by Mike Cox
Soon after the fire, rumor spread about as fast as the flames that had consumed the building that the building had been deliberately torched by someone wanting to destroy land records to cover up an extensive real estate fraud. Since Texas land records were kept in the free-standing general land office, not the capitol, state officials did not take the arson theory particularly seriously. Clearly, the fire had been an accident, and a more thorough investigation later backed that up.
Like a long-smoldering ember, the conspiracy theory rekindled ninetyfour years later when Dallas Morning News columnist Frank X. Tolbert wrote a piece that made it seem like a fait accompli that an arsonist had touched off the blaze, which in turn had the unintended effect of expediting construction of the present capitol. According to Tolbert, “A rancher in Leon County was trying to claim 20,000 acres of land with forged titles. He ‘aged’ the phony papers by leaving them on coffee grounds and then slipped them in the county records.” Knowing the authentic records were filed in Austin, he and several of his ranch hands rode to the capitol, managed to set it afire without being seen and immediately made a near horse-killing ride back to his ranch. Soon, the crooked cowman must have learned to his chagrin that the capitol did not hold any land records. Tolbert said the scoundrel failed to hold on to the Leon County land he claimed but never faced prosecution.
Flame-scarred ruins of the limestone capitol. Many irreplaceable historic artifacts were lost in the 1881 fire. Author’s collection.
“You’ll not find in any history…an account of the Leon County land thief’s scheme for burning down the capitol,” Tolbert crowed. And in that he was correct, but the colorful folklore he offered his readers was not.9
Assuming the burning of the statehouse was truly Henry McBride’s fault (he never denied the dubious honor, but a tinner’s shoddy installation of the stove pipe played a bigger role), the fire did not cost the porter his job. In fact, he stayed on the state payroll for fifty years, possibly the longest-ever tenure of a state worker in Texas. His last day on the job came in 1931, half a century after the capitol fire.
When McBride died at seventy-six on April 8, 1936, the Associated Press, which like the rest of the mainstream media in Jim Crow days did not normally report the natural passing of African Americans, distributed a four-paragraph story noting the death of “the negro who indirectly caused construction of Texas’ massive granite capitol.”10
In truth, though McBride might have accidentally started the fire, state officials already had been planning for a new capitol, a grand structure that would be a much more fitting home for the government of the nation’s largest state. Ironically enough, the capitol board charged with overseeing the building of a new statehouse had been meeting in the House chamber of the old capitol when the fire broke out. (Before fleeing the building, members hurriedly gathered up all the proposed designs for the new capitol then under consideration.) Since the new capitol was to be erected where the old one stood, the fire might even have saved the state a little money in wrecking costs.
What would replace the old capitol would be a world-class building, a structure comparable to the Capitol in Washington and bigger than the houses of the German Reichstag or Great Britain’s Parliament.
7
THE FORGOTTEN CAPITOL
The temporary capitol of Texas, built in 1883 to house state government while the present capitol was under construction, cost the state $50,000. Eighty-nine years later, the state spent almost the same amount to dig up its ruins.
After the 1853 capitol burned in 1881 and after considering several options, the state contracted for construction of a temporary statehouse on the southwest corner of Eleventh Street and Congress Avenue as soon as possible. Ever frugal, the state stipulated that as much of the stone from the old capitol as possible be used in the stop-gap statehouse. While state officials awaited the temporary building’s completion, they worked in the smaller two surviving antebellum government buildings near the ruined capitol, as well as in borrowed space at the Millett Opera House, the Travis County Courthouse and even the county jail. After its completion in 1883, the hastily built three-story government building remained in use until the new capitol opened in 1888. After the state moved into the present capitol, the temporary statehouse was used to house Austin High School, and the third floor of the building was rented to individual tenants.
History seemingly repeated itself on September 30, 1899, when fire broke out in the temporary building. Low water pressure again hampered firefighters, and the building was reduced to rubble. A large crowd gathered to watch as it went up in flames, but no one considered it a great loss. Many townspeople figured it would have fallen down anyway, sooner or later. The stones were salvaged and used in other structures across the city. The lot where the temporary capitol had stood remained vacant until 1912, when the state landscaped the area and made it into a park. The park continued in use until after World War II, when the grass was ripped up and the land paved for use as a parking lot.
After the 1853 capitol burned, the state built a temporary capitol on the cheap. Even though construction was delayed after part of it collapsed during a storm, it served as the statehouse for five years. Author’s collection.
In 1969, officials looking down on the property from the overcrowded 1931-vintage highway department building at Eleventh and Brazos Streets envisioned a new agency headquarters going up on the site. The highway commission authorized the department’s executive director to proceed with planning a new building, which the agency intended to fill the entire block between Tenth and Eleventh Streets. In 1971, responding to protests that the new building would not only be overly pretentious and costly, but it would also necessitate the destruction of the old Lundberg Bakery (in the National Registry of Historic Places) at 1006 Congress Avenue, the legislature directed the department to rethink its plans.
