CRWD’s Ruzek to provide free presentation Monday night at library
Oct. 3, 2025 — Virtually 160 years of background along the Cedar River at Austin Mill Fish pond will be covered in one hour Monday night while overlooking the man-made lake.
Cedar River Landmark District outreach organizer Tim Ruzek, a neighborhood chronicler, will certainly offer the complimentary, hour-long”Flood Walls in a Previous Swamp”presentation including old images and maps at 6 p.m. at the Austin Public Library’s west-end workshop area neglecting Mill Fish pond.
“Austin Mill Fish pond has a fascinating background as this stretch of the Cedar has changed significantly over the decades whether that be its form, water entertainment or task on its shoreland,”Ruzek said.”Even today, a major apartment building is being built on what used to be a huge bend of the river moving right into Mill Fish pond till the 1960 s.”
For years, this area was called a”swamp land”and covered even more land than Austin Mill Pond does today. By the early 1900 s, the community started looking to develop a park and waterbody shaped even more like a lake, which caused the development of Horace Austin State Park.
This state park, however, eventually faded away up until the late 1950 s when the Austin area started opening park land there for industrial development. With the building and construction of Interstate 90 through Austin– simply upstream from Austin Mill Pond– more low-lying pastureland and marshes near Mill Fish pond were acquired and opened up for developing a business area, including Austin’s very first indoor mall developed dug up river material.
An area long thought about by residents to be”unbuildable”became extremely created and, many thanks to numerous document floodings in the previous 20 years, now is secured by an extensive system of earthen flood berms and flood walls.
