Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from An Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Austin County, Texas
Toward the southeast the surface of the country slopes down through a succession of beautiful mountains and hills to vast levels, which appear to have been recently the bottom of the sea. These levels are nearly all prairies; they present to the spectator a striking image of the expanse of the sea, which indeed they join by so gentle a gradient that they are distinguished to the eye by the blue of the water and the green of the plain, rather than by the elevation of the coast, and the feeble tides of the gulf maintain a ceaseless dispute with the land for an uncertain boundary.
Austin county, in its southern portion, includes the inland margin of the level prairies. In the northwest the boundary lines of the county run over rolling hills which rise to an average height of fifty feet above the intervening valleys. Some hills are more than a hundred feet in height and afford views of very beautiful and extensive landscapes. The general surface of the county rises from southeast to northwest about three hundred feet. The streams course to the southeast as do most others in Texas. One considerable tributary of the Brazos river crosses the county. This stream now called Mill creek, was known to the Spaniards as the Palmetto (from a species of dwarf palm common to the Mississippi valley which grows profusely on its lower course.) This stream is formed by the union of two principal branches, the east and west Mill creeks, having their sources in Washington county, and an immense number of tributary rivulets which flow in from all sides in Austin county. Two other independent tributaries of the Brazos rise and run their course in this county named by the early settlers, from natural features which designated them, the Caney and the Piney creeks, though the cane brake near the mouth of one and a few scattered pines on the other, are very trivial in extent. Their sources are in the forests of oaks. Their tributary branches run between prairie hills crowned with groves, and announce their course down the valleys by fringes of thickets and waterside trees. In the Southwest two sources of the St. Bernard river, rising in the oak woods, run, with few tributaries, a solitary and shadeless course through sandy prairies, until they leave the county before any considerable stream is formed. There are perhaps more springs and living streams in Austin county than in any other in Texas, and there are but few counties in the United States so well supplied with running water.
A belt of oak forest, which has an average width of five miles, extends across Austin county from northeast to southwest perpendicular to the general course of the streams.
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