While that review proceeded, highway department archaeologists undertook an extensive excavation of the temporary capitol site. Plans for a new building ended up getting scrapped, and the highway department is still in its eight-story Art Deco building across from the capitol. But the body of historical information collected by the archaeologists remains. It was compiled into a 221-page report, released by the agency in 1972.
The dig at the old capitol was the largest project newly hired department archaeologist Frank Weir had undertaken up to that point in his career. Among the things Weir and his colleagues brought to light with their digging—both in the ground and in archival sources—was that some corner cutting went into the building of the temporary capitol. “The original specifications called for a concrete floor several inches thick on the first floor,” Weir said. “But when we dug it up, we found only a thin layer of concrete on top of gravel mixed with a little cement.”
That procedure saved someone money.
“Politics was no different back then than now,” Weir smiled.
The foundation of the building, the investigation showed, had not been very stable. “An architect who looked at the work said he was surprised that the building stood,” Weir said. In fact, while the building was still under construction in September 1882, a gust of wind from a thunderstorm collapsed the structure’s northwest corner. That event resulted in a different kind of tempest: the contractor got the boot.
The building was finally finished, but the work was still nothing to write home about. Weir’s study showed that many of the measurements of the excavated foundations did not match the measurements found in the original building plans. Two of the building’s walls did not even meet at a ninetydegree angle.
Archaeologists found a wide selection of artifacts in and around the exposed building foundations. The objects ranged from an 1856-vintage Colt dragoon pistol (how the weapon got lost is open to the imagination) to an array of old bottles, several coins of various ages and even a few prehistoric flint projectile points.
Though architecturally insignificant and cheaply built, the temporary capitol sa
w a lot of history in its brief heyday. Lawmakers meeting in its second-floor legislative chambers passed a strong education law and a tough measure to stop barbed wire fence cutting, an issue of old ways versus new technology that claimed several lives and many miles of wire during what is known as the Fence Cutter’s War. Two governors served within its walls: John Ireland (1883–87) and Sul Ross (1887–91). In 1883, the two-hundred-plus students who constituted the student body of the newly opened University of Texas attended classes in the building while the school’s main building was under construction on the northern outskirts of town.
Historical marker at the site of the 1883 temporary capitol at Eleventh and Congress, just across the street from the modern capitol. Some of the structure’s foundation has been preserved. Photo by the author.
Perhaps the most unusual thing that ever happened at the temporary capitol took place in 1887, in the midst of what came to be called the Grass Lease Fight. The state’s land board had passed resolutions setting the lease price for public land at eight cents an acre for land without water and twenty cents for land with water. Panhandle ranchers resented having to pay for what they considered their right to graze livestock on public land. During the dispute, which had ended up in court, cattle baron Charles Goodnight, along with land developer W.B. Munson and Austin attorney “Buck” Walton, placed $72,000 in cash into a wheelbarrow and had a porter push it up Congress Avenue to the capitol for deposit with the state treasurer. All three men wore six-shooters. In modern parlance, it was a publicity stunt.
The interim capitol also housed the capitol board, the three-member body that oversaw construction of the building that replaced the temporary statehouse. Members could look out their office window and watch the new statehouse going up, a structure—unlike the one in which they sat—that was intended to last a long, long time.
8
THE GRAVES ON CONVICT HILL
The Travis County community of Oak Hill, long since absorbed by a fastgrowing capital city, more appropriately should be known as Convict Hill after its most significant if largely forgotten landmark: the quarry that produced all the many tons of limestone used in building the capitol. As it is, that evocative place name survives only on green city street signs and as part of a suburban park’s name.
What has lasted are lurid tales of bone-weary prisoners—balls and chains shackled to their legs—trying to escape only to be tracked down by bloodhounds and shot by their guards, lost graves, lingering ghosts and a mysterious cave. But the tens of thousands of commuters who sit near the historic site in traffic snarls every workday at what is now one of Austin’s busiest intersections—and most local residents—have probably never heard the story of Convict Hill. Even a state historical marker put up in 1969 stands obscured by overgrown vegetation at a roadside park abandoned by the Texas Department of Transportation to make room for highway widening.
Of course, Oak Hill has always suffered from something of an identity crisis. First settled in 1856, it was known as Liveoak Springs. After the Civil War, local residents renamed it Shiloh for one of that conflict’s bloody battles. By the early 1880s, the community was called Oatmanville, even though its post office had been named Oak Hill a decade earlier. In 1900, residents finally decided to drop Oatmanville in favor of Oak Hill.
People started calling the massive, cedar-covered limestone formation near the modern intersection of William Cannon Drive and US 290 Convict Hill (though its owners called it Quarry Hill) after the state prisoners who had been pressed into labor at the quarry in the early to mid-1880s. The subcontractor engaged in building the capitol’s foundation and basement paid the state sixty-five cents a day per inmate to blast and chisel the limestone and load the large blocks onto rail cars.
