Austin Found Podcast

Austin Found is a history show about Austin, Texas, and it works at street level. Its subjects have addresses: a theater now at Lamar and Riverside, a house museum across 24th Street from a freedom colony, a high school whose name has since changed. The talk is a back-and-forth between Michael Barnes and J.B. Hager, sometimes joined by a guest from the place under discussion. The questions are the kind a newcomer might ask. What does it mean that an archaeological site has been covered back up? Who controls that land now? The answers come with names, dates and specifics, and now and then a question prompts a promise to follow up on a later show. The Zach Theatre conversation goes back to the 1920s, when towns were building libraries, reading clubs and community theaters as people moved off farms. It also airs a view the speaker concedes is a minority one: that movies freed live theater to be more artistically adventurous once it was no longer mass entertainment. It closes on endurance, with a reminder, framed around the pandemic, that such groups made it through the Depression, recessions, wars and plagues. The Austin Symphony episode is about scale and money, explaining why the Austin Symphony is a part-time orchestra, its musicians working by contract hours, while San Antonio kept a costly full-time one. The Neill-Cochran House gets two episodes, and the second asks listeners to hear the first before it. Part one follows the house's occupants, beginning with students and teachers of the Texas Asylum for the Blind and reaching Fletcher Stockdale, the Civil War lieutenant governor who handed the keys to Texas to Andrew Hamilton, the provisional governor during Reconstruction. Part two takes up cisterns and Wheatville, whose residents were the site's first neighbors and probably worked there. The show keeps the harder chapters in view. One conversation recounts an all-white school board naming schools after Confederate figures on the heels of integration, a choice described as a jab at communities of color; those names have since been changed. The same story brings in Jacqueline McGee, remembered as an English department head and dean of students whose work reached journalism, student government and the school songs for Johnston. The house museum conversation also raises a slave dwelling on the property that may be one of the last intact ones still standing. An episode titled We Turn the Clock Back 20,000 Years concerns an archaeological site now in the care of the Archaeological Conservancy, reburied under soil for protection and open to tours for a group of ten. Some of these stories come from volume four of Indelible Austin, and Michael Barnes uses one sign-off to offer himself as a speaker for clubs, churches and businesses. For a first listen, try the two Neill-Cochran House episodes in order, since the second picks up where the first leaves off. Episodes close on the same two words: 'happy trails.'