"Austin was awesome."

When Attorney General Hogg first moved his family to Austin in 1887, they found a bustling place with a population of nearly 15,000. State politics was its main business. Dallas, with 38,000 people by 1890, was Texas’s largest city, but to Jim and Sallie and their children, who had grown up in rural East Texas, Austin was awesome. The city had thirty mule-drawn streetcars clacking along on ten miles of track. Streets were not paved, but many were lit by gas lamps. It was a small city, with its grid of streets laid out between Shoal Creek and Waller Creek, bounded by the Colorado River to the south and 15th Street to the north. There were gentle hills and an abundance of trees—live oak and cottonwood, pecan and walnut. (Before his death in 1906, ex-Governor Hogg requested that a pecan tree and a walnut tree be planted on his grave.)

On Sixth Street, a cattle baron named Jesse Lincoln Driskill had just built a grand 60-room hotel. (Years later ex-Governor Hogg would occupy a suite there, and one day the Driskill Hotel would have a suite named for him.)

        

         Ima remembered that Austin was elegant: "It was quite the fashion for ladies and gentlemen to drive up and down Congress Avenue and over the Colorado bridge, [and] around the Capitol grounds, especially on Sunday afternoons. Many Victorias [light, open carriages] drawn by fine horses with the driver on the seat above made a beautiful picture."

By the time the Hoggs left the Governor's Mansion in 1895, Austin had electric streetcars, an underground sewage system, waterworks, and electric lights.

And there were the railroads: The first one—the Houston and Texas Central Railway--had come to Austin in 1871, and the International and Great Northern in 1876. By the 1890s Austin passengers could go by train (at the breath-taking speed of 30 miles an hour) to St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with journeys of two or three days eased by Pullman sleeper cars and dining car buffets.

        

And there was the University of Texas. It had opened its doors on September 15, 1883 with 13 faculty members and 218 students, and graduated its first class of 32 seniors on June 15, 1887.

Three of the Hogg children--Will, Ima, and Mike--would one day call UT their alma mater.