Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  Other finds during the 1990s capitol redo were a pair of black women’s dress gloves and a fan discovered by a worker crawling under the House floor—items apparently missed by Patterson fifteen years earlier. Clearly dating from the initial construction was a portion of a plaster barrel lid labeled “Windsor Plaster Mills, Staten Island, N.Y.” Its still-intact red-and-yellow label added, “The celebrated Diamond Brand Plastic. Pure white gypsum plaster was quarried from mines in Nova Scotia.”

  A fire in February 1983 heavily damaged the capitol and brought about a major renovation that revealed long-lost items. Author’s collection.

  Not all unexpected capitol finds have been made by maintenance workers. Shortly after the beginning of what would later be called World War I, a clerk organizing and re-filing records stored in the capitol basement found an age-yellowed envelope containing $200 in cash, bills issued by the U.S. Treasury during the Civil War on March 10, 1862. Before the cleanup was completed, around $1,000 had been found. “It is not known how the money came to be lost among the records,” the Associated Press reported on July 29, 1915. “The old records have been buried under odds and ends for years.”

  By far the most significant discovery made at the capitol came not long after noted Texas suffragette Jane Y. McCallum took her oath in January 1927 as secretary of state under Governor Dan Moody. In getting familiar with the records of her office, which ranged from corporate filings to extradition proceedings, she found the original copy of Texas’s Declaration of Independence from Mexico stashed away in the department’s vault.

  The document, signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836, had originally been sent to the U.S. State Department in Washington. There it remained for at least the next sixty years before the federal government returned it to Texas. Presumably, one of McCallum’s predecessors in office locked up the document. As the years passed and secretaries of state came and went, it had apparently been forgotten.

  McCallum transferred the document to the state board of control in 1929. That agency placed the declaration into a revolving, custom-made iron and glass enclosure for display in the main corridor of the capitol. Governor Moody gave the keynote speech at the dedication of the new display on March 2, 1930.

  When Moody concluded his remarks, seven-year-old Sterling Robertson Fulmore Jr. and young Mary Elizabeth Miller, descendants of declaration signatories Sterling Robertson and Samuel A. Maverick, pulled a Texas flag away to unveil the exhibit.

  27

  ALL TEXANS OWN THE CAPITOL, BUT…

  Anyone who has ever bought a house knows that nothing gets signed until all parties to the transaction—seller, buyer, lien holder—are satisfied that a clear title exists for the land on which the property stands.

  But while possession is proverbially “nine-tenths of the law,” the state has never had a perfectly clear title to the land beneath the capitol even though it has paid for that land three times. In fact, an argument can still be made that the statehouse and most of the state office buildings surrounding it technically occupy land belonging to someone else, not the state.

  The land saga started with Thomas Jefferson Chambers, who, in 1834 when Texas was still a Mexican province, gained appointment as superior judge of the Circuit of Texas. His court never convened, but in lieu of salary, Mexico awarded him an eight-league tract of land “on the eastern margin of the Colorado [River] near the foot of the mountains” that covered much of what is now the capital city. Unfortunately for Chambers and his heirs, he did not file a claim for this land in a timely manner.

  Meanwhile, Texas declared its independence from Mexico in 1836, and Chambers served with distinction as a general in the revolution. After Texas won the fight, Chambers settled in Liberty County. Knowing the new Republic of Texas’s constitution confirmed all Spanish and Mexican land titles, he apparently felt no rush to perfect his claim to the remote acreage in Central Texas.

  When a five-member commission appointed by President Mirabeau B. Lamar recommended the village of Waterloo as the site for the young nation’s capital city, its Congress condemned 5,004 acres for government use and set aside $15,000 to pay the landowners. But for some reason, Chambers’s land was not included, even though it contained the hilltop that one day would become the capitol site.

  Since Chambers had never filed his claim, the republic’s land office began doling out tracts from his grant to others as payment for their service to the republic. One of those grantees was Samuel Goucher, who in 1838 received roughly 1,500 acres. Unfortunately for Goucher, he never got a chance to enjoy his bounty. Not long after he obtained the grant, Indians attacked his cabin near Bastrop and supposedly massacred Goucher and his entire family. Edward Burleson (one-time Republic vice president) and Joseph Porter Brown had Goucher’s land surveyed and filed a claim on it. Once they had title, they conveyed it to the republic and got some of the money Congress had earmarked for buying the condemned land.

  A participant in Texas’s revolution against Mexico, Thomas Jefferson Chambers was the first owner of the land on which the capitol would later stand. Author’s collection.

  In 1840, Chambers finally decided to file on his land, only to discover that more than 150 patents had already been granted on his tract. One of those patents, the land that had gone to Goucher, is the tract on which the capitol would eventually stand. Chambers sued to recover his land, including the future capitol tract. His lawsuits dragged on for years, but Chambers never prevailed either with the Republic or the State of Texas following its admission to the Union in 1845.

