Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  Hundreds of prints of this photograph of the capitol got sold as souvenirs during the building’s dedication in 1888. Author’s collection.

  Not everyone wanted to go to the trouble of paying for a remembrance of their capitol visit. In the 1930s, and perhaps earlier, the state kept watchmen in the building to guard against vandalism and theft on the part of souvenir hunters.

  “Guards maintain constant watch to prevent souvenir hunters or others from despoiling the capitol of its historical treasures, but occasionally their vigilance is eluded,” the Associated Press reported on May 31, 1938. “An example of vandal’s work is seen in the iron grill which ornaments the niches near the rotunda where originals of the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico and ordinance of secession from the Union are displayed. A number of leaves and acorns have been broken off the decorative tree and vines.”

  More brazen souvenir hunters (sometimes including legislators) also were known to remove pieces of wood, finials and ornate brass door hinges and door knobs stamped “Texas Capitol.” It got so bad, the state finally reinstalled the surviving original hinges, along with needed reproductions, with screws only a special tool can remove.

  Over the years, visitors wishing to take home a reminder of their capitol could buy assorted statehouse trinkets in some of the stores and shops along Congress Avenue, including Woolworth’s, when it was still in business. Items ranged from china plates bearing transfer images of the capitol to salt shakers. In the 1990s, the preservation board opened two gift shops, one in the new underground extension and one in the restored land office building. Both still sell plenty of capitol souvenirs seven days a week.

  Most state capitols, and certainly the U.S. Capitol, have been commemorated with ornate silver spoons over the years. In fact, the gift shops at the capitol visitors’ center and in the extension still offer a silverplated capitol spoon. Older sterling silver spoons featuring the Texas Capitol occasionally turn up on the market.

  Other capitol collectibles include coffee mugs, replicas of capitol architectural hardware, snow globes containing a small model of the capitol (which gets snowed on way more than the real capitol), miniature metal or plaster capitols and other traditional kitsch. The capitol also shows up in advertising pieces, from Grand Prize Beer coasters to mirrors to framed prints.

  During the renovation and expansion of the capitol in the late 1990s, stone carver Philip Hoggatt of Dripping Springs, a community half an hour’s drive west of Austin, heard that a quantity of granite and limestone from the statehouse had been removed and would likely be hauled off by the contractor. Hoggatt drove to the job site and left with several pieces of stone laid more than a century before. At his shop outside Drippin’, as locals call it, Hoggatt cut the stones into souvenirs, including Texas-shaped paperweights and other items. Each of the granite objects bears a small glued-on metal label: “Granite from the front steps of the capitol, once part of the Historic South Grounds Texas State Capitol, Philip Hoggatt, Artisan 2015.”

  A collage of capitol souvenirs from author’s collection. Photo by the author.

  This display in the capitol visitors’ center gives the history of the hugely successful Christmas ornament program. Proceeds from the sale of each year’s ornament, which features some aspect of the capitol’s architecture, go to help with capitol restoration projects. Photo by the author.

  The most successful capitol souvenir has been the annual capitol Christmas ornament introduced in 1996. Started by Nelda Laney, wife of Speaker Pete Laney, by 2016, the program had raised more than $8 million for Texas statehouse preservation projects. Each year’s ornament features a different element of the capitol’s architecture, from its dome to fence finials. Since the state stocks only the last ten years’ previous ornaments, the earlier ones have become pricey collector’s items.

  “The capitol ornament is a wonderful way for Texans, and those who love Texas, to support the care of our magnificent capitol…and tell the incredible history that it represents,” Julie Straus, wife of Speaker of the House Joe Straus, said in 2013. “The ornament is also a great way to put a bit of Texas on your Christmas tree.”

  25

  LADY WITH A PAST

  Alady with a past, she stood cloaked in mystery and a long robe.

  For years, no one—including the press—gave the feminine figure atop the capitol much thought, although tens of thousands looked up at her daily. In fact, holding an upraised five-point star in her left hand and a downward-pointing sword in the other, she towered over the statehouse for thirty-eight years before finally capturing the eye of an Austin newspaper reporter who thought there might be a story about her to tell.

