AUSTIN, SARAH (1793-1867), English author, was born in 1793, the daughter of John Taylor (d. 1826), a wool-stapler and a member of the well-known Taylor family of Norwich. Her great grandfather, Dr John Taylor (1694-1761), had been pastor of the Presbyterian church there, and wrote a once famous polemical work on The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1738), which called forth celebrated treatises by Jonathan Edwards on Original Sin. Her mother, Susannah Cook, was an exceedingly clever woman who transmitted both her beauty and her talent to her daughter. Their friends included Dr Alderson and his daughter Mrs Opie, Henry Crabbe Robinson, the Gurneys and Sir James Mackintosh. Sarah Taylor married in 1820 John Austin (q.v.). They lived in Queen Square, Westminster, where Mrs. Austin, whose tastes, unlike her husband’s, were extremely sociable, gathered round her a large circle, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and the Grotes being especially intimate. She received many Italian exiles, who found a real friend in her. In 1821 was born her only child, Lucie, afterwards Lady Duff-Gordon. Mrs. Austin never attempted any considerable original work, contenting herself chiefly with translations, of which the most important are the History of the Reformation in Germany and the History of the Popes (1840), from the German of Leopold von Ranke, Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia (1834) from the French of V. Cousin, and F.W. Carove’s The Story without an End (1864). After her husband’s death in 1859 she edited his Lectures on Jurisprudence. She also edited the Memoirs of Sydney Smith (1855) and Lady Duff-Gordon’s Letters from Egypt (1865). She died at Weybridge on the 8th of August 1867.
See Three Generations of Englishwomen (1888), by her grand-daughter, Mrs Janet Ross.
AUSTIN, STEPHEN FULLER (1793-1836), American pioneer, was born in Austinville, Wythe county, Virginia, on the 3rd of November 1793. He was the son of Moses Austin (1767-1821), a native of Durham, Connecticut, who in 1820 obtained from Mexico a grant of land for an American colony in Texas, but died before he could carry out his project. The son was educated in New London, Connecticut, and at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, and settled in Missouri, where he was a member of the territorial legislature from 1813 to 1819. In 1819 he removed to Arkansas Territory, where he was appointed a circuit judge. After his father’s death he obtained a confirmation of the Texas grants from the newly established Mexican government, and in 1821-1823 he established a colony of several hundred American families on the Brazos river, the principal town being named, in his honour, San Felipe de Austin. He was a firm defender of the rights of the Americans in Texas, and in 1833 he was sent to the city of Mexico to present a petition from a convention in Texas praying for the erection of a separate state government. While there, despairing of success for his petition, he wrote home recommending the organization of a state without waiting for the consent of the Mexican congress. This letter falling into the hands of the Mexican government, Austin, while returning home, was arrested at Saltillo, carried as a prisoner back to Mexico, and imprisoned for a year without trial. Returning to Texas in 1835, he found the Texans in armed revolt against Mexican rule, and was chosen commander-in-chief of the revolutionary forces, but after failing to take San Antonio he resigned the command, for which he had never considered himself fitted, and in November 1835 went to the United States as a commissioner to secure loans and supplies, and to learn the position the United States authorities would be likely to take in the event of a declaration of Texan independence. He succeeded in raising large sums, and received assurances that satisfied him that Americans would look with great favour on an independent Texas. Returning to Texas in the summer of 1836, he became a candidate, rather reluctantly, for the presidency of the newly established republic of Texas, but was defeated by Samuel Houston, under whom he was secretary of state until his sudden death on the 7th of December 1836.
See A Comprehensive History of Texas, edited by D.G. Wooten (2 vols., Dallas, 1898).
AUSTIN, a city and the county-seat of Mower county, Minnesota, U.S.A., on the Red Cedar river and Turtle creek, (by rail) 105 m. S. of Minneapolis and 100 m. from St Paul. Pop. (1900) 5474; (1905, state census) 6489 (913 foreign-born); (1910, U.S. census) 6960. It is served by the Chicago Great Western and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul railways. Austin is the seat of the Southern Minnesota Normal College and Austin School of Commerce (1896), and has a Carnegie library, court house and city hall. It is a market for livestock, and for dairy and farm products, and has slaughtering and packing establishments, flour mills, creameries and cheese factories, canning and preserving factories, carriage works, a flax fibre mill and grain elevators. Brick, tile, sewer-pipe, and hydraulic cement are manufactured, and there are railway repair shops. A valuable water-power is utilized for manufacturing purposes. Fresh-water pearls of considerable value and beauty are found in the Red Cedar river. The city owns and operates its own water-supply system and electric-lighting plant. Austin was settled in 1855, was incorporated as a village in 1868, and was chartered as a city in 1873.
