Summer Project
I have a lot of new things to talk about this week. I would like to reflect on completing the CREATURE Marin City Project, and my group’s process and experience with it. I would also like to mull over the readings on Oslo and Fjord Cities we discussed Wednesday. But another project I finished this week was completely outside of school for the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail. I’m proud of the work I did, and now I am just awaiting the next steps…
To preface, this was an unpaid, spur of the moment summer internship that I sort of wrote the description and pitched the idea for. Since this past summer was such a mess, it gave me some purpose and some experience when other internships fell through. Below is the article I wrote describing the project for the yearly ElCaT publication.
Lillian Byrd is in her second year in the Master of Landscape Architecture program at University of California Berkeley. Her research in spring 2020 focused on the repurposed quarry in San Antonio, TX that is today Brackenridge Park, and limestone extraction as a resource that has shaped the modern Texas architectural and cultural landscape. She drew inspiration from the travel journals of Frederick Law Olmsted in his book A Journey Through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier in 1957, where he travelled very same route as the Camino Real de los Tejas south as far as San Antonio. She continues to be interested in cultural landscapes of Texas and their histories in relation to physical geography and geomorphology.
I had the privilege this past summer of returning to Texas to assist a project with the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail. There was an opportunity to collaborate with a private developer whose mixed-use housing development, “Estancia” encompasses a section of the El Camino Real and a particular crossing mentioned in Espinosa’s writings at modern day Onion Creek and Old San Antonio Rd (not to be confused with the OSR section of the historic trail). The developer, Stratford Land, was obligated by the county to commemorate this section of the road in a small historic plaza, and herein came our opportunity.
After research and site visits, I proposed a conceptual plan for the Estancia plaza that would not only commemorate the history but capture the historic importance of the land features. The design is simple. It includes roadway and pedestrian signage to notify visitors that they are on the nationally recognized historic trail, but more importantly a series of educational exhibits. The first is at the Live Oak Paraje, which reflects the features of a campsite with live oak grove adjacent to grassland savannah, where travelers likely would have set up camp under the trees and allowed livestock to graze in the field. Another poignant site worth commemoration is the Onion Creek Crossing, or Garrapatas Crossing. This limestone-bedded creek shows a glimpse of the geography to the west, but was also formerly full of gravel, making it a place — and perhaps the furthest west part of the creek — that was easy for livestock and wheeled carts to cross. Just up the hill from here is a registered archaeological site, which indicates that this area was occupied and heavily used for centuries by indigenous peoples prior to colonialization in North America.
I have been back and forth between Texas and California over the past year, crossing many of the landscapes travelled by the Spanish missionaries. The movement along the convergence of the Edwards Escarpment and the Blackland Prairie became especially interesting to me because of the available resources for travelers. Abundance of water from aquifer-fed springs and the ease of movement and cattle-grazing on rich prairie soils is evident to anyone familiar with this part of Texas. This project allowed me to work alongside the National Parks Service and further reinstate my love and pride in the Texas landscape; a pride that we share, and which translates into our environmental stewardship and commemoration for geographic history.
