Drive by at the height of springtime and the hill dissolves into a cloud of colors.
Slow down a bit, though, to notice the house, built in 1877, that stands behind the blur of blossoms and overhanging trees on West Sixth Street. Oversized white columns guard two of the historic structure’s many porches, some of which function as old-fashioned sleeping porches.
You have just passed Flower Hill, a hushed urban homestead museum perched above one of the city’s busiest streets.
This slice of history is more satisfying if you park on a side street and walk up the curving driveway.
Though not many Austinites have done so, it’s even better to join a tour of this fully furnished 19th-century remnant, built and occupied by a learned and, in some ways, visionary family.
For more than 130 years, the Smoot family cultivated this wild garden. Meanwhile, they also influenced the futures of the University of Texas, Austin American-Statesman, Texas Capitol, Central Presbyterian Church, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and more than one Austin high school.
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“Everything all at once,” Robin Grace Soto, the former director of the Flower Hill Urban Homestead Museum, writes about the enchanted spot. “That is what it feels like to walk onto the dining porch at Flower Hill, surrounded by planks of petrified wood and geodes the size of beach balls.
“Or to stand at the top of the horse collar drive in a field of fool’s onions, redbuds and spiderworts. To open a hidden drawer on a roll-top desk and exhume a sentimental collection of coins, a package of postcards sent home from World War II, a ticket stub from the matinée of ‘The Love Parade.’
“Daily I find myself in conversation and collaboration with the past, present and future, all at once.”
I first explored Flower Hill in the 1980s. I remember being surprised by the size of the lot in Central Austin and the fact that a small lake once sparkled alongside the property. Expansive sleeping porches — real ones! — faced the prevailing Gulf breezes, and the rooms, especially a small one set aside to store touring trunks, looked like they had been untouched for 100 years.
I always wanted to share the Flower Hill story with readers.
That looked like a distinct possibility a few years ago when the energetic and charismatic Soto took the role of founding director of a nonprofit formed to steer Flower Hill into the 21st century. Her job was even bigger than organizing the thousands of items left behind by the Smoots and overseeing the necessary improvements to the 1877 structure and its namesake half-wild gardens.
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Yet it took years to obtain permits from the city to make Flower Hill regularly available to the public.
Jane Smoot, its last resident, foresaw a future museum as early as the 1950s. The founding board of the Flower Hill Foundation saw that the acreage could serve as a unique “urban homestead museum,” given its out structures, tools and other facets of daily life, including food production in what was a city of little more than 10,000 people during the 1870s.
Meanwhile, Soto invited artists, writers and scholars to take up temporary residence there. Their work has celebrated the place through various creative projects.
One of those guests was Rosa Walston Latimer, an author who has written books on historical subjects, edited print and online newspapers, supervised television shows, and taught classes in memoir and nonfiction writing.
In 2021, History Press published Latimer’s “Austin’s Flower Hill Legacy.” This slender volume not only provides the basic background on the place, it demonstrates through generous literary excerpts that the Smoots were themselves excellent writers and memoirists. The book is packed with priceless stores; only a few will appear here.
Latimer divides the book into neat chapters about the three generations of Smoots, whose roots go back to Tennessee and Kentucky. The patriarch was the Rev. Richmond Smoot (1836-1905), who served as pastor of what became Central Presbyterian Church downtown, and who helped found Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
His wife was Sarah Jane “Sallie” Graham Smoot (1837-1916), an independent-minded woman who married the Rev. Smoot in 1866.
Their sons were Asher Graham Smoot (1869-1915), who wrote for the Statesman and American newspapers and married the socially prominent Frances Sampson (1872-1934), and Lawrence Kelley Smoot (1875-1968), longtime law librarian for the Texas Supreme Court who married history teacher Julia Emma Williams (1883-1963).
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Richmond and Julia’s only daughter was Jane Smoot (1919-2013), often called “Miss Jane,” “Miss Smoot” or “Miss Jane Smoot.” She taught English and foreign languages at Austin high schools for 40 years and, over the course of decades, she lovingly preserved this homestead and its history.
Her guardian, nurse and friend was the formerly enslaved Jenny Moore, who was one of the African American servants who did much of the work on what was once an urban farm located not far from the post-emancipation freedom colony called Clarksville. A chapter is devoted to her.
Rarely has a house and garden been so lovingly documented, in part because the industrious and history-minded Jane lived in the place for most of her life. She died in 2013.
