Austin, Texas In 1839, the city of Waterloo was chosen to be the capital of the new Republic of Texas. A new city was built quickly in the wilderness, and was named after Stephen F. Austin, "the father of Texas." Judge Edwin Waller, who was later to become the city’s first mayor, surveyed the site and laid out a street plan that has survived largely intact to this day. In October 1839, the entire government of the Republic arrived from Houston in oxcarts. By the next January, the town’s population had swollen to 856 people.

By the 1880s, Austin was becoming a city. In 1888, a grand capitol building, advertised as the "7th largest building in the world," was completed on the site originally chosen in the 1839 plan. Funded by very creative financing involving the famous XIT Ranch, the building remains a central landmark on the Austin skyline. It has also, of course, remained the center of one of the city’s most prominent industries—government.

In 1893, the construction of the Great Granite Dam on the Colorado River was another milestone in the city’s growth. The dam stabilized the river and provided hydraulic power to generate electricity, which in turn attracted manufacturers. By 1938, the dam had been replaced by a series of seven U.S. government-funded dams. One official who helped shape these public works was the young congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, who got his start in government work in Austin.

In a lot of ways, the Austin of today is just another city, but it is a very unique city. As of April 2002, over 680,000 call Austin home. Most of the population are not native Austinites, but have moved from other states (or countries) to work in Austin's high-tech industry. Companies like Dell Computer and AMD have their corporate head-quarters in Austin. Austin is also home to the main University of Texas campus, with over 50,000 students.