  “Did you ever hear the legend that the giant cast iron lady in white on top of the capitol dome was once blown off the foundation by a wind storm, hanging only by a twisted girder, and that a bunch of valiant men and boys, including several University of Texas students, climbed to the top of the dome in the dark, as the storm whirled and lightning flashed, and after heroic efforts, finally put her back in place again?” the Austin American-Statesman asked in a breathlessly long sentence on February 25, 1925.

  The newspaper reporter checked with the inspector of buildings for the state board of control (the agency then responsible for maintenance of the statehouse) and got this reply: “Impossible. For one thing the heroic maiden in white weighs several tons. It is firmly bolted in place, and the highest wind on record would not be sufficient pressure on it to move it. In the second place, if it were to topple over, it would go right through the dome and down to the basement.”

  What little newspaper attention the statue had received prior to 1925 had not been particularly positive. Shortly after she began her reign atop the statehouse in February 1888, the Austin Weekly Statesman called her the “Old Lady Goddess” and observed that “her face resembles an old woman of 80.” In 1903, another local sheet termed the statue “ludicrous,” saying she stood out of proportion to the capitol. “One wishes as he gazes on it that it were lower that he might pelt it with mudballs,” the writer concluded.

  Austinites and construction workers posed for this photograph before the Goddess of Liberty statue went to capitol dome. Author’s collection.

  By the early 1950s, Austin American-Statesman reporter Frank Davis wasn’t even able to confirm her name. Most people, he wrote, knew her as the Goddess of Liberty, but the chief justice of the state supreme court insisted she was the Goddess of Victory. Though Davis didn’t mention it in his article, still others thought the statue was the Goddess of Liberty Enlightening the World or even a copy of the Statue of Liberty.

  While some old-timers who had been around for the capitol’s dedication in May 1888 still lived when Davis did research for his story in 1952, no one could even tell him what the statue was made of. Guesses included bronze, copper and marble. Neither did Davis find anyone sure of where she came from. Some said Belgium, France or Spain, while another story had her hailing from the Keystone State.

  J. Steve Kennerly, then assistant curator of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Museum (in the old Texas General Land Office building at the time), said that the statue had been cast in France and that the first statue intended for the capitol had been lost at sea on the way to the United States. On the other hand, a master’s thesis on the capitol completed by J.L. Greer in 1932 said the statue had been cast of bronze at a temporary foundry in the basement of the building.

  While no one seemed to know much about her, the robed lady finally had begun to cause talk. Gladys Greenwood, then an information clerk at the capitol, said the statue’s sword pointed downward because “Texas gained her independence from Mexico in 1836 and there was no more reason to fight.” Less delicately, some said that Confederate veterans had pressured the state into having the statue looking south so that her backside faced forever north.

  When completed during the last week of February 1888, she stood fourteen feet tall and weighed in at about a ton. Finally, wo
rkers laid on three coats of lead-based white paint mixed with sand to make her look like solid stone instead of hollow zinc.

  After taking her place atop the capitol, the statue stood aloof literally and figuratively. The only time anyone got up close and personal with her was when she got a new coat of paint. The first time was in 1891, when painters found a hive of bees in her head. To keep from being stung, they supposedly poked two beer corks up her nose.

  Fittingly enough, workers painting the capitol’s dome in 1983 were the first to notice the iron lady had become a damsel in distress. At ninety-five, she had very much begun to show her age, with cracks visible on her arms, hand and sword. In 1985, the State Preservation Board (a successor to the old state board of control) contracted with the Sculpture Conservation Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis to evaluate the statue. The lab concluded the lady needed help, her problems ranging from corrosion to missing pieces. Rather than repair the existing statue and keep it in place, the board decided to replace it with a reproduction and put the original on display in a stable interior setting.

