In 1908, the Texas chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy built a 15-bedroom mansion in Austin’s leafy Hyde Park neighborhood, a mile north of the University of Texas. Intended to house elderly wives and widows of Confederate veterans, the Confederate Woman’s Home, like similar facilities in other southern states, was part of the Daughters’ mission to create “living monuments” to the Confederacy, an effort that also involved erecting hundreds of Confederate memorials across the South in the early decades of the 20th century.
The Confederate Woman’s Home still sits at 3710 Cedar Street, and last summer demonstrators enraged by the murder of George Floyd convened at its doorstep. One protester covered the site’s state historical marker with a sign that read, in part, “the glorification of a white supremacist group is an insult to our BIPOC neighbors.” The building’s current owner, AGE of Central Texas, a nonprofit that provides education to caregivers and the elderly, appeared to get the message. On June 23 it covered the marker with a black plastic bag and attached a notice declaring the organization’s commitment to equal rights.
This gesture of solidarity ignited a battle—over the status of Confederate markers and monuments, over local control, and over private property rights—that has played out over the past year in virtual meetings of the Texas Historical Commission, the state agency charged with historic preservation. In response to this incident and other efforts to remove Confederate memorials across the state, the commission has strengthened protections for Texas historical markers and enacted a new rule requiring a majority vote of the 15-person commission before a state antiquities landmark can be “retired.”
