Peter Heinrich Mansbendel: Dead guy

I was biking through the Oakwood Cemetery the other day. It’s one of the older Austin cemeteries, dating back to the first half of the 19th century. It’s a good place to see old mausoleums and tombstones that are badly weathered slabs of Texas limestone. I had seen a fox in that area, so I biked through at sunset hoping to see more.

The foxes weren’t out yet, but I did pick up the Oakwood Cemetery walking tour guide. A few of the graveyard residents had names recognizable from local buildings or roads, but mostly the dead of Oakwood Cemetery are the footsoldiers of history, people who live out their lives making their community better, but not scratching the paint job on the national destiny.

One such individual is Peter Heinrich Mansbendel.

He was an immigrant who studied under the master wood carvers of Germany, and then ended up in America. While a part of the art scene in New York, he met and married the daughter of flamboyant Hyde Park developer Monroe Shipe. Then he came to Austin where he practiced his 19th century art. Unfortunately there was only a modest market for decorative architectural wood carving during the Great Depression.

The booklet gave the address of his house in Hyde Park (only a block and a half from his father-in-law’s house at the edge of what had once been the local horse-racing track). I must have biked past this house a hundred times, but I had never noted much about it other than the particularly tasteful landscaping.

Here’s a photo of the house from a French genealogy site.

The photo must have been taken in the 70s, because the trees have veritably enveloped the house since then.

I felt a little awkward about taking surreptitious photos of a stranger’s house, so I didn’t get close enough to highlight the details. But you can get a feeling for the decorative flare that Mansbendel put along the eaves.

There’s some philosophical musings that I want to put here to wrap up the blog entry.

Something about how people can leave their mark on the world, or how there’s all this residue of careers that were hard fought and diligently pursued, but all the signs of those herculean endeavors are lost in the background noise of the present.

Or maybe I want to use this example to make the exact opposite point.

Either way, it may be somehow relevant.

Or possibly completely irrelevant.