  Once the statue had been shored up with supports and straps, a Texas National Guard helicopter plucked her from her longtime pedestal on November 24, 1985, and sat her down on the capitol’s south lawn. She hadn’t been on the ground since the late winter of 1888, when someone took a photograph of her surrounded by folks prior to her placement on top of the new statehouse. (Contrary to legend, one of those who posed with the robed lady was not mustachioed former outlaw and Austin city marshal Ben Thompson, who was already dead by then, having been gunned down in San Antonio in March 1884.)

  On June 14, 1986, a replica cast from a mold made of the original statue was hoisted to the top of the capitol by a large “Sky Crane” helicopter from the Mississippi National Guard, and two years later, the restored original went on display at the Texas Memorial Museum. When the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum opened, she was moved there.

  Meanwhile, as work proceeded on the original statue’s rehabilitation, researchers delving into her story began to replace legend with fact—or, lacking absolute proof, more-informed guesses. The State Preservation Board concluded that John C. McFarland of Chicago, the subcontractor who handled the capitol’s galvanized iron and zinc work, furnished the statue as part of his contract. Two of his foremen—Albert Friedley and Herman F. Voshardt—oversaw the transformation of plaster molds made by an unidentified sculptor into a metal statue. The work involved welding eighty different zinc parts into four major sections: her torso, head and each arm. The sections were then hoisted to the top of the dome and put together with large iron screws.

  Features of the goddess’s face had to be exaggerated so she would look good at a distance. Author’s collection.

  Born in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents during the Civil War, Herman Voshardt’s surname somehow got attached to the most outlandish tale told about the statue. Supposedly, just before the statue assumed her perch above the capitol, Voshardt’s nephew Tom rode up on a horse, grabbed a rope wrapped around the lady’s not-so-delicate neck, kicked his mount in the flanks and attempted to drag her off. But given the lady’s two-thousand-pound weight, the abduction went for only as long as the rope did. Accordingly, the next thing Voshardt knew, one of the Scottish stonecutters was helping him up off the ground.

  Pressed for an explanation, Tom Voshardt is said to have claimed that his wife had posed for the sculptor who fashioned the statue and he simply could not bear the thought of her likeness being consigned to such a lonely spot. To support his case, he produced a small photograph of Mrs. Voshardt and showed it to the Scotsman.

  “No offense laddie,” the rock worker said after studying the image, “but I think the Goddess is a wee bit prettier.”

  “She’s not only prettier,” Voshardt said of the goddess, “she’s far less demanding and considerably more cordial.”

  26

  LOST AND FOUND

  Jack Patterson fought panic.

  The state worker had crawled beneath the floor of the House chamber, wedging himself between a sandy-colored brick subfloor and the old oak planks above. At most, he had two and a half feet of space in which to operate.

  “It was easy at first,” he said. “But the closer I crawled toward the front of the House, the narrower it got. I finally got stuck, and had to use a saw to cut a beam so I could get back out. I was about to get sick at my stomach, but I knew if I had gotten in, I could get out.”

  Patterson, who then worked for the state as a technical services employee, had been working on the installation of a new electronic voting board. To string new wiring, he had to get under the floor.

  As the project continued, Patterson began mixing a little lay archaeology with his electrical work. He went on to discover a treasure-trove of yesterday’s garbage under the House floor, some of it dating to the days when the granite statehouse was still under construction.

  Each time Patterson entered the dark, sub-political world in the capitol, he found another piece of history. The material was casually displayed in a room in the Speaker’s office. “We’re getting a little museum here,” said George Work, Speaker Bill Clayton’s press aide.

  Work said the oldest items discovered were two plaster pots, one bearing an 1885 patent date. Also dating from the mid-1880s were the remnants of a tobacco package discarded by some long-ago workman, a handmade scoop fashioned with tin, wood and square-headed nails and a patent medicine tract guaranteeing a sure cure for everything from piles to headaches.

  Workers upgrading the House’s electronic voting system in the late 1970s found numerous artifacts beneath the flooring. Author’s collection.

  “We know this material was left by the men who helped build the capitol,” Patterson said. “It’s fascinating.”