  While the late Samuel Goucher no longer figured in the capitol land dispute, at some point, it became apparent that his three children had not been killed by Indians, only captured. And they had since been ransomed and released. Since they were Goucher’s legal heirs, the Burleson-Brown conveyance of the tract legally became moot. One of Goucher’s sons had died in 1849, and a daughter named Jane had died around 1850, but not before bearing some children. That left another son, William Goucher, who signed a quitclaim deed to one E.M. Smith in 1853 in consideration of $500.

  In 1858, a year after the limestone state capitol had been completed on the still-contested property, the state supreme court handed down an opinion affirming Chambers’s grant, ruling that Chambers had “as perfect a title as the law is capable of bestowing” to the 35,427 acres in question, including the 25-acre capitol grounds. For whatever reason, Chambers took no immediate action on the favorable high court ruling. Despite Chambers’s legal victory in the supreme court, under the venerable doctrine of sovereign immunity—common law that goes back to the early monarchies—the “king” must grant permission before his subjects can bring suit. And the state legislature would not give Chambers leave to sue for payment.

  Chambers may have believed that sooner or later he would prevail in his case, but for him that possibility and everything else ended on March 18, 1865. His family had just finished supper, and Chambers sat on the second floor of his home in Anahuac holding his six-month-old daughter Stella in front of an open window. Across from him, thirteen-year-old daughter Kate sat on a sofa while Mrs. Chambers occupied another chair nearby. Suddenly, a shotgun blast shattered the domestic tranquility. Still holding baby Stella, Chambers slumped over dead. The killer was never identified.

  The matter of the capitol land seemingly died with Chambers. In fact, his family believed his murder had something to do with his claim.

  Meanwhile, Smith had acquired legislative approval to sue the state for compensation for the capitol tract he had obtained from Goucher’s son. But he did not actually file the suit until 1867, a decade later. Finally, in 1874, the state ponied up for the land—the second time Texas had paid for the capitol tract.

  Following the death of their mother, Chambers’s two (by then married) daughters, Stella MacGregor and Kate Sturgis, both of Galveston, believed they were the rightful heirs to the property and, in 1884, resurrected the dispute as the current capitol was under constructio
n. They did that by filing a legal notice that improvements were going up on land they owned and those improvements would therefore automatically become their property.

  Once again, however, the legislature refused to give its consent for the Chambers daughters to sue the state. That attitude on the part of Texas lawmakers so exercised former governor James Hogg that he offered to represent the two women for free. “Build a log cabin on the capitol grounds,” he said, “move in and Jim Hogg will defend you in any legal actions brought by the state.”

  Proper gentlewomen, the two Galveston ladies declined to stoop to such an outlandish maneuver. Instead, they opted to go on with their lives, though frustrated by the fact that the state ought to settle with them.

  In 1925, two elderly women walked into the Austin office of attorney R.E. Cofer and said they owned the capitol and its grounds. At first, Cofer later recalled, he thought the “sweet old ladies” were simply eccentrics with no valid case. But he agreed to look over the documentation they offered him, a large packet of vintage legal papers he called “General Chambers’ Portfolio.”

  “I had not read thirty minutes until I realized that these women just as certainly owned the Capitol grounds as I owned my home,” he wrote in an article published in the Texas Law Review in 1931. Agreeing to take the case, Cofer succeeded in getting the matter presented to the Thirty-Ninth Legislature.

  “At first the Chambers case caused much banter and merriment among the legislators,” he wrote. “The claimants’ lawyers [he and a colleague] were greeted with the jocular inquiry: ‘When are you and your clients going to move into the Capitol?’” But then the lawmakers got a chance to study the 1858 supreme court ruling. Dallas senator John Davis took the matter particularly seriously.

  The state did not get a clear title to the capitol site until 1925, and even today, it’s possible someone could make a claim of ownership. Author’s collection.

  “Mrs. MacGregor and Mrs. Sturgis can come marching up here with the sheriff in front, armed with a writ of possession, to take over the Capitol and its grounds,” he told his fellow lawmakers. “In my judgment as a lawyer the state has a chance to settle a dangerous claim for a small sum.”

  Senator Davis thought that “small sum” ought to be $100,000, but the legislature ended up offering only a fifth of that: $20,000. That still being a lot of money in 1925, the sisters opted to take the money and signed a deed relinquishing their interest in the capitol tracts. Even though the two women no longer had a claim on the building or grounds, their father had left his mark on the building. Two stubby-barreled howitzers that General Chambers acquired for the Republic of Texas still flank the doors at the south entrance of the capitol.

  Despite all the paperwork connected to the ownership of the land the capitol stands on, if anyone can prove that he or she is a descendant of Jane Goucher, yet another lawyer might be able to make some money on the land that first belonged to Thomas Jefferson Chambers.

  28

  CAPITOL GHOSTS

  State employees put in their eight hours a day (usually more during legislative sessions) and then go home, but true believers in the supernatural say the capitol’s ghosts roam the building around the clock.

  “The Capitol is haunted day and night,” ghost hunter and author Fiona Broome told the Associated Press in 2008. “If you’ve got a nice, misty day… people see ghosts walking up the path to the Capitol building all the time.”

