Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  1

  WHY THE CAPITOL’S NOT IN TEHUACANA

  Hard to spell and harder to pronounce, the East Texas town of Tehuacana could have been the capital of Texas, not Austin.

  In a democracy, all elections are important, but early Texans went to the polls twice to determine the location of the state’s capital. If the outcome either time had been different and another community chosen as the seat of government, it could have turned Austin into a virtual ghost town, certainly not the major metropolitan area it became.

  Though President Mirabeau B. Lamar had chosen what would become Austin as the site of the Republic of Texas’s capital in 1839, that decision had never been 100 percent popular. First president Sam Houston, for one, considered the Buffalo Bayou city named in his honor much more suitable for the seat of government than frontier Austin. But despite the unsuccessful attempt in 1841 by the man known as the Hero of San Jacinto to seize the republic’s archives and remove them to Houston, Austin survived as the capital city, continuing as capital in 1845 when Texas joined the Union as the twenty-eighth state.3

  Five years after statehood, in Texas’s first federal census, enumerators found only 629 people living in Austin. Actually, even that decidedly modest head count represented a decline of 26.5 percent since 1840. Most of its residents lived in the original one-mile-square town site first surveyed by Edwin Waller, the town’s first mayor.

  What reenergized Austin happened on perhaps one of the most important but least-remembered dates in its history: March 4, 1850. On that date, two days after celebrating the fourteenth anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico, Texas voters went to the polls to decide if Austin should continue as the state capital. Anyone with business or other ties to Austin knew that the town would likely never be more than a backwater county seat if it lost its status as home of the state’s government, modest as that was at the time.

  Sketch of the capitol in use when Texas voters decided to keep the seat of government in Austin. Author’s collection.

  The front page of the February 16, 1850 issue of the Texas State Gazette, Austin’s only newspaper, devoted nearly two columns of type to a circular setting forth the various arguments to keep the capital in Austin. Headlined “To the Voters of Texas,” the pro-Austin piece was signed “Very Respectfully” by the “Citizens of Austin.” Austin’s mono-media campaign brief began:

  In the exercise of one of your most sacred privileges, the responsible duty will devolve upon you on the first Monday of March ensuing, to determine where the Seat of Government of this State shall be located for the next twenty years. Before casting your suffrage upon a question replete with so much vital importance to the present interest and future welfare of the State, it behooves you to lay aside every sectional feeling and party prejudice, to scrutinize with care every argument for and against the different places put in nomination, and to weigh with caution every consequence, whether for good or for evil, that may result from your determination.

  The other towns on the ballot were Huntsville (Walker County), Palestine (Anderson County), Tehuacana (Limestone County) and Washington-on-the-Brazos (Washington County). All lay in the more populated eastern half of the state, Austin being the outlier by far. But while the capital was then Texas’s westernmost town of any consequence, the article pointed out that the community sat practically in the center of the state.

  “It may be argued, however, that although Austin is central with regard to territory, it is not so with regard to population—and this is true AT PRESENT,” the article went on. Clearly, Austin’s civic boosters believed the state would continue to grow. As new immigrants arrived and the frontier advanced westward, Austin would become more and more convenient to the state’s citizenry.

  The second major argument advanced by the Austin committee had to do with economics. It would take tax dollars, and likely a tax increase, to move all the government records, stores and personnel from Austin to some new location. Also, a new statehouse and other public buildings would have to be built at the new capital city.

  The final point the newspaper piece made in Austin’s favor was that a more eastern capital would heighten the chance that Texans might opt to cleave their state into two or more separate states, a possibility allowed in Texas’s terms of admission to the Union. Such a division, some feared, “would hazard a fatal blow to the interests of the whole South upon the question of slavery.”

  Ending with an appeal to “true Texians,” the piece urged voters not to be swayed “by the sectional prejudices of those who desire to remove the seat of Government through selfish motives, but, on the contrary, by a sincere and an ardent desire to promote the interest of the whole State from the North to the South, and from the East to the West.”

  In a brief editorial on an inside page, the newspaper expressed its confidence that Austin would remain the capital. Indeed, the editor wrote, “the claims and advantages of our place are so evident as to render it unnecessary” to belabor the point at length. “Let the friends of Austin but go to the polls, and our opinion is, that she is safe on the first ballot.”

  Over in Limestone County, early settler and prime community mover John Boyd really wanted to see the capital removed to his town. Its hard-to-pronounce name was Tehuacana (Ta-wok-can-uh), a corruption of the Tawakonis Indian tribal name. Boyd, who had served in the first Congress of the Republic of Texas, had obtained the land grant encompassing future Tehuacana in 1835. After the town developed, he became its first postmaster in 1847. Two years later, he succeeded in getting Tehuacana on the capitalselection ballot.

