Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol
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1984 A city ordinance setting height limits for buildings within a quartermile radius south of the capitol is passed.
1985 November 24: The deteriorating zinc Goddess of Liberty is removed from the dome by helicopter.
1986 June 14: A new aluminum replica of the Goddess of Liberty is placed on the dome by a Mississippi National Guard helicopter; capitol is named a National Historic Landmark.
1987 Carpeting is replaced in the House chamber with a replica based on original carpeting visible in a 1905 photograph of Lyndon Johnson’s father sitting at his desk while a state representative; venetian blinds are replaced with replicas of louvered blinds circa 1888; Austin Heritage Society restores the Governor’s Public Reception Room.
1988 The capitol’s centennial is celebrated.
1989 April: A master plan for underground extension is presented to the legislature.
June: The legislature approves the expansion plan.
A Pearl Harbor monument is dedicated.
1990 May: Excavation for the extension begins.
December: Excavation is completed.
1991 January: Construction begins on the extension.
1992 August: Work begins on interior renovation.
1993 January: The underground extension is completed.
1995 Extensive interior and exterior renovations of the original capitol are completed.
1998 The Texas Pioneer Woman statue is erected.
Tribute to Texas Children statuary erected.
1999 Korean War Veterans and Texas Peace Officer monuments are placed.
2013 Tejano monument dedicated.
2014 Vietnam Veterans monument dedicated.
2016 African Americans monument dedicated.
NOTES
Prologue
1. Goar, Marble Dust, 211–14. The state commissioned Ney (1833–1907) to create sculptures of Austin and Houston in 1892. Governor Sul Ross allowed her to use an empty room in the capitol basement to work on the pieces prior to completion of her studio in North Austin. The Houston statue was exhibited in the Texas Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, but Ney had not been able to complete the Austin piece in time. Both works stood in her studio until they were moved to the capitol in 1903.
2. Al Eck is buried near other family members in the Teck Cemetery.
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3. Kerr, Seat of Empire, 184–85, 188. A boardinghouse owner named Angelina Eberly (1798–1860) has been credited with saving the archives—and Austin’s status as capital city—by touching off a cannon and sending a load of grapeshot whizzing in the direction of the men busily loading records from the Land Office into wagons. Some historians question whether that actually happened, but Eberly has nevertheless been immortalized in a statue in the 600 block of Congress Avenue in downtown Austin.
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4. Ibid., 87–91. The limestone capitol, ordinary as it was, stood majestically in comparison to the structure it replaced, the capitol erected in 1840 by the Republic of Texas at what is now Colorado and Eighth Streets. Built of pine planks on cedar framing, the one-story statehouse extended some 60 feet deep and 110 feet wide. A “dog trot,” or porch, separated the Senate and the House, which was on the south side of the east-facing building. A covered front porch ran along the white-painted building’s width. Seven sheds behind the capitol served as committee rooms. “A more unpretentious building for a law-making body could hardly be found,” wrote German visitor Ferdinand Roemer. Since hostile Indians remained very much a threat to early day Austin, the city’s first capitol did have one feature that distinguished it from its three successors: it was protected from attack by a moat-like ditch and log stockade.
5. Giraud went on to serve as San Antonio’s mayor from 1872 to 1875. He died two years later.
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6. Franke, Inheritance, 90–130. The slain lawmaker is buried in the old Franke family cemetery near Black Jack Springs off Guettermann-Ehler Road and FM 609 in Fayette County. His family had a three-foot-high, eleven- by fourteen-foot sandstone enclosure constructed around the grave in 1875.
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7. Sharing a boardinghouse room with fellow delegate and future Texas governor Sul Ross, Fleming minimized his personal expenditures as well.
8. Born on January 19, 1829, in Bangor, Maine, Abner Taylor moved as a child with his parents to Ohio and, later, Iowa. By 1860, he was living in Chicago. He served as a colonel in the Union army during the Civil War and later as a U.S. Treasury agent. After that, he moved into business and construction contracting. For part of the time that he was involved in the building of the capitol, from 1884 to 1886, he also served in the Illinois House of Representatives. Less than a year after the capitol’s dedication in 1888, he was elected to the U.S. House. On September 9, 1889, he married Clara Babcock, daughter of his Capitol Syndicate partner A.C. Babcock. After leaving Congress in 1893, Taylor returned to the construction business. He died in Washington on April 13, 1903. He and the subcontractor he hired, Gus Wilke, were the driving forces in building the capitol.
