This corridor once carried a different name entirely — Pecan Street, so christened when Mirabeau Lamar laid out the Republic of Texas capital in 1839. Lamar had a poet's eye for landscape; he named the streets not with numbers but with the trees he saw growing across the limestone plateau: Pecan, Live Oak, Cedar, Pine. The pecan was everywhere in Central Texas, its nuts sustaining both the Tonkawa and Comanche people and the Anglo settlers who followed.
Lamar's capital plan placed the seat of government at the north end of a long boulevard running down to the Colorado River, and this street — Pecan Street — was one of the primary east-west arteries of his vision. The frontier town that grew up along it in the 1840s and 1850s was a rough collection of wooden storefronts, blacksmith shops, and saloons serving the Republic's politicians, soldiers, and settlers. As Austin grew and rationalized its street grid in the late nineteenth century, Pecan Street became simply 6th Street, part of the numerical system that made navigation easier and erased the botanical poetry of the original names.
But when Austin restored and celebrated its Victorian commercial strip beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the Pecan Street name was revived — in festivals, in historical markers, in the collective memory of a city learning to love its own past.