For generations, they eked out a meager existence hunting, fishing, stocking semi-feral pigs and cattle, distilling moonshine, and cutting cedar, which they used to build zigzagging “worm fences” and rustic barns or burned to sell as charcoal. The mountain folk didn’t have much to begin with, and they were well suited for the woodlands, so they hunkered down. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the wealthy farmers had moved on to greener pastures. An earlier wave of German and Anglo settlers had already established farms throughout the Hill Country, but their intensive tilling and overgrazing practices quickly depleted the region’s thin topsoil, allowing Ashe juniper-a shrubby tree known colloquially as mountain cedar-to spread out of the region’s steep canyons and across disturbed rocky slopes where native grass once grew. The mountain clans that would come to be known as the cedar choppers, or cedar whackers, first settled in Appalachia in the eighteenth century, moving west through the Ozarks before finding their way to Central Texas shortly after the Civil War.

The boys set Roberts on edge, and when his friend Dudley taunted them, one of them pulled out a club. These were not kids you would see in Austin.” “They were barefoot, their pants were too short, their shirts ragged.

“I remember how different from us they looked,” he writes in his 2018 book The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing (Texas A&M University Press). There, along the Balcones Escarpment, the geological fault zone marking the eastern edge of the Edwards Plateau, a reclusive folk known as cedar choppers lived hard and free on the rugged terrain, and polite company kept its distance.Īustin native Ken Roberts was ten or eleven the first time he encountered the children of cedar choppers, at the low-water crossing of the Colorado River below the Lake Austin dam sometime in the mid-fifties. But there was a time, not so long ago, when res pectable townspeople avoided the highlands just outside the city. Today, expensive homes dot the hills of Austin’s western fringe. It has been updated with new information. This story originally published on August 27, 2019.

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