  It seemed to him that just about every carpenter or repairman who crawled under the floor over the years had in some way left his mark. Patterson found a Prince Albert tobacco can with a 1910 revenue stamp on it, a 1914 St. Louis Post-Dispatch and an Austin American of the same date, an old Eastman film package that cautioned, “Develop before December 1920” and an empty five-cent box of Lemon Snaps.

  Lawmakers have been known to blow their top on the floor, and apparently so did at least one unknown tradesman—Patterson found the lid only to an old-style white straw Panama hat. “Some carpenter probably cut the top out of his hat to keep cooler,” Patterson said.

  Things must have been a little rough for another long-ago maintenance man. Patterson found a pair of old black shoes, holes worn in both soles. Whoever owned the shoes had neatly folded a 1914 newspaper to use as liners. Why he took off his shoes and left them beneath the floor of the House can only be a matter of speculation.

  Journalists, lobbyists and anyone else who knows anything about government understand that sometimes proposed legislation falls through the figurative cracks and disappears into oblivion—at least until the next session when its sponsor might give it another try. Patterson found evidence that might have actually happened, at least in one case: an undated proposal for limiting the money spent on high school textbooks to $285 for “1st class schools.” Also discovered in the dust was a handbill, again undated, urging, “Listen for the Bombs! When you hear them go to the traveling Public Health Exhibit Car of the Texas State Department of Health and the Texas Public Health Association.” Another handbill he discovered under the floor touted the West Texas city of Abilene, population 13,500, where farm and ranch land in tracts from 320 to 100,000 acres could be had for $2.50 to $5.00 an acre. (Based on U.S. census records, Abilene’s population was 10,274 in 1920 and 23,175 by 1930.)

  The state worker even discovered some early graffiti of the “Kilroy Was Here” genre. “Somebody named E.J. or F.J. Schock wrote his name all over down there,” Patterson said. “He spelled his name in neat, German-style letters. He must have been a carpenter who was proud of his work.”

  Patterson was neither
the first nor the last worker to find interesting things in the capitol. In the summer of 1963, state board of control plaster foreman Glendon Doss, while replacing some of the original ceiling in the capitol, found two vintage hand tools left on ledges of interior walls later covered. One of the tools was a stone drill, the other a rivet hammer. Both were hand forged. The river hammer (used to shape or turn hot rivets) had a hickory handle about sixteen inches long. The stone drill, about ten inches long, was used to drill dowel holes in granite, no easy job done by hand.

  “Texas’ Capitol may contain other ‘lost’ items of the 1883–1888 period,” the article offered. Of course, the cornerstone is definitely known to contain historic artifacts, since newspapers of the day recorded the items that got sealed inside. The nineteenth-century time capsule included, among other things, a stone from the old capitol; a book of Texas statistics by Colonel A.W. Spaight; a copy of a speech given by then governor John Ireland; an olive leaf plucked from a tree on Mount Zion by F.S. Roberts; copies of the Austin Daily Statesman and the Boston Gazette of March 7, 1785, as well as other newspapers of the day; two twelve-inch ears of corn grown by one Henry Ray; “an ode to Texas by a young lady”; a twenty-five-cent meal ticket dated August 9, 1862; some Confederate money; and a “silk winder made and presented by Gen. Sam Houston to Miss Annie E. Kyle.”

  When the Goddess of Liberty statue was taken down in 1985, preservationists found a time capsule of sorts they didn’t even know about. Discovered in the five-point star the lady holds was a German-language newspaper published shortly before the statue had been set in place, two newspapers from Wisconsin, an assortment of calling cards and a printed broadside.

  Another round of surprise discoveries came during the restoration of the capitol in the early 1990s following the destructive 1983 fire that started in the lieutenant governor’s apartment. In 1992, a cache of six old postcards dating from the early 1900s was found by workmen stuffed inside a wall near a window in a third-floor room likely once occupied by an appeals court judge or clerk. “Practice makes perfect but be careful what you practice” read one of the cards. Another said, “Here’s champagne to our real friends, and real pain to our sham friends.” One of the cards, showing a stately Victorian house on Dallas’s Maple Avenue, had been mailed to Austin from Dallas on August 1, 1910.