Sprinkle

Sprinkle is on Walnut Creek nine miles northeast of Austin in northeastern Travis County. It was named for Erasmus Frederick Sprinkle, who brought his family to the area from Virginia in the 1870s. He received permission to open a post office called Sprinkle in December 1885. By 1890 the town had three churches, a school, a general store, and a population of 100. Most of the families in the area were farmers, and cotton was their principal cash crop. Bad roads made it difficult to transport the cotton to markets in Austin, so residents began to lobby for rail service. The post office at Sprinkle closed in 1902, and for a time mail for the community was sent to Manor. In 1904, however, the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad was built through the town, and the post office at Sprinkle reopened. The railroad helped residents at first, but the population continued to decline, falling to fifty by 1914 and to ten by the early 1930s. Around 1900 Sprinkle was the focus of a common school district that had one school for sixty White students and one for forty-seven Black students. In the late 1930s these schools were consolidated with the Manor Independent School District. Improvements in roads and the availability of automobiles encouraged the few remaining residents to take their business to nearby Austin instead of to local establishments. The post office was discontinued in 1940, and mail for the community was sent to Austin. The railroad soon eliminated Sprinkle as a stop and abandoned the track altogether in the mid-1970s. The population of Sprinkle was reported at twenty in the 1950s and 1960s. The community was still listed in 1990.