Coupland, Texas

Everything Coupland is known for

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Music in Coupland

Songs About Coupland

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Artists From Coupland

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Rivers & Roads in Song near Coupland

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Coupland.

Interstate 35 43 songs Texas Colorado River 6 songs Texas State Highway 71 2 songs Pedernales River 6 songs Blanco River 4 songs

Musical Heritage

From Elgin's Classroom to Ray Charles's Band RoadyGoat

After finishing his music degree at Huston-Tillotson in Austin in nineteen sixty two, a young pianist named James Polk took a job teaching at Washington High School, Elgin's all-Black school. He also started a band, James Polk and the Brothers, which was hailed as one of the first integrated bands in Austin and could play rooms that were otherwise closed to Black musicians. By the late nineteen seventies, Ray Charles called and offered him a job as pianist for the Ray Charles Orchestra, and over the next ten years Polk's role kept growing, to organist, arranger and conductor.

RoadyGoat → · 7.6 mi away

History of Coupland

The Major Who Never Farmed Here RoadyGoat

1859

Coupland was named for a man who barely lived here. Major Theodore Van Buren Coupland was born in Alabama in 1836 and made his career far away, serving as collector of customs at the port of New Orleans. The land came through family. His granduncle, Texas senator Morgan C. Hamilton, had gathered tracts along Brushy Creek starting in 1859. When Hamilton died in 1883, the Brushy Creek land passed to Coupland. In 1887, with the Taylor, Bastrop and Houston Railway pushing through, Coupland sold the line a 100-foot right-of-way, and the Coupland City Company platted a town on the new tracks. He got the name; the railroad got the traffic. The first post office opened under John Goetz on December 28, 1889. Coupland himself died just days later, on January 3, 1890.

The Ground That Breathes RoadyGoat

1902

The dark cropland around Coupland sits on one of the strangest soils on Earth. This is the Blackland Prairie, and its signature dirt, Houston Black clay, is a vertisol: 40 to 60 percent clay made largely of smectite, a mineral that swells when wet and shrinks when it dries. In a dry Central Texas summer the ground literally splits open, with cracks half an inch to four inches wide reaching a foot or more down. Then rain comes, the clay drinks it, and the cracks seal shut. That heave and settle can crack a house foundation or a road, which is why builders here design for it. The same fat clay held water and nutrients for cotton, and by the late 1800s the Blacklands were the leading cotton region of Texas, which is exactly what put a gin and a railroad at Coupland.

One Building, A Dozen Lives RoadyGoat

1904

The dance hall at 101 Hoxie Street has worn more hats than most whole towns. The building went up in 1904 on Coupland's railroad main street. By 1911 it housed the Coupland Drug Company. In 1948 it became Albers Drugstore, where three doctors kept an office and treated patients with a hand-powered x-ray machine. Over the decades the same walls also held a hardware store, a newspaper, a grocery, and a tavern. The honky-tonk chapter came late. In 1992, Tim and Barbara Worthy converted the former Speckles grocery into a Texas-sized dance hall of more than 7,000 square feet, and lodging and a country kitchen followed above and beside the floor. A drugstore floor became a dance floor, and the old brick kept every previous life stacked underneath it.

Coupland, Theodore Van Buren

1883

T. V. Coupland, military officer, lawman, and government official, was born on October 16, 1836, in Jefferson County, Alabama, the son of Hugh and Kerenhappuch (Hamilton) Coupland and a grand nephew of Texas governor Andrew Jackson Hamilton and Texas senator Morgan C. Hamilton . He settled in Austin, Texas, before the Civil War and served as deputy sheriff in Travis County until secession , when, along with other Unionists and Masons in Central Texas, he moved to Mexico and later New Orleans. In that federally occupied city, Coupland joined a socially and politically prominent group, accepted a commission as a major in the First Texas Cavalry, U.S.A. He was mustered out in 1865. On December 21 of that year he married Frances Flanders, daughter of a New Orleans ship owner and niece of a Louisiana governor. Until 1883 Coupland held appointments as collector of customs for the port of New Orleans and as deputy clerk of the United States circuit court. In 1883, Coupland, his wife, and their son Frank Hamilton Coupland returned to Texas to land the elder Coupland inherited from his uncle, Senator Hamilton, on Brushy Creek in Williamson County. There Coupland farmed and ranched until his death, on January 3, 1890. Ostensibly because of his and his wife's family's extensive connections with developing rail lines in Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico, the community of Coupland, in southern Williamson County on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, was named for him in 1887.

