Historical Marker #14310

I spent a lovely Sunday this past weekend on Lake Georgetown. With the spontaneity and lack of planning that I love, I packed a lunch, a book, and some water, drove up there, dropped my kayak in the water, and picked a direction. I paddled for about an hour and a half, beached my kayak at an unoccupied camp ground, ate lunch and read for a bit, then set out on a hike. I walked for about an hour and a half round trip, embarked again, and paddled my tired butt back to my car. It was a wonderful, refreshing, renewing day spent entirely alone, and I loved it.

But I completely forgot to look for a historical marker along the way. Maybe that's how this is supposed to go, though: find random markers on my adventures without trying.

Instead, I saw one a few days ago that had more or less become invisible to me. I spend a lot of time on the Brushy Creek Regional Trail. It's where my son and I met friends for tricycle play dates lo, these many long years ago. We've geocached it. We've walked it, run it, and biked it. It's where I first experimented with letting my son out of my sight in public, letting him pedal his training-wheeled bicycle far ahead of me as I walked, trusting that he would wait, or come back, and that the boogeymen of child abductors with which parents are constantly tormented these days would not find or harass him in brightly lit, well-used public spaces.

I've logged many miles on that trail. I trained for my 2012 half marathon there. I ran farther than a 10K for the first time there, running 12.5 miles and hobbling back to my car after, almost unable to walk. And in all of those miles walked, run, and biked, I have passed by this historical marker at one end of Brushy Creek Sports Park so many times that I've ceased to see it all. So I stopped and took its picture the other day. I had never once, in all that time, actually read it. It tells the story of granite traveling by railroad from Burnet County to the site of the new capitol, and how some of that granite fell off the flat cars and into the creek bed here. Since it hadn't cost them much, they cared not, and left it there.

I love this story because the capitol grounds are also a special place in my memory. We've spent some quality time there over the years. We've snacked and fed the squirrels. We've geocached and caught Pokémon there. We've spun until we're dizzy underneath the rotunda, climbed all of the stairs, and discovered and played hide and seek in what my son likes to believe is "the secret basement," though there's a gift shop there, which leads me to believe its existence is not such a secret. We were there to stand with Wendy Davis when she tried valiantly and ultimately failed to prevent the tyranny of the majority. We were there for our city's march in global solidarity the day after the inauguration in January this year. We've spent a lot of time on the stairs, in the hallways, among the trees and statues, and in the shadow of all that stone. It's pleasing to know that our own corner of the world has a part in the story of that pink granite.

Passing the historical marker and heading towards the sports park, a runner will cross a foot bridge, then pass under a kind of chain link awning beneath the railroad tracks. It's a popular spot. I've seen quinceañera and wedding photos staged here, parents stopping to refuel cranky children with snacks, cyclists resting mid-ride. I've often wondered what this awning is meant to protect us from, perhaps from random flotsam shaken loose from the tracks or the trains themselves as they pass. It now amuses me to choose to believe it's intended to protect us from falling blocks of granite and indeed entire trains that slip now and then from the tracks above. I suspect chain link will be entirely insufficient to the task.

In the 1880s, the arrival of the railroad helped develop western Williamson County and contributed to the construction of a new state capitol. When quarried limestone proved deficient for the new statehouse, contractors chose granite from Burnet County outcroppings. The Austin and Northwestern Railroad, which ran through this area and established Brueggerhoff (Cedar Park) and Leander, extended to the Granite Mountain quarry site in 1885. More than 4,000 flatcars passed through here in 1886-87, carrying the large blocks of pink granite to Austin. Three dozen blocks that tumbled off the tracks were left in the creekbed, since the state obtained its building stone free of charge. The Texas State Capitol was completed in 1888. (2008) Marker is property of the state of Texas

One of the City of Cedar Park signs next to the historical marker reads, "While the granite hauling job financially secured the troubled Northwestern Railroad, occassionally an entire train went into the ditch. Such a train wreck happened on the southwestern corner of the Brushy Creek Recreational Park property, causing several massive blocks of granite to be dumped into the Brushy Creek. These stones never arrived in Austin to be used in the construction of the Texas State Capitol and remain intact and undisturbed just as they fell in the late 1880s." In all the years that I've been passing through here, I've never noticed the huge blocks or wondered how they got here. Now I'll they'll never be invisible again.