West of Congress: Clarksville, Treaty Oak & the River Bluffs

On the leafy west side of Austin, three very different pioneer stories sit within a few minutes' drive of one another. In 1871 a freed man named Charles Clark bought land and started a community for his people, and the neighborhood he founded — Clarksville — still stands as one of the oldest surviving freedom colonies west of the Mississippi, anchored by the church at its heart. A short way off grows the Treaty Oak, a live oak estimated at more than five centuries old, which the whole city rallied to save when a vandal poisoned it in 1989. And out along the Colorado, the river bluffs and the cold water of Deep Eddy, beneath the lookout at Mount Bonnell, mark where Austin first fell for the water. This is the west side's deeper history: settlement, survival, and the landscape that made the place.