Tsha Handbook →

United States Senator Morgan C. Hamilton

1809

(1809-93) An outstanding patriot who acted as Secretary of War and Marine in Republic of Texas and later served the state in many roles, Morgan Hamilton in 1837 obtained a 1009-acre land grant in this area. While his brother A.J. Hamilton was governor (1865-66), he retrieved for Texas some bonds sent to Europe during the Civil War. In 1870-77 he served as a United States Senator from Texas. His nephew Theodore Van Buren Coupland (1836-90) settled here and in 1887 founded town of Coupland on land that formerly belonged to Senator Hamilton. (1975)

Historical Marker →

Battle of Brushy Creek

1839

A skirmish between Comanche raiders and a local militia near here in mid-winter (1839) led to the last major battle between Anglo settlers and Indians in Williamson County. The Comanche retaliated on February 18, 1839, by attacking several area homes, including those of Mrs. Robert Coleman and Dr. J. W. Robertson. Mrs. Coleman and her son, Albert, were killed. Another son, Tommy, and seven of Robertson's slaves were taken captive. The ensuing battle along nearby Brushy Creek claimed the lives of Jacob Burleson, Edward Blakely, the Rev. James Gilleland, and John B. Walters. (1993)

Historical Marker → · 4.1 mi away

Rice, James O.

1835

(1815 - about 1875) South Carolina-born James O. Rice migrated to Texas by 1835 and served in the Texas Army during the War for Independence. In early days of the Republic of Texas, he protected frontier settlements as part of a Texas Ranger company. On May 17, 1839, in command of a volunteer force clashing with Mexican troops led by Manuel Flores on the North San Gabriel River, Rice captured vitally important documents related to the Cordova Rebellion against the Republic of Texas. He joined the Somervell and Mier Expeditions of 1842 and the Snively Expedition of 1843. He also served in the Mexican War (1846-48). For military services, he received several bounties of land. When Williamson County was created in 1848, Rice was one of the commissioners named to select a site for the county seat. One of the county's largest landowners, Rice built his home on Brushy Creek about one mile west of here at a site then known as Blue Hill and later called Rice's Crossing. He ran a store and was postmaster of Blue Hill post office, 1849-57. For a short time, he had a tanyard in Georgetown. Rice married Nancy D. Gilliland (d. 1860), of an early Texas family. The couple had four daughters. Rice is buried in the Sneed Family Cemetery near Austin. (1977)

Historical Marker → · 4.3 mi away

Avery, Frederick Bean [Tex]

1908

Frederick Bean “Tex” Avery, cartoonist, animator, and director, was born in Taylor, Texas, on February 26, 1908, to George Walton Avery and Mary Augusta “Jessie” (Bean) Avery. He grew up in Dallas and attended North Dallas High School, where he drew cartoons for the school newspaper and yearbook. He graduated from high school in 1926 and then studied at the Chicago Art Institute, where he received instruction from newspaper cartoonists as well as fine artists. After these studies, he returned to Dallas for a brief period and worked odd jobs. Thinking his ambition to be a newspaper cartoonist would be easier to realize in California, Avery moved to Los Angeles by 1929. Unfortunately, breaking into this already crowded field had become more difficult in the 1920s. The increasing popularity of radio had given Americans an alternate source of news and entertainment, and the number of daily newspapers was on the decline. The animation industry, however, was in its infancy and was receptive to the likes of Avery. Avery’s first job was with Walter Lantz, best-known as the creator of Woody Woodpecker, at Universal Studios. While employed at Universal, where he was given the nickname “Tex,” Avery worked on the popular Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series. A jack of all trades, he painted backgrounds, wrote gags and stories, drew storyboards (a pre-production task similar to drawing a comic strip) and worked as an “in-betweener.” The latter was a term for an artist responsible for the drawings in between the main, or “key,” drawings, which were handled by the animator. Today in-betweening is largely handled by computers. While at Universal, Avery lost sight in his left eye due to some office horseplay. Also, he met his future wife, Patricia Agnes Johnson, who also worked for the studio. They married in 1935 and later had two children. After a salary dispute in 1934, Avery applied for work at Warner Brothers. Pretending he had worked as a supervisor (in other words, as a director) while at Universal, he talked his way into a job with producer Leon Schlesinger and auditioned by supervising the 1935 cartoon Gold Diggers of ’49 with Porky Pig. The cartoon was well-received so Avery became a full-time supervisor. At Warner Brothers, Avery worked at “Termite Terrace,” a ramshackle, termite-infested five-room cottage at 5800 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood (in the 2010s the space was occupied by KTLA-TV). While employed there, he worked with a clutch of talented artists, including Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, all of whom made their mark in the animation industry. While at Warner Brothers, Avery introduced and/or developed a number of characters who have remained popular into the twenty-first century. In 1937 he introduced Daffy Duck in Porky’s Duck Hunt . According to Avery, he first conceived of the character while hunting ducks on White Rock Lake in Dallas. This early version of Daffy lived up to his name, but subsequent directors toned him down. Also in 1937 Avery created an Elmer Fudd predecessor named Egghead in Egghead Rides Again . The character was modified over the next few years until the Elmer Fudd familiar to viewers today was introduced in A Wild Hare , a 1940 opus retrospectively credited as the first true Bugs Bunny cartoon. Although Warner Brothers had employed a rabbit character in earlier cartoons, it had little in common with Avery’s rabbit. Nevertheless, the rabbit became known as Bugs because the supervisor of the previous cartoons ( Porky’s Hare Hunt in 1938 and Hare-Um Scare-Um in 1939) was Ben “Bugs” Hardaway. Avery’s rabbit was thus known as “Bugs’ bunny.” Eventually the apostrophe went away, and the character became known as Bugs Bunny, even though Hardaway had moved on to Universal. In contrast to Avery’s zany Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny exhibited self-confident cool composure in a character that animation historian Steve Schneider described as the “brainiest wiseass on the block.” The iconic line “