Her grandfather, the Rev. Smoot, moved his ministry from Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Austin in 1876. He led the small Southern Presbyterian Church, also called the Free Presbyterian Church, as distinct from the Northern Presbyterian Church, which had also attracted a following in Austin.
The family lived in a log cabin just east of the Capitol until their brick Victorian Italianate house on Pecan Street, now West Sixth, was completed in 1877.
In some ways, Austin was still the Wild West, and the Smoots interacted regularly with gunslinger Ben Thompson, who was elected Austin city marshal in 1881. Three years later, after gangsters killed Thompson in San Antonio, the Rev. Smoot preached at his funeral.
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He certainly became a civic leader.
“There is no man in this state who has come into contact with his impressive personality who is not, and who has not been from that time, better for it,” read one newspaper article about Smoot. “Few men in Austin are better known and perhaps none enjoy a larger measure of public confidence.”
His wife, Sallie Smoot, bought the property for Flower Hill for $1,000 from Captain James H. Raymond, who acquired it in a grant from the Republic of Texas. The two-story, four-room house cost $3,471.45 to build. Trains brought family heirlooms from Kentucky and Tennessee. Richmond Smoot paid the city $100 to extend water lines to the house.
The bricks were fashioned by the Butler Brick Company from Colorado River mud mined in and around what is now Zilker Park.
“In the late afternoon the way sun slants, you can see hand prints and fingerprints all over those bricks,” Jane Smoot said in a 1980 oral history interview.
Extra rooms and a curving carriage drive were added during the following decades. The Smoots planted fruit and nut trees as well as terraces of flowers that were shared with families all over Austin.
The little lake, however, annoyed a neighbor who felt like it caused her chronic illnesses, so the Smoots took it out, and the natural spring that fed the lake flowed into a creek that trickled down the middle of what is now Pressler Street.
The Rev. Smoot was not paid regularly or well for his position at Southern Presbyterian, but his son Lawrence recalled that he would drop everything to visit the sick, preach a funeral, or officiate at a wedding. He served on many Presbyterian boards, as chaplain of the Texas Senate from 1882 to 1891, and he offered dedicatory prayers when the cornerstone of UT’s Old Main was laid.
In 1882, he started training theological students at Flower Hill, the seed for the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, which opened north of the UT campus in 1902.
Among the most famous events at Flower Hill, however, was the sitting-room wedding of William Porter, later known as the author O. Henry, but at the time just a cigar salesman at the Driskill Hotel, to Athol Estes, who came from a socially distinguished family. Their elopement cause a bit of a scandal, but the Rev. Smoot could tell that his two congregants who sang in the choir were very much in love.
Asher Graham Smoot started writing for the Daily Statesman, an ancestor of the American-Statesman, when he was only 17 years old. Known in print as “A.G.,” he joined every civic group in town that would have him. A cheerful optimist, he was dubbed “the long-hair poet of the Statesman.” In 1914, he cofounded the rival Austin American with Henry Sevier.
Asher traveled widely and died at age 46 of apoplexy and chronic malaria. His ties to the Statesman and the American, which were brought under the same business roof in 1924, remained his primary legacy.
“In addition to this work on these two papers, to whose interests practically his entire newspaper career was devoted, Mr. Smoot also acted from time to time as a correspondent for some of the leading papers of the country,” read the 1922 edition of “The Encyclopedia of Texas.” “As a writer, Mr. Smoot gave evidence of rare ability, humor, tinged with clever analytical depiction, characterizing his style, and making his articles and editorials peculiarly readable.”
His brother Lawrence Kelley Smoot was only 1 year old when he made the long trip from Bowling Green to Austin and never developed Asher’s worldly ways.
“Flower Hill was a grand place for a small boy,” Lawrence wrote in a memoir. “Until I started school I had the place to myself. Papa saw to it that there was a pile of sand in the back yard all of the time. Mama always had a box of empty spools, from which she had used the thread in making our clothes.
“She and I worked out a way to put those spools together and make trains of them. Those trains and that sand pile were the making of a big railroad system, with tunnels running through it. All of this was fine until our little dog would plant himself right in the middle of the system, thus wrecking it, and I would have to rebuild.”
Latimer quotes Lawrence’s charming unpublished memoir extensively on the subjects of school, play, college and work. He intended to become a banker, but took a job as an assistant librarian at the Texas State Law Library in 1995. He earned a law degree by attending UT night classes.
Yet he stayed in the employ of the Texas Supreme Court and its library until he was appointed reporter of the court in 1932. He retired in 1961 after working for the court — and becoming acquainted with its characters — over the course of 66 years.
