grabs.
Or maybe they’re just
being ornery. “We’re always trying to stimulate Webberville, but it’s a sleepy
town and there’s only a few people who own most of the property, and they’ll
never sell as long as they’re alive,” says 20-year resident Thomas Trantham.
“So that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
Trantham, despite his vintage, is emblematic of the New Webberville — after
commuting for years to IBM, he got bought out, established himself as a
carpenter and furniture maker, and then after suffering health problems he
feels were solved with herbal medicinals, entered the herb-dealing business.
His shop, the Olde Thyme Store, looks on passing like it’d be just another
potpourri pit, but is something else entirely. “We’re actually, more than
anything, a herb wholesaler,” says Trantham. “We grow some of our stock, and we
have people in the community who grow herbs for us. Between people out here and
all the commuters who use FM969 as their shortcut to and from Bastrop, business
has been very good. In Webberville, Texas. Who would have thought?”
In Webberville, it seems less odd than it should to imagine grizzled Texas
farmers raising up crops of comfrey and dong quai. Such changes “are definitely
happening around here,” Trantham says. “People, even the farmers, are getting
more health-conscious; they use these herbs themselves, not just grow them as a
cash crop. And they have to survive as farmers, too — as the market changes
they’ll have to change. You have some diehards who’ll stick to cattle until
they die, but they’re a dying breed, so to speak.”
And Webberville, as a community and perhaps as a state of mind, seems intent
on living forever. “This community is not dead; it’s very much alive and
growing,” Rev. Routt says. “The ones who are there now are making sure it stays
alive.”
This article appears in July 26 • 1996 and July 26 • 1996 (Cover).