Road, River, and Ol' Boy Politics: A Texas County's Path from Farm to Supersuburb (review)

In 1950, Texas contained a largely rural population whose labor revolvedaround agricultural production; its politics were conservative and Democratic; its demographic majority was white. A half-century later, none of those characteristics hold sway in a state that now contains three of the nation's nine largest cities, the economic fortunes of which are tied to industrial growth and high-tech development; this urban and urbane society is markedly multicultural and devoutly Republican. The Lone Star State is a new-found land.

No place is more emblematic of these staggering transformations than Williamson County, and in Linda Scarborough it has found the perfect muse; a native daughter who, after launching an environmental beat for the New York Daily News, returned to her home ground in the late 1970s at the precise moment when it began to experience the seismic shift denoted in her impressive book's less-than-compelling subtitle, "A Texas County's Path from Farm to Supersuburb."

Little else in the book is as clunky, for Scarborough is a careful analyst and fine writer, and is well-schooled in the historiography of environmental politics, allowing her to set her narrative in its widest context. The book is divided into two parts: The River and The Road. The San Gabriel River's flow through the county sustained its early economic productivity and settlement patterns, but was also a source of terrifying power: the 1921 floods swept away life and community, and in their aftermath the Army Corps of Engineers constructed a series of flood-control dams that submerged the very farms it reportedly wished to protect. New downstream interests benefited, altering regional political dynamics, which is reflective of one of the book's central insights—that "local firebrands and quiet lobbyists" (p. 13) have been in constant tension with big-government planners, out of which has emerged unanticipated consequences.

Just as complicated has been the impact that Interstate 35 has had on Williamson County's spatial development. Like the routing of nineteenth-century railroads, the siting of twentieth-century freeways is neither accidental nor incidental. As she tracks the highway's north-south path through the county, Scarborough helps us better understand the way local power brokers bent federal and state plans to their ends; a reflection of the intense public debates and essential private negotiations is captured in her discussion of why interchanges were placed where they were, and her deft calculation of who benefited (and lost) from their locations. The before-and-after photographs of the intersection at Round Rock of Farm-to-Market 1325 and IH-35 (pp. 365–366) are a vivid portrayal of Scarborough's analytical framework: in the intervening years between the time the first aerial was shot in 1968, to its 2005 shutter click, the tiny farming town had been absorbed into Austin's mega-sprawl.

Had she left her story there, Scarborough would have added much to our appreciation for the changes, large and small, that have reconfigured this one Texas county. Happily, she has another and wider agenda, educating her community about itself. As a historian and newspaper publisher (she and her husband run the Williamson CountySun), she is understandably intrigued by how communities perceive themselves and whether and in what form those perceptions have changed over time. The now Republican-controlled county of more than 300,000 people, many of whom cluster in its Edge-City subdivisions, cannot imagine itself as it once did. And that leads her to wonder whether its "fast-track development" has created a place replete with "affluent ciphers, lacking that most fundamental American virtue—civic responsibility" (p. 13). Scarborough may not explicitly resolve her query, leaving it up to her readers to decide, but her very question leaves little doubt about her conclusion.