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9. Tolbert apparently had forgotten his 1959 interview of a ninety-year-old Austin woman who witnessed the fire as a girl of twelve. “She never heard of the arson plot, nor did anyone else I talked with in Austin,” Tolbert wrote. “So this investigation was pretty much a waste of time,” he concluded.
10. Given that McBride (born circa 1860) was a black man whose entire life was spent in the Jim Crow era, little is known of his background. An 1897–98 Austin city directory shows him living with his wife, Mary, at 1308 Angelina Street on the city’s east side. At the time, he worked for Adjutant General W.H. Mabry.
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11. “The discipline at the quarries was good,” noted a report from the superintendent of Texas penitentiaries on October 31, 1886. “There was little punishment of the prisoners, and escapes were very few.”
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12. In buying the first 500 head of cattle for the ranch, XIT general manager “Barbecue” Campbell paid fifteen dollars a head for two-year-olds and eleven dollars for yearling heifers. The ranch sold its first cattle in 1887, trailing 716 head from Buffalo Springs to Higgins, where they went by rail to Chicago. There, they sold for ten to eighteen dollars a head.
13. Casad, Farwell’s Folly, 64–67. The author wrote in her preface that she had been surprised to learn that so few people, including Texans, are aware of the XIT and the role it played in the state’s history. Yet, she said, “the ranch is a sociologist’s mother lode, a historian’s hidden archives and a venture capitalist’s textbook.”
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14. Originally from Philadelphia, Myers moved to Detroit following the Civil War. Thirty-nine when the Capitol Board accepted his design, Myers already had a national reputation. As one writer later put it, he was “a talented, dishonest, hard-working, spiteful, clever, unbalanced, self-assured, self-destructive, hypochondriac whose story must be pieced together from fragments.” He died in 1908.
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15. The dome is actually two domes, an outside dome and an inner dome. The outer dome gives the capitol its iconic profile (and similarity to the U.S. Capitol) as well as support for the inner dome, which shapes the ceiling of the rotunda. The outer dome is fashioned of wrought iron with a galvanized sheet metal covering and is supported by girders custom-made in Belgium. A spiral staircase goes from the fourth level and between the inner and outer domes to the rounded point on the top of the dome that the design calls the lantern. The Goddess of Liberty sits on that. From the moment the capitol opened to the public, making the arduous climb to the top of the building was highly popular with visitors. In the 1890s, when the state decided to close the dome on Sundays in deference to the Sabbath, a whirlwind of protest got the move reversed.
16. While details related to the building of the capitol are recorded in the annual reports of the capitol board, as well as in surviving correspondence and contemporary newspaper accoun
ts, firsthand accounts by those who actually did the work are surprisingly scarce. One worker later talked about his experiences in newspaper interviews, but so far as is known, only one man, Gonzales, Texas native Gustave Birkner, ever wrote about his role in building the capitol. The son of a German immigrant to Texas, Birkner (1861–1956) devoted five double-spaced typewritten pages to his experiences at the statehouse job site in his unpublished 1940 memoir. In addition to the other work he did, he said that near the end of the construction project he spent eight days inside a six-foot-wide, three-walled brick airshaft during installation of a large metal rod that had to be added to repair a crack in the brickwork supporting the metal dome. The derrick used to lift construction materials for the dome was supported by guy wires that extended outward for one mile. In all, thirteen derricks were used in the building of the capitol, he wrote.
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17. Born on the Denton-Wise County line on May 2, 1861, C.V. Terrell gained admission to the bar in 1885. He served as Wise County attorney for four years before being elected to the state senate. Terrell was elected state treasurer in 1922 and after two years in that office became a member of the Texas Railroad Commission. He served on the commission for fifteen years. He died in Austin on November 17, 1959, and is buried in the State Cemetery.
18. “Trip to Austin Dedication of the State Capitol,” photocopy from handwritten diary in the author’s collection, author unknown, 375–79.
