Williamson County is booming. People, jobs, traffic, crime and real estate development all hit the sleepy county north of Travis two decades ago like a storm that never let up. That’s the price of close proximity to Austin these days: a blessing and a curse. Things weren’t always this way in the area known as Wilco. For most of history, the land draining into the San Gabriel River was just a placed people passed through on the way other places. For years it was home for a few determined cedar choppers in the hills of the plateau and farmers growing cotton on the prairies to the east. Infamous outlaws on the run, great cattle herds going north and Tonkawa bands heading south – all of them passed through the area that is now Williamson County. Zooming down one of the county’s many busy new highways, it’s difficult to image the area as the vast, empty, treacherous landscape it was until recent times. You can find a few of those wild spots hidden here and there if you know where to look. One is along the Brushy Creek trail near Cedar Park. I went there to paint and found just the right place.
Brushy Creek trail was busy that Saturday morning with people, children, bicycles and dogs. Even walking a mile or so down the trail, one can still hear the low roar of nearby highways and the occasional passing Cap Metro train, making its way between downtown Austin and Leander. It was a different story in the 1880s.
Back then, Texas was building a grand new capitol building in Austin. Land then was cheap, Wilco was mostly empty and Texas did not want to spend much money on its showplace seat of government. A landowner in Llano County offered the state free stone for the new capitol building if the government would pay for quarrying it and hauling it the 60 miles or so from Marble Falls to Austin. The Llano County granite was lovely stuff, with a pale rosy hue and hard as, well, granite. Payoffs were made, favors were paid and soon a short railway was built dedicated to moving the granite to the construction site on a fleet of flat cars that ran between the quarry and downtown Austin 24 hours a day. Over the next few years, the rail cars made thousands of trips carrying the granite into Austin and the plan worked well.
But accidents happen. From time to time, bridges
on the line washed out in flash floods or the cars tipped off the rails, spilling the heavy granite blocks. Reloading the blocks back on the cars was too laborious and the stone came at no cost to the state anyway. So they left it there, right where it fell along the tracks in the wastes of Williamson County. Nearly 140 years later, the granite blocks are still there near the old wooden bridge that crosses Brushy Creek on the trail.
I set up my paint box on the tripod in the shadow of the bridge facing the creek. Every half hour or so, the Cap Metro trained rumbled 30 fee overhead, an echo of where the pink stones came from. There was a light morning rain that gave up after a few minutes and got the creek moving, with a calming sound. Mercifully, low, damp clouds kept the sun hidden. The pecan and walnut trees along the bank had given up their leaves, early casualties of 
Autumn. The osage orange and other bushes had kept theirs, red, yellow and gold. It smelled of fresh-fallen rain and the bitter odor of creosote from the framework of the old bridge. Scattered all around were the roughly dressed blocks of pink granite that fell off the rails long ago. That event must have been a loud and terrifying moment for the stray cattle and jackrabbits nearby who witnessed it here in 1887. The builders from Austin came out, shook their heads and left the mess in the creek. Today it is just a peaceful point along the trail. There are a few other spots around Austin on this rail line where granite blocks tumbled off the cars and were left. I have painted at least one of those spots. The others don’t tell a story like this spot on Brushy Creek does.
My pallet had seven colors, yellow, red, cobalt blue, white and a few earth tones. There were honey bees about; one really liked by my brushes. The darkest element of the scene was the wooden bridge, which I laid in first. Then I mixed the greens, darkest to lightest. The overcast sky came last, just as the clouds began to part and 
reveal patches of the blue Texas sky. I think the paint caught some aspect of this little wild spot on the creek next to the bridge. Come boom or bust, Williamson County will never be like it was. But those pink granite blocks in the creek aren’t going anywhere.
