Photos by Kay Keys - Mayfield Park

Mayfield Park

Mayfield Park is probably my favorite place of all. It's a city park and nature preserve in Austin, Texas. (It's right next door to Laguna Gloria, another of my favorites). Austin Parks & Recreation Department provides Web pages on Mayfield Park Gardens and Cottage and Mayfeld Park and Preserve, and now there's a Mayfield Park / Community Project website, too. Beyond what's on those sites, this extract from a National Register of Historic Places document provides details of its history and description (the Mayfield-Gutsch Estate landscape was entered in the National Register June 5, 1997, #94001159). Jeffrey Kerr's book Austin, Texas Then and Now: A Photography Scrapbook provides some additional history.

As a brief history of the place, Allison Mayfield, a Texas Railroad Commission Chairman and Texas Secretary of State, purchased a cottage west of Austin with 23 acres as a family retreat in 1909. The Mayfields had one daughter, Mary Frances, who married Dr. Milton Gutsch, a longtime University of Texas History Department Chairman, in 1918. In 1922, the couple moved to the cottage and added Bungalow style porches on three sides. The site was developed over a period of sixty-two years, with Mary Mayfield Gutsch designing the gardens, Milton Gutsch directing the building of stone walls, ponds, and garden features, and Steve Arrendondo serving as resident gardener for many years; peacocks came on the scene as a gift in 1935. When Mary Mayfield Gutsch died in 1971, she left the property to the City of Austin to be used as a park.

view from above (courtesy Google)

I was first introduced to Mayfield Park in 1975 and have continued to come back to it. I have been a supporter of the Mayfield Park/Community Project for a number of years. I'd always thought it was the perfect place for a wedding, and we rented it for ours in 2001. The rest of this Web document displays some of the photographs I have taken there.

the whole place