No matter its importance in the history of the capitol, much of what remained of the quarry after operations ended in 1887 has been gnawed away to make room for roadway expansion and commercial development. In fact, were it not for a well-traveled thoroughfare nearby called Convict Hill Road and Convict Hill Quarry Park, the area’s lasting contribution toward the capitol would be all but lost to memory. Compared with other aspects of the capitol story, the quarry gets short shrift in most histories, even though about one-third of the statehouse is built with limestone blasted and cut from the hill.
Indeed, at the height of quarrying operations in 1886, ten carloads of stone rolled daily by rail to the capitol construction site. More than 280,000 cubic feet of limestone from Oatmanville/Oak Hill went into the capitol for use in the building’s foundation, basement and cross walls and as backing for exterior walls.
The Convict Hill story began with a statewide search for Texas stone for use in the planned new capitol. After spending more than $16,000 in inspecting fifteen potential limestone sources, capitol board commissioners decided to begin quarrying on one thousand acres near Oatmanville that would be leased from owner W.K. Beckett. The next order of business, once the paperwork had been signed, would be building a rail line from Austin to the site. In addition, the Capitol Syndicate had a large locomotive custom-built at the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia to handle the job, a steam engine they fittingly named the Lone Star.
A still-visible drill mark at Convict Hill, where the limestone used in the capitol’s foundation, basement and inner walls was quarried. Photo by the author.
On February 24, 1884, an excursion train packed with state officials “and a large delegation of citizens of Austin” traveled from the depot downtown to the quarry site at Oatmanville. The Austin Daily Statesman said that the seven-mile trip took about an hour, likely because the cars had to be switched from the International and Great Northern Railroad tracks to the spur that had been extended to the quarry.
“At the [quarry] there was abundant evidence of good work,” the newspaper reported. “Men and machinery were both at work getting out and shaping large boulders of stone, several hundred of which have been finished ready for the construction of the State Capitol.”
When enough rock had been extracted from the hill, laborers ripped up the railroad tracks connecting the quarry with Austin. The seven saloons that had helped slake the thirst of the non-inmate quarry workers noticed a decided decline in business, and Oatmanville resumed its status as a sleepy little rural community until Austin began sprawling in its direction in the 1970s. Meanwhile, with the passage of time, what had been an industrial operation all about extracting cheap natural resources with the use of convict labor began to be romanticized.
With interest in history enjoying a brief spike due to the approaching U.S. bicentennial, in the mid-1970s, a writer for Free & Easy, a long-defunct throwaway tabloid published in Austin, interviewed Josephine McCullough, granddaughter of the original landowner. She had no specifics on convicts shot while trying to escape but did confirm that some of the inmates had died during an influenza outbreak.11
“Nobody in my family ever talked about dangerous criminals living in the community,” she said. “Nobody talked about how they were treated cruelly. It sounds real bad when you say there wasn’t a doctor on the grounds, but the fact was there wasn’t a doctor in Oak Hill at all, then.”
In 2014, a blogger with an interest in Oak Hill history interviewed retired county employee James Wier about the history of the area. As a youngster, he had heard stories about the quarry from Oak Hill old-timers.
Later owned by Buster Thomas and Skeeter Hudson, the quarry continued in operation into the early 1960s. By then, the city of Austin was slowly growing in the direction of Oak Hill, a process that picked up momentum with each decade. As late as the early 1980s, however, two distinct piles of stones left over from the capitol quarrying operation remained atop the hill. Local lore had it that the rock cairns marked the hasty burial sites of convicts who died at the quarry a century before. Where there are graves, even if they never existed, soon there arise ghost stories. With house foundations about to be poured on the spot in 1985, developer Nash Phillips/Copus Inc. paid for an ar
chaeological survey to determine if there really were graves on the hill, improbable as it seemed that even prisoners would simply be buried under a pile of rocks. The study revealed that the cairns had once supported an array of wooden derricks used to lift stone from the quarry. Chemical analysis of soil samples taken from under the stone features proved no human remains existed at either spot. There were no graves.
“There was a cave there where the prisoners stayed at night,” Wier said. “They had wooden bunk beds and straw mattresses. There was a big iron ring embedded in the wall and at night when the prisoners went to bed, the bosses would run a chain through all their leg irons and attached them to the ring in the wall, so they couldn’t get out of bed at night and escape.”
That recollection is a good example of how the passage of time can morph a physical feature into something it never was. The “cave” actually was manmade and had nothing to do with accommodating prisoners at night. (They slept in tents.) Two large pieces of cut flat rock had been propped up to cover a limestone overhang, with a gap in the middle for a strong door. A thick layer of dirt had then been piled outside the rocks. Inside the roughly eightby ten-foot structure, quarry operators kept blasting powder and related explosive equipment.
“I used to play there when I was young,” Josephine McCullough said. “People used to say convicts were kept there at night but it was just a powder shed.” When the highway that developed into US 290 was put through Oak Hill in the early 1930s, the highway department bulldozed the “cave.”
