A secret garden
Go inside Case Mill Homestead’s fertile history on Manor Road
You fly past the old place on Manor Road and wonder: What’s hidden behind all that lush shrubbery?
When you notice the sign — American Botanical Council — another mystery is hatched. Is it some kind of corporate headquarters? Are they doing genetic experiments back there?
For a few Austinites, ABC, as it is known, is no puzzle at all. They can tell you that it’s a well-established nonprofit center with a staff of 13 that gathers and distributes information on wellness through medical botany, a sometimes controversial field that deals
with periodic skepticism from the public and rounds of regu- lation from the government.
ABC, founded and directed by Mark Blumenthal, puts out five peer-reviewed periodicals and holds classes in the handsome but unfussy old house on a rise above Little Walnut Creek.
The horticulturally inclined might be aware that the three-story house is surrounded by more than two acres of 25 themed gardens. Some are named after functions — the First Aid Garden and the Human Body Systems Garden — or for regional cultures, such as the Chinese, Mexican, Indian or French cuisine gardens.
Head gardener Toby Bernal tends these beds in ways that demonstrate how, historically, botanicals have fit into
everyday life.
One more part of this story begs to be told. The 5,000-square-foot house, built in 1853 and expanded in the 1950s, is known as the Case Mill Homestead. It once overlooked 451 acres of what is now University Hills, Windsor Park and adjacent neighborhoods.
“It was ranch land at the time,” Blumenthal says. “They probably also grew wheat here in earlier years. There would have been a grist mill on the creek.”
A bit of history
When city life overtakes nearby country life, as happened in Austin periodically since 1839, sometimes not much of the latter is left behind. The Bouldin Plantation south of the river, for instance, lent its name to a modern neighborhood. Yet there are few traces of the main house other than ancient oaks around Becker Elementary School.
We are more fortunate in retaining once-outlying gems such as the French Legation, Green Pastures, Paggi House and Boggy Creek Farm. Perhaps the lesser-known Case Mill Homestead should be counted among them.
According to a concise history written by ABC’s magazine editor Tyler Smith in 2013, Sherman Case, a clock peddler from Connecticut, and his wife, Rachel, settled on Little Walnut Creek in the early 1850s. The undulating land was part of three land grants, one presented in 1845 by Anson Jones, the Republic of Texas’ last president.
Smith found evidence of Case’s early enterprise in an Oct. 12, 1853, article in the Texas Monument newspaper.
“New farms are continually being opened,” the Monument boasted about the Austin area. “Much wheat will be sown (in) the ensuing season. Mr. Case is building a flour mill and expresses himself confident, that out of Texas wheat he will be able to make good and white flour.”
(It might astonish some readers to discover that wheat is still grown within the Austin city limits. Not long ago, former Travis County Commissioner Rupert Ceder invited this reporter into his wheat and corn fields off Old Manor Road, three miles northeast of Case Mill Homestead.)
At the mill, Case teamed up with William Burditt — whose plantation probably lay in Montopolis, south of the river — then Burditt’s son Giles after 1866.
“During this time, Case — known locally as a carpetbagger from up North — was involved in a series of lawsuits with landowners and city merchants, with one dispute reaching the Texas Supreme Court,” Smith writes. “Although the exact reasons are unknown, Case eventually gave up his share of the mill and returned to his northern home. Giles Burditt continued operating the mill until his death in 1903.”
Smith writes that there are no remains of the mill, which was washed out by a flash flood on Little Walnut Creek in the early 20th century.
Edwin and Maggie Frame bought the homestead in 1906 and cobbled together a 451-acre farm. Edwin was committed to the Austin State Hospital and died soon after, but Maggie lived until 1947, by which time the old house had begun to disintegrate.
Smith writes that Jesse “Vernon” Cook, a produce and real estate salesman, and his wife, Betty, took the land and house in 1949. Jesse Vernon “Bubba” Cook Jr. told Smith that the once-abandoned house had been hit hard by vandals and party-happy University of Texas students.
Ada “Fay” Peters, one of Bubba’s three sisters, wrote to Smith about the condition of the house in the ’40s.
“I can remember walking through its abandoned rooms,” she wrote in 2013. “Most had been vandalized and were in disrepair with floor planks pulled up and wallpaper stripped. The four fireplaces had been completely destroyed. My father said it was because rumor had it that Mrs. Frame had hidden her fortune somewhere in the house. To my knowledge, no one ever recovered any such thing.”
The Cooks added on to the house in the 1950s and built a garage next to the old carriage house.
A photograph in the March 23, 1953, American-Statesman ran with this caption: “The Vernon Cook family (has) one of the finest expanses of bluebonnets yet seen around Austin this spring,” adding, “Their house is surrounded by the wonderful flowers which make several acres a lake-like stretch of blue.”
As with any house that age, there was — and still is — talk of hauntings.
Smith says that early during the Cook years, the land around the house was mostly used to run cattle and horses. By the 1960s, the elder Cook had sold or developed big parts of the ranch, including Walnut Hills, later renamed University Hills.
The Cooks hung onto the house and surrounding 2.5 acres. Bubba and his wife, Kathy, bought it from their parents in 1979. A Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center volunteer, Kathy planted herb and vegetable gardens.
“When we bought it, there were no gardens at all,” Kathy Cook told Smith. “We grew all of our own vegetables ... and we never used any pesticides. The girls, they would just eat anything in the yard.”
For a while, the Case Mill Homestead served as a special events venue. When the immediate neighborhood declined during the 1990s, the Cooks waited for just the right buyer.
Becoming ABC
“We bought the house on D-Day 1997,” Blumenthal says. “We paid $224,000. It took us about a year to raise the money and fix it up. Bankers wouldn’t lend us any money. What would we do with a property ‘over there’?”
ABC shrugged off the red-lining and went ahead with the purchase.
“They did me a favor,” Blumenthal says. “By not loaning me money to fix it up, it made us go out and conduct a capital campaign. We brought in $1 million that we don’t have to pay back.”
Sporting a bushy saltand-pepper beard and greeting visitors with a twinkle-eyed warmth, Blumenthal trails one of those storied Austin histories. For instance, he worked with Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1972 when he was Texas radio news coordinator for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.
“Bill’s office was right across the hall from mine,” Blumenthal smiles. “I heard a lot of things!”
For a while, Blumenthal lived off the grid in a New Mexico commune, “the Whole Earth Catalog thing,” he says, referring to the back-to-theland counterculture magazine and product catalogue that began publication in 1968.
Back in Austin, he started farming downstream from Boggy Creek Farm. He started an herb company, then went into the dirt business with organic guru John “The Natural Gardener” Dromgoole.
“We made high-quality potting soil,” Blumenthal says. “John still donates one or two dumptrucks of compost to us each year, which we use to mulch. We compost, too, including brown paper. We’ve been building up the soil for years.”
Part of ABC’s stewardship of the land and its 25 gardens includes employing University of Texas pharmacy student interns to use the gardens as a part-time classroom.
“Some of the gardens were existing when we got here, and the soil was all right in them,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of topsoil because we are located on an uplift, just a few inches above the caliche. We loosened the existing soil and amended it.”
ABC continues to preach science-based data on herbs through electronic and print publications, public speaking and media outreach. While its core activities revolve around a “brain trust” of botanists, herbalists and other experts, the public shares in the glories of the Case Mill Homestead and its gardens on Manor Road.
“I don’t know if you’d say God was watching over us or what,” Kathy Cook told Smith, “but I was really glad ABC got it and they kept our gardens.
“They’ve expanded, but our stuff is still here, and it makes me feel really good that they didn’t erase what we did.”