Outdoorsy and handy with tools, he helped make Flower Hill a children’s wonderland for his daughter Jane and their little friends.
His wife, Julia Emma Williams Smoot, a history teacher who taught at Allan Junior High and Austin High, was one of several independent women in the family. She insisted on taking summer courses at Harvard University whether her family approved or not.
An excellent cook, she kept up the Smoot tradition and style of gardening at Flower Hill.
In 1925, Julia was responsible for adding the big white columns to the front porches of the house. At first, she was going to purchase them from the Swisher family, which owned a big house on West Fourth Street, but Dr. Z.T. Scott — father of actor and Zach Theatre namesake Zachary Scott — bought the whole Swisher house and moved it to Tarrytown, where it still stands. Julia was not deterred, and Flower Hill’s columns were built from six huge cypress trees that stood upstream near Deep Eddy.
Julia spent considerable time overseeing the chickens, other livestock and grounds of what was what we would call an “urban farm” today. In fact, prior to World War II, many if not most Austinites produced much of their own food.
Jane Smoot, the primary steward of Flower Hill, benefited from other strong women role models in her early life. Latimer’s book shares stories of her aunt, Amelia Worthington Williams, a distinguished historian who taught history at UT from 1925 to 1951 and whose dissertation was the first scholarly study of the survivors of the Alamo, and of Jenny Moore, who was “an intimate and essential part of life at Flower Hill for three generations.”
“Jenny was 15 years old when slavery was abolished,” Jane Smoot wrote, “and she came to Texas with a family migrating westward after the Civil War. She continued living with them in their settlement near Hornsby Bend until she heard there was better work in town.
“Jenny and my grandparents arrived in Austin at about the same time … and they needed each other. Somehow they connected and Jenny became an integral part of the Smoot household.”
Early in Jane’s life, while both her parents worked, Moore raised the only child. An astute businesswoman, Moore was able to buy a parcel of land for her family near O. Henry Junior High, which is at 2610 W. 10th St. She lived past 90 years old and died in the mid-1940s.
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Precocious and excellent at school, Jane started taking courses at UT at age 15. After earning her master’s degree, she taught English and foreign languages at University Junior High, Fulmore Junior High (now Lively), Austin High and Travis High. From 1945 to 1948, she taught English to soldiers returning from World War II at UT.
Her family took in boarders and Flower Hill was often filled with activity and stories, although in retrospect, the quiet oasis was slow to shrug off the customs of the 19th century.
“Jane remembered that her family was the last one in the neighborhood to have a radio,” Latimer writes, “and possibly the last in Austin to have a television.”
If you ever tour Flower Hill, you’ll likely feel that its stewards have caught the urban-rural life of early Texas in amber.
Although she never married, Jane was very much part of Austin’s civil and social life. She joined numerous charitable clubs and was a prime figure at multiple Presbyterian churches. She won multiple awards and honors, and, in 2011, when she was 92, the Texas Senate recognized her lifelong work as an educator.
She lived alone at Flower Hill for 45 years after her father died.
In the 1990s, however, John Plyler came on to do some yard work.
“When I came to Flower Hill to talk with Miss Smoot, I immediately recognized her as a very upright woman,” Plyler told Latimer. “I knew she had all the integrity in the world and I respected her very much. As small and fragile as she looked, you couldn’t judge that book by its cover. She was a strong individual.”
After 20 years of working together, Jane appointed Plyler a trustee of the Flower Hill Foundation, founded in 2004, which eventually gave birth to the urban homestead museum. For a time, the Heritage Society of Austin, now Preservation Austin, was designated as one of the partners on the Flower Hill project, but after years of disagreements, the foundation and the nonprofit parted ways.
It fell to Soto and the board to figure out Flower Hill’s legacy, post-Jane. Yet Jane left behind rooms full of evidence about what she wanted for the place.
At the very back of a file drawer labeled “Letters, Diaries, Albums and Spoons,” for instance, Soto discovered a shoebox filled with cassette tapes.
“Twenty-six hours of Miss Jane Smoot’s oral history,” Soto recalls. “In one of the later tapings, in between an exploration of her teaching philosophy and detailed stories about her childhood growing up in the young city of Austin, Miss Smoot reminds us that people through time are intrinsic treasures.
“Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone is worth a book.”
Michael Barnes writes about the people, places, culture and history of Austin and Texas. He can be reached at [email protected].
Flower Hill is at 1316 West Sixth St. The homestead museum is closed for a renovation project. Information, including about when tours might resume: flowerhillfoundation.org