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19. Mrs. R. Houy, letter to Betty Hudman, August 19, 1963, in the author’s collection.
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20. Some 126 years after Lieutenant Governor Stockdale’s death in 1890, someone attempted, at least in the figurative sense, to “assassinate” the official on October 9, 2016. Around 3:30 a.m., a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper assigned to the capitol saw a man climbing temporary scaffolding on the south side of the building. The man then broke a window and entered the statehouse. Before officers could get him arrested, he pulled the portrait of the former governor from the wall and tossed it over the railing in the rotunda to the ground floor three stories below, badly damaging the painting. The twenty-two-year-old suspect was jailed on charges of burglary of a building and criminal mischief.
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21. Valerie Bennett, e-mail to author, October 25, 2016. Bennett was curator of the O. Henry Museum from 1988 until her retirement in 2011.
22. The building accommodating the barbecue place incorporated an 1869-vintage stone house where Susana Dickinson (1814–1883) once lived. She and her young daughter Angelina were the most noted Anglo survivors of the Alamo massacre. When the restaurant was razed, the Dickinson house was reconstructed across the street on Brush Square, adjacent to the O. Henry house, and is operated as a museum by the City of Austin.
23. Clay Leben, e-mail to author, October 24, 2016. Dr. Leben is a longtime member of the Brush Square Museum Foundation, the successor of the Friends of the O. Henry Museum.
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24. Weddle, “Granite Mountain: A Rock for a Horse,” Southwest Heritage (December 1968). George Washington Lacy, who came to Burnet County in 1858, traded a horse for the property and its granite.
25. A Marble Falls old-timer told a particularly outlandish convict story in 1932. “One on occasion,” he claimed, “a convict capable of operating the…locomotive, and a few of his companions, seized some children of the captain of the guards, held them as shields, mounted the locomotive that was near at hand, and made for the outside world. They gave the guards a merry chase for a while, but I believe they were all captured. Possibly some of them were killed, but no harm came to the children.”
26. Facing east, the marker reads: “Erected/By Their Fellow Workmen/In Memory Of/George Mutch/Who Died 13th Of June 1886/Aged 23 Years/Also/John Smith/Who Was Drowned The 27th Of June 1886/Aged 27 Years/Also/George Moir/Who Died 15th of October 1886/Aged 22 Years/Cut Of Burnet Granite.”
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27. “The Capitol Accident,” Galveston Daily News, May 13, 1887; Brenham Weekly Banner, September 2, 1886. One laborer died of what likely was a heat stroke. Another was crushed beneath thousands of pounds of stone when a wrought-iron girder in the fourth-floor ceiling that was being used to support building material for use elsewhere failed due to the heavy weight and collapsed. The accident occurred on May 11, 1887. Less than a year before, the Brenham Weekly Banner observed: “The construction of the new capitol at Austin involves the use of a great deal of machinery and the result is that accidents—some of them fatal—are of frequent occurrence. The contractor should exercise great care.” The third death may have been the carpenter rumored to have been poisoned by his wife. More likely he died from heat or natural causes.
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28. Morehead, Richard Morehead’s Texas, 167. Veteran Dallas Morning News capitol bureau chief Richard Morehead, who covered the legislature in the 1950s, did not believe Morris’s story. “If this ever happened, nobody around here knew it,” Morehead wrote. “Apparently, it is just more barroom fantasy about how Texas laws are made.”
SOURCES
Prologue
Austin American-Statesman. November 27, 1938.
“Leonard T. Eck.” Austin (Texas) History Center biography file.
Smyrl, Vivian Elizabeth. “Teck, Texas.” Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed September 9, 2016. https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hwt01.
Texas Public Employee. “Capitol Loses Old Friend.” March 1970.
Wightman, Marj. “Capitol Veteran! Al Eck Honored at 90.” Austin Statesman, April 13, 1964.
Chapter 1
Cox, Mike. Historic Austin: An Illustrated History. San Antonio, TX: Historical Publishing Network, 1998, 21.
Hart, Weldon. “Austin Beat Out Tehuacana and Palestine for Capital Site 120 Years Ago.” Austin: N.p., [1970].
Tolbert, Frank X. “Once Pronounced It ‘Tiwockony!’” Dallas Morning News, December 29, 1958.
