The Davenport Ranch and the Birth of Westlake

The Early Years

When James Davenport arrived in the Texas Hill Country in the 1850s, the land that would become Westlake was rocky cedar country — useful for grazing, difficult for almost everything else. Travelers from Austin reached the area only by descending to the low-water crossing of the Colorado River at the foot of what is now Bee Cave Road, then climbing the steep grade up onto the ridge.

Davenport was not the first settler in the area, but the parcel he patented in 1854 — described in the records of Travis County as one thousand and twelve acres bounded on the south by the Colorado and on the east by "the Old Bee Cave Trail" — formed a continuous spine of ranchland that would shape almost every later decision about how the hill country west of Austin developed.

A Family on the Bluffs

For three generations the Davenports ran cattle on the limestone ridges above the river. The original ranch house — a modest stone structure photographed by an itinerant traveler in 1890 — stood near what is today the intersection of Westlake Drive and Camp Craft Road. The family supplemented ranch income with cedar-cutting, hauling posts down to Austin in wagons that descended the same crossing travelers used.

In the late 1920s the Davenports began selling pieces of the tract to neighboring families and to a new class of Austin businessmen looking for country property at a reasonable distance from the capital. Among the buyers was Polk Shelton, who purchased a smaller parcel along Bee Cave Road and operated it in partnership with his brother Emmett — the storyteller whose recollections form much of the early audio in this archive.

What Remained

Most of the original Davenport tract was subdivided in the postwar decades, and the ranch house itself was lost to a fire in the 1960s. What remains is the name — preserved in the Davenport Ranch neighborhood and in the records of the Westlake Historical Society — and the long, low silhouette of the land itself, still legible to anyone who turns west off Loop 360 and looks down toward the river.