Owen, D. (2024, January 2). A question of legacy. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/a-question-of-legacy

Introduction

In 1866, my mother’s great-grandparents Eugene and Mary Robinson Bremond bought a house and property on a hill overlooking the Colorado River, in what’s now downtown Austin, Texas. Other Bremonds and Robinsons bought or built houses nearby—two of Eugene’s sisters married two of Mary’s brothers—and created a family compound that eventually filled one block and parts of two others. All the houses on the main block are still standing. They look much as they did in the eighteen-hundreds, except that today they’re surrounded by office buildings. In 1970, the area was designated the Bremond Block Historic District.

The Bremonds sold dry goods, and Eugene opened a private bank in the back of the family store. The businesses were so lucrative that in 1876 a local newspaper estimated that five per cent of all the taxes collected in Austin were paid by Bremonds. My mother’s mother, Anne Bremond, was born in 1894. She grew up at the northwest corner of West Eighth and San Antonio, in a house that had been a wedding present to her parents from Eugene. Because of the three interfamily marriages, her regular playmates included the children of fifteen double first cousins. They treated the alley and open area in the center of the block as a communal back yard.