  On foggy mornings, she said, mysterious handprints appear in the condensation of one of the windows in the Senate reception room. That’s where a twenty-three-year-old man died in the fire that gutted the lieutenant’s governor’s apartment in 1983. Others, Broome said, have seen a ghostly lady in red, the supposed spirit of a woman who had been the secret lover of some long-ago lawmaker. Still others, she continued, have seen a darksuited, derby-wearing man gliding along the corridors of the capitol.

  One purported capitol apparition, a man who in life never set foot in the building he is said to haunt, is former governor Edmund J. Davis. No matter that he died in 1883 during the early building phase of the current capitol, his lingering ethereal self is supposedly occasionally seen peering from one of its large first-floor windows. Some claim the gray-bearded Davis will fix a chilling stare on a person and not look away until that person takes his or her leave. That the spirit of the governor, one of the least regarded of any of Texas’s former chief executives, would like to hang around the capitol is understandable enough. (Assuming a person suspends rationality to the extent of believing in ghosts.) The Reconstruction figure, as close as Texas has ever gotten to having a despot in the governor’s mansion, was so reluctant to leave office in January 1874 that it took armed militiamen—and a refusal of federal military intervention by the president of the United States—to oust him from the old limestone capitol.

  A ghost story’s prime ingredient is someone’s too-soon or violent demise, and the capitol has seen its share of both. At least three workers died in or near the capitol during its construction.27 (Contrary to legend, they were not convicts. All the convict labor took place during quarrying operations either at Marble Falls or Oak Hill.) A fourth worker died accidently in the building early in the second decade of the twentieth century, and in 1977, a twenty-four-year-old man committed suicide by jumping from the third floor inside the rotunda.

  The most notable violent death—the only assassination of a state official in Texas history—occurred in the capitol on June 30, 1903.

  Fifty-six-year-old comptroller of public accounts Robert Marshall Love, a Confederate veteran and former lawman who had served both as Limestone County sheriff and U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Texas (August 28–December 11, 1894), sat behind his desk in his office on the first floor of the capitol’s east wing when a man he recognized as W.G. Hill walked in about 10:00 a.m. as the comptroller talked with a local minister. Colonel Love, as he was known, and the clergyman greeted Hill and then continued to talk while Hill waited patiently. When the minister finally left, Hill handed Love a letter:

  Dear Sir:

  Public office is a public trust. Public offices are created for the service of the people and not for the aggrandizement of a few individuals. The practice of bartering department clerkships for private gain is a disgrace to the public service, and in this nefarious traffic you are a record breaker. You have robbed the state employees and your incompetent administration has prompted others to rob the state. The greatest mind that ever gave its wisdom to the world, the mind of all others capable of “umpiring the mutiny between right and wrong” said, “You take my life when you do take from me the means by which I live.” If that be true, you are a murderer of the deepest crime. Although I cannot help myself before laying life’s burden down, I shall strike a blow—feeble though it be—for the good of my deserving fellow man. For the right against the wrong, in the weak the strong.

  As the comptroller sat reading the letter, Hill pulled a borrowed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver from his coat and shot Love in the chest. Hearing the shot, chief bookkeeper J.W. Stephens rushed into the office in time to see Hill put a second bullet into Love. Hill then pointed the weapon at Stephens, who rushed him and began trying to take away the pistol. Scuffling, both men fell to the floor. As they continued to struggle, a third shot echoed through the capitol.

  By this time, Love’s secretary had come into the office along with the minister who had just left. After the third shot, Stephens and Hill lay still for a moment before Stephens slowly stood up while blood began to spread from under Hill. Stephens later said the revolver went off accidentally as he tried to pull it from Hill’s hand.

  At that point, though also shot in the chest and gravely wounded, Hill reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a vial of laudanum, an opiate that in a large enough dose could be fatal.

  “Let me take this and die easy,” he said, but Stephens slapped the drug out of his hand.

  Love, made as comfortable as possible o
n a couch in his office, died at 11:05 a.m. with his wife, family and Governor Samuel W.T. Lanham at his side. His last words were, “I have no idea why he shot me. May the Lord bless him and forgive him. I cannot say more.”

  Hill, having been taken to the Austin Sanatorium, died at 2:30 p.m. The killer was a former employee of the comptroller’s office “whom Colonel Love had refused to retain in his official family.” He would not make a dying declaration, but the letter he had given Love and the life insurance policy he had taken out the day before made it clear enough that he had planned to kill his former boss and then commit suicide.

  “Texas loses her first official at the hands of an assassin,” the Austin Statesman noted the following day.

  A postcard image of the capitol at night, when many believe the ghosts come out. Author’s collection.

  The Office of the Comptroller of Public Accounts, having grown over the years, left the capitol for its own office space in the 1960s. But legend has it that Colonel Love’s ghost never got the memo and continues to occupy his old office in the east wing of the first floor.

  In 1915, only a dozen years after Love’s murder, people started hearing an unearthly howling in the statehouse at night. After a day or two, someone finally identified the source of the scary sounds: the state health department, then located on one of the upper floors, held a quarantined dog that apparently got lonesome in the evening after everyone had left the office for the day.