AUSTIN, the capital of Texas, U.S.A., and the county-seat of Travis county, on the N. bank of the Colorado river, near the centre of the state and about 145 m. W.N.W. of Houston. Pop. (1890) 14,575; (1900) 22,258, of whom 5822 were negroes; (1910 census) 29,860. Austin is served by the Houston & Texas Central, the International & Great Northern, and the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railways. The city is built on high bluffs 40-120 ft. above the river, which is spanned here by a bridge, built in 1874. The Texas State Capitol, a handsome building of red Texas granite, with a dome 318 ft. high, cost more than $3,500,000, and stands in a square in the centre of the city. It was built (1881-1888) by Chicago capitalists in exchange for a land grant of 3,000,000 acres. It is in the form of a Greek cross, with an extreme length of 556.5 ft. and an extreme width of 288.8 ft. Next to the National Capitol at Washington, it is the largest capitol building in the United States, and it is said to be one of the ten largest buildings in the world. Austin is the seat of the University of Texas (opened in 1883; co-educational); the medical department of the state university is at Galveston, and the departments in Austin are the college of arts, department of education, department of engineering, department of law, school of pharmacy, and school of nursing. The government of the university is vested in a board of eight regents nominated by the governor and appointed with the advice and consent of the state senate. At Austin are also state institutions and asylums for the insane, the blind, the coloured deaf and blind; the state school for the deaf and dumb; the state Confederate home; the Confederate woman’s home (1907; for wives and widows of Confederate soldiers and sailors), maintained by the Daughters of the Confederacy; St Mary’s Academy (Roman Catholic, under the supervision of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, founded 1875, chartered 1886); St Edward’s College (Roman Catholic, chartered 1885); the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary (Presbyterian Church, South), opened in 1902 by the Synod of Texas, and after 1905 partly controlled by the Synod of Arkansas; Tillotson College (a negro school under Congregational control, founded by the American Missionary Association, chartered in 1877, and opened in 1881), and Samuel Huston College (for negroes; Methodist Episcopal; opened in 1900 and named in honour of an Iowan benefactor). The principal newspapers of Austin are the Statesman (Democratic, established in 1871), a morning paper, and the Tribune (Democratic, established in 1891), an evening paper. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Society is published here. Austin is the principal trade and jobbing centre for central and western Texas, is an important market for livestock, cotton, grain and wool, and has extensive manufactories of flour, cotton-seed oil, leather goods, lumber and wooden ware; the value of the factory product in 1905 was $1,569,353, being 105.2% more than in 1900. The city owns and operates its water-supply system. In 1890-1893 one of the largest dams in the world, an immense structure of granite masonry, 1200 ft. long. 60-70 ft. high, and 18 to 66 ft. thick, was constructed across the Colorado river 2 m. above the city for the purpose of supplying water and power, creating a reservoir (Lake M‘Donald) about 30 m. long. Freshets in the spring of 1900, however, undermined the wall, and on the 7th of April the dam broke with a resulting loss of several lives and about $1,000,000 worth of property. The rebuilding of the dam was projected in 1907. Austin was first settled in 1838 and was named Waterloo, but in 1839, when it was chosen as the site of the capital of the Republic of Texas, it was renamed in honour of Stephen F. Austin, one of its founders. Under the influence of General Sam Houston the capital was for a time in 1842-1845 removed from Austin to Houston, but in 1845 an ordinance was passed making Austin the capital, and it remained the state capital after Texas entered the Union, although Huntsville and Tehuacana Springs in 1850 and Houston in 1872 attempted in popular elections to be chosen in its place. The first Anglo-American settlement in Texas, established on the Brazos river in 1823 by members of the Austin colony, was San Felipe de Austin now San Felipe. In 1909 Austin adopted a commission form of government.