“To the Voters of the State of Texas,” Texas State Gazette, February 16, 1850.
“When Austin Was Selected Capital of Texas.” Frontier Times 10, no. 3 (December 1932): 104.
Chapter 2
Austin American-Statesman. “Firemen Fight in Vain to Save First Capitol and Contents.” July 26, 1970.
Chabot, Frederick Charles. With the Makers of San Antonio. San Antonio, TX: Yanaguana Society Publications 4, 1937.
Connor, Seymour, James M. Day, Billy Mac Jones, Dayton Kelley, W.C. Nunn, Ben Proctor and Dorman H. Winfrey. Capitols of Texas. Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1970, 121–47.
Harris, August Watkins. Minor and Major Mansions & Their Companions in Early Austin, A Supplement: Buildings of the Seat of Government 1840–1861. Austin, TX: privately published, 1959.
Harrison, Charles A., to F. Giraud, November 14, 1851; December 30, 1851; and January 5, 185[2]. Texas State Library and Archives.
Ramsdell, Charles W. “The Legacy of F. Giraud.” Texas Parade, April 1968.
“Resolution of the Senate.” November 11, 1851. Texas State Library and Archives.
Williamson, Roxanne Kuter. Austin, Texas: An Architectural History. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1973, 26–28.
Chapter 3
Austin American Statesman. “Tells Story of the Bandit Attempt to Rob Treasury and Battle Round Capitol.” July 27, 1919.
Austin Southern Intelligencer. July 21, 1865; August 11, 1865.
Brown, Frank. “Austin in 1865.” Chap. 24 in Annals of Travis County and the City of Austin from the Earliest Times to the Close of 1875. Austin, TX: Von Boeckmann, Schutze and Company, 1901.
Dallas Morning News. “The Looting of the Treasury.” May 18, 1897; May 25, 1897.
———. “When the State Treasury Was Robbed.” November 15, 1925.
Dealy, Edward M. “Outlaws Tried to Loot Austin Treasury 56 Years Ago.” Dallas Morning News, November 13, 1921.
Freeman, G.R., to F.W. Emory, June 26, 1865. Records of the Adjutant Gene
ral. General Correspondence, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph. June 16, 1865.
Streeter, Floyd. Ben Thompson: Man with a Gun. New York: Frederick Fell, 1957, 56–57.
Chapter 4
Austin Daily Statesman. February 20, 1873; February 22, 1873; February 23, 1873.
Birkner, Gustave. “Gus Birkner.” Unpublished manuscript, 1940, 52.
Brewer, Anita. “Rock Mason Recalls Capitol Construction.” Austin American, June 20, 1950.
Crider, Bill. Texas Capitol Murders. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Daily State Gazette (Austin, TX). February 21, 1873.
Dallas Daily Herald. February 24, 1873; March 1, 1873.
Franke, Gertrude, ed. The Inheritance. Austin: Nortex Press, 1987, 80–130.
Legislative Reference Library of Texas. “Louis Franke.” Accessed September 27, 2016. www.lrl.state.tx.us/legeLeaders/members.
Chapter 5
Austin Weekly Statesman. September 16, 1875; January 20, 1876; March 27, 1879; October 9, 1879.
Dallas Weekly Herald. June 28, 1883.
Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Texas. Galveston, TX: Galveston News, 1875, 527, 698–99.
Members of the Legislature of the State of Texas from 1846 to 1939. Austin: Texas Legislature, 1939.
Miller, Thomas Lloyd. The Public Lands of Texas, 1519–1970. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972, 62, 65–66.
Waco Daily Examiner. “From Comanche.” October 1, 1878.
Chapter 6
Connor, Seymour, James M. Day, Billy Mac Jones, Dayton Kelley, W.C. Nunn, Ben Proctor and Dorman H. Winfrey. Capitols of Texas. Waco, TX: Texian Press, 1970, 121–47.
Cox, Mike. Historic Austin: An Illustrated History. San Antonio, TX: Historical Publishing Network, 1998, 37–38.
Tolbert, Frank X. “Tolbert’s Texas: When Land Thief Burned Capitol.” Dallas Morning News, January 4, 1975.