Shoeless children running around the land that would become Rollingwood and West Lake Hills. Bar fights ending in axe-chopped limbs. Illegal moonshine operations in caves.
“They’d just drink all their money … and get in these huge fights in the parking lot with axes,” Ben Livingston said, recounting legends he'd heard of an elusive group of people who lived west of Austin and made a living cutting down the cedar trees of the Texas Hill Country.
“They would just chop each other up,” he said.
Livingston said he became obsessed with the so-called "cedar choppers," filling his shelves with books, pamphlets and memorabilia about how this community used to live.
He wondered if these stories were true or if they were just myths, so he submitted a question to ATXplained. "What and who are cedar choppers? Where did they come from and why did they come here?"
Most often, he said, he’s heard the term “cedar chopper” as a slur.
“ I just always heard it around Austin, like, 'Oh, bunch of damn cedar choppers,’" he said. “I guess they're just saying redneck slash hillbilly.”
The 'clans' of West Austin
Historians and census records show people came from the Appalachian region to Texas after the Civil War. They made their money cutting down cedar trees — which are actually Ashe juniper trees — and selling the wood. These people became known as cedar choppers, and the wood they cut became fencing for farms and ranches. It was used by people in Austin to heat their homes and cook meals.
Newspaper ads looking for cedar chopper services were common by the late 1800s.
One listing reads: “Wood! Wood! Wood! Fifty choppers wanted.” Another requests exclusively white wood choppers.
Ken Roberts, author of The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, wrote about how generations of cedar choppers lived west of Austin along the Colorado River and its many creeks.
These families of cedar choppers were tight-knit, according to Roberts.
"When people talked, ‘clan’ was a word they used,” he wrote. “Each of these clans is associated with a particular creek where they lived.”
Mothers and fathers taught their kids how to cut down trees, and generations made a living out in the Hill Country. When strapped for cash, some turned to selling moonshine to city folks.
Get out of jail card
Cedar choppers ran the Texas Hill Country and as their communities grew, Roberts said, so did their presence in Austin. Newspaper headlines described violent exchanges between cedar choppers, including shoot-outs and stabbings.
Emmett Shelton often found himself in the middle of the action. In a tape from 1978, Shelton talks about his family, a group of Austin lawyers who would represent cedar choppers when they got in trouble with the law.
“One night, we got a call to our old telephone, said that John Teague had killed a Mr. Gest down at his saloon,” Shelton said. “ Mr. Gest had made some kind of derogatory remark about … John's sister.”
Shelton helped John with his case, and then he got to know John’s younger brother, Tom Teague.
“Tom was a good chunker with a rock; he killed rabbits and killed squirrel,” Shelton said. “He'd make a pretty good living in the woods out there just throwing rocks, and he had a lot of 'em to throw.”
One day, Shelton said, Tom got in a rock fight.
“Tom hit an old boy in the back and broke his back, and the boy died,” Shelton said. “But it was a fair fight.”
Shelton represented Tom and got him off on a $15 fine.
The family business
Reba Peel is a descendant of cedar choppers. She keeps the family trade alive by helping her daughter run a landscaping business: A Lot 4 Less.
“They say money don’t grow on trees," she said. "It does at our house."
Peel grew up south of the river near Riverside Drive and Ben White Boulevard and has dozens of stories on what it was like growing up in a cedar chopper community. She said her family would participate in chicken fights, and she remembers cash prizes ranging from $5,000 to $10,000.
“That was a lot of money back then; it was big,” she said. “One year, Daddy won the chicken fight. We got a go-kart.”
Then, there were the dogfights. Peel wasn’t allowed to watch those.
“But I was the oldest and I was always so nosy, I’d watch out the window,” she said. “I’ll never forget it. It was horrible, traumatizing.”
Peel said it wasn’t just animals that fought; growing up, she saw cedar choppers duking it out over cheating on a poker game or a rooster fight. Most of it was alcohol induced, she said, but cedar chopper families had their own community code.
“ We could fight each other, but if you mess with ours, you have to fight us all,” she said.
Although Peel doesn’t cut timber as much anymore, she said it's still how her family made most of its money in 2025.
But she worries the new generation won’t be able to keep the trade alive.
“They’re all into these computers and games, and they’re lazy and they stay up all night and sleep all day,” Peel said about her nine grandchildren. “They won’t have the survival skills that we’ve left behind, that my mother left with us. Anywhere I go, if I have a chainsaw, I can make a living.”
She said being a cedar chopper means surviving, day by day, and she’s worried her culture could be dying out.
Keeping history alive
Peel's ancestors are buried at the Tarleton-Young Cemetery, a small plot of land behind the Barton Creek Square Mall. The grass is overgrown, and there’s litter outside the gates. About three dozen headstones have stood the test of time, some better than others.
“Not all of them are marked, some of them are very old, some of them you can kind of read, and some of them you can’t,” Christy Boyd, Peel's youngest sister, said. “A lot of them don’t even have headstones.”
Boyd, who runs the cemetery, said some headstones have letters that face the wrong direction. She said that’s because most cedar choppers weren’t well-educated. Boyd took a different path.
“ I was one of the first in my generation, in my family, to go to college,” she said. “ I still have uncles alive that chop cedar … but it's not something I really got into in my life. I do more computer work.”
She said she became interested in preserving her family’s cemetery and even got a historical marker for it. While doing research, she found information on her family that she said she wasn’t too proud of.
“Only thing I can find is bad stuff, just this person’s done killed that person," she said. "This person went to prison for that."
The oldest headstone, she said, belongs to a man named Tom Young. In 1906, the Shelton family represented Young after he was charged with the murder of a young girl. He was the last man publicly hanged in Williamson County.
Boyd said the negative press and attitudes toward her community don't align with how she sees cedar choppers.
“Cedar chopper boys were hard workers and they probably had a pocket full of money,” Boyd said. “They were all really good people.”
Cedar chopper culture is still around, just not where it used to be. Much of Boyd and Peel's family now lives north of Killeen, in Gatesville. Austin, the city cedar choppers helped build, got too crowded for them.
"The hills hadn't always been million-dollar homes. They used to be little shacks," Boyd said. "Those communities are what they are today because those people were there first.”
She said she's never seen the term “cedar chopper” as an insult, and she hopes to continue preserving what’s left of her community in Austin — even if it's just their history.
