Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Seems like there are more plantations and museums showing what slavery was like in Richmond. Austin's early history included a large portion of slavery. The culture is not as indicative today, but it was definitely there.
Seems like there are more plantations and museums showing what slavery was like in Richmond. Austin's early history included a large portion of slavery. The culture is not as indicative today, but it was definitely there.
The topic of this thread is the peripheries of the two cities. I know Austin better than Richmond, and for good historical reasons the peripheries of Austin are barely Southern except to the northeast of the MSA. While Austin was mostly founded by slave-owning Southerners, by the time of the civil war, it looks pretty different - most of central Texas, particularly the hill country, is not settled by Southerners but by Germans fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848, so commie, abolitionist Germans to boot, who set up utopian socialist communes in towns like Boerne and Comfort. Karl Marx's brother-in-law moves to New Braunfels. There is a statue in Comfort of the young German men massacred for refusing to join the Confederacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treue_der_Union_Monument
While one should not downplay the the importance of slavery in Texas history - it is after all the state that gave us Juneteenth, central Texas is too dry and rocky for cotton or tobacco plantations, and its patterns of white settlement are quite different from points east.While the hill country today is a different kind of red to what it was in the nineteenth century- the German influence is still palpable in the southern and western and northwestern peripheries of Austin - in the food - kolaches, smoked sausage and the distinctive German influence on Texas BBQ; architecture - most of the towns in the hill country are built in Central European style, often by German and Czech stonemasons. There is not much Neo-classical anything. And Texas German is recognized as a dialect by most linguists. It is a dying language but you can occasionally still hear it spoken in towns like Fredericksburg. Driving southeast of Austin to Schulenberg, you hit the Painted Churches of Texas. https://thedaytripper.com/the-painte...hes-road-trip/ many if not most towns in central Texas have German names.
I think only to the northeast of Austin do you get a more clearly Southern feel. Taylor, just east of Georgetown is sometimes called the westernmost town in East Texas, and East Texas is indisputably Southern in my book. Increasingly overlaying this historical bedrock is generic sunbelt suburbia, and in the hill country this looks more like a scrubby Temecula than anywhere else . . .
Last edited by homeinatx; 09-14-2022 at 08:23 AM..
That being said, Richmond is not as southern as people make it to be - especially as the Northeast influence move southward. It's just that in comparison to Austin, which has almost zero southern-ness, RVA "won".
Austin ultimately has too many Hispanics (mainly Mexicans) for it to be very "southern". Throw in all the transplants and it feels even less southern. The demographics feel more like Californian metro areas (i.e. SF Bay Area or LA where African-American population are more or less no longer there) than your stereotypical southern "White + Black segregated with not many Hispanics/Asians". The stereotype applies to basically every single larger metro in the "South" other than Atlanta especially Gwinnett County. Raleigh/Durham and Nashville is heading away slightly but is still very "zebra" in terms of population.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