Tsha Handbook → · 8.3 mi away

Dickey, James Lee

1921

James Lee Dickey, Black physician, the son of John S. and Linnie A. (Sears) Dickey, was born in 1893 in Central Texas, probably near Waco. He attended Waco public schools from 1900 to 1912 and graduated from Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson College) in Austin in 1916. For a brief time he worked as an industrial-arts teacher in Marlin. Then he entered Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tennessee, and graduated in 1921. He planned to go north or east to a large city to practice. But just before graduation his father died in an accident, leaving his mother with eight other children. Dickey traveled to Taylor, Texas, to talk to Dr. J. Richard Moore, the Black doctor there, but upon arrival found that Moore had moved to San Antonio. Dickey later said, "The hand of destiny guided me to Taylor, I came to stay a few years; I remained to do my life's work." He married Magnolia Fowler of Nashville, Tennessee, on November 29, 1922, and brought her to Taylor, where they worked together on many projects, including support of the African Methodist Episcopal Church . At the time, Dickey was the only Black practitioner in Williamson County and one of only 130 Black doctors in Texas. In Central Texas he established a medical facility that began with a three-bedroom clinic and expanded to a fifteen-bed hospital with modern surgical and obstetrical facilities. There were no other provisions for Blacks in any hospital in Williamson County except two beds in a building set apart from one hospital. Dickey discovered that there were no facilities for Blacks in Bell, Lee, Milam, or Bastrop counties. He investigated health problems among the Black population and discovered that the principle causes of death were typhoid fever, diarrhea among infants, convulsions and complications of childbirth, tuberculosis, pellagra, venereal diseases, and violence. He conducted health campaigns and established a prenatal clinic where all expectant mothers who were unable to pay could have free examinations and advice, and established a venereal-disease clinic to treat those unable to pay. Early in his career he also curbed a typhoid fever epidemic through a vigorous vaccination program. His concerns extended to problems of segregation and emotional suppression of Blacks. Because violence was the cause of numerous deaths, Dickey, along with others, developed recreational facilities for youth. He sought assistance from White physicians and got it. In 1940 the school board bought land for a park for African Americans , and with the help of Black women in the community and donations from leading White citizens erected a building used as a community center. A major gain came when the Taylor Amusement Company opened a balcony where Blacks could attend movies. Dickey observed that "it's hard to realize how much that meant. In earlier years, for example, one man had been whipped with a pistol for simply inquiring if seats were available for Negroes." There was no direct means of reaching the Black school except by a "foot log" over Bull Branch, or over a railroad trestle. During high water children would fall off the log into the sewage-filled water and have to be rescued. Finally, through Dickey's intervention, a bridge was erected across the branch. Dickey received many honors for his community service. He was named the year's most outstanding citizen of Taylor in 1953 by the chamber of commerce, the first time a Black man had been so honored in the community. He was also named general practitioner of the year by the Lone Star State Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association in 1953. Honors were bestowed upon Dickey as he lent time and expertise to service at his alma mater, Tillotson College, where the Science Building is named for him and Theodore K. Lawless, a dermatologist, and where he served on the board of trustees from 1951 to his death. Dickey died in Williamson County on May 18, 1959.

Tsha Handbook → · 8.3 mi away

Things to Do in Coupland

food 24.0 mi away
Franklin Barbecue

Legendary Austin BBQ with 2-3 hour waits. Obama waited in line here.
food 22.9 mi away
Snow's BBQ

Texas Monthly's #1 BBQ. Only open Saturday mornings in tiny Lexington.
historical 24.3 mi away
Texas State Capitol

The Texas Capitol in Austin is taller than the US Capitol in Washington -- three hundred and eight feet to two hundred and eighty-eight -- because Texas wanted…
quirky 24.3 mi away
The Con Man Who Named a Town

Bastrop's namesake Baron de Bastrop was no baron at all. He was a Dutch commoner named Philip Hendrik Nering Bogel wanted for embezzlement in the Netherlands.…
historical 24.4 mi away
The Man Who Survived His Own Scalping

In 1833 Josiah Wilbarger was scouting near Bastrop when Comanches attacked his party with arrows and bullets. They left him for dead after taking his scalp.…
historical 24.6 mi away
Antone's Nightclub

Clifford Antone was a kid from Port Arthur who loved the blues so much he opened a club on East Sixth Street in 1975 and spent the next thirty years flying…
quirky 25.0 mi away
Congress Avenue Bridge Bats

When Austin rebuilt the Congress Avenue Bridge in 1980 the new design accidentally created perfect crevices for Mexican free-tailed bats. By the mid-1990s one…
food 7.4 mi away
Southside Market & Barbeque

Elgin's BBQ originator, established 1882 by William Moon, who slaughtered animals on FM 1704 and sold meat door-to-door by wagon. Now on US 290 — sausage…

Everything Near Coupland

428 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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