  What Boyd did not know was that for such a small town, Austin had a cabal of strategically minded movers and shakers with vested interests who understood that there were other ways to remove the epidermis from a feline when it came to ensuring election results. Accordingly, they set into motion what could be called the El Paso Plan.

  “A short time before the election,” Travis County clerk and Austin’s unofficial chronicler Frank Brown wrote, “the people of Austin raised several hundred dollars to defray expenses and dispatched an old citizen of the town, Mr. William Cockburn, to El Paso [County], in order to secure the support of those people for Austin.”

  In 1850, traveling six hundred miles from Austin to Texas’s westernmost county amounted to a long, water-scarce and dangerous trip mostly through hostile Indian country. That Cockburn got there with his scalp intact is impressive, but it is hard to imagine that it would have cost him several hundred dollars to do so when a pound of coffee could be purchased for less than forty cents, beef brought eleven cents a pound and even a good rifle only ran twenty dollars. Considering those metrics, it can be conjectured but likely never proven that Cockburn spent some of the funds that had been entrusted to him by the good people of Austin on “educating” El Paso County’s electorate. Vote-buying would be a more realistic, if harsher, term.

  In the end, voters statewide agreed with the arguments set forth by Austin’s boosters. By a two-to-one margin over Tehuacana, garnering 7,679 votes, Austin retained its status as capital city. Even so, Tehuacana came in second with 3,142 votes and Palestine got 1,854 votes, 460 of them home folks. Huntsville netted 1,216 votes, Washington-on-the-Brazos 1,143 and miscellaneous write-in towns got 24 votes between them.

  Interestingly, according to Brown’s contemporary report, 754 of the Austin votes came from El Paso County. Only three El Paso County residents voted for Palestine, and no one put their mark next to Tehuacana, Huntsville or Washington-on-the-Brazos. “The El Paso vote decided the question in favor of Austin,” Brown wrote. Intriguingly, a decade after hundreds of El Paso County residents made their will known in the capital election, the 1860 census showed only forty-three people actually lived there. Clearly, “old citizen” Cockburn was one heck of a lobbyist.

  Tehuacana, a near–ghost town in Limestone County, could have been Texas’s capital city. This is how it looks today. Photo by the author.

  To put the importan
ce of this election in perspective, in barely a decade, both Tehuacana and Washington-on-the-Brazos had practically vanished. The same thing could have happened to Austin, though its status as the seat of Travis County would have kept it barely alive. Of course, in mandating the election, the legislature had given the public some wiggle room by stipulating that the capital question be taken up by voters again in 1870.

  Assured of at least two decades of stability, Austin soon began its first boom. “Upwards of 100 residences have been completed in the last four months,” the Texas State Gazette reported in the spring of 1851. “This is, if providence should hold out, agoing to surpass eney citty [sic] in the west,” Austinite William Holt wrote to an acquaintance in Mississippi.

  “Austin has a fine situation up on the left bank of the Colorado,” Frederick Law Olmsted wrote after a visit in 1854. “Had it not been the Capitol [sic] of the state…it still would have struck us as the pleasantest place we had seen in Texas. It reminds one somewhat of Washington; Washington, en petit, seen through a reversed glass.” Still, Texas’s young capital city fell a little short of paradise. “There is a very remarkable number of drinking and gambling shops,” Olmsted continued, “but not one book store.”

  Following the Civil War, Reconstruction delayed the second election on Austin’s status as the state capital, but the matter finally went to the voters again in 1872. In an election held November 5–8 that year (voters had to be given ample time for travel to the polls), 63,377 Texans agreed that Austin should be the permanent seat of government. Houston, this time the secondplace contender, got 35,143 votes, while 12,776 citizens cast their ballot for Waco; 101 other voters wrote in their preference for various other cities, including 10 who thought the Brazos County seat of Bryan should be the capital. This time, Tehuacana had not even made it to the ballot.

  Four years later, the Constitution of 1876 made Austin’s status as the seat of state government part of Texas’s organic law. Assuming future generations do not tamper overmuch with the state’s charter, Austin will be the capital of Texas for as long as there is a Texas.

  2

  HALF A WATERMELON ON A CORN-CRIB

  The story of a civil engineer from San Antonio who earned less than the value of a good mule for designing a new capitol for Texas and whose efforts came to nothing shows that cheaper is not always better, at least in the construction of public buildings.

  Since statehood, the legislature had continued to meet in the original wooden capitol raised by the late Republic of Texas, but lawmakers realized they badly needed a new building.4 The electorate having approved Austin’s continuation as the capital, on November 11, 1851, the Senate adopted a resolution asking that Governor Peter Hansborough Bell “obtain from some competent architect or master builder, a plan of a building for a State Capitol.” The statehouse, the resolution stipulated, should be constructed of brick or stone “on as cheap a plan as practicable.”

  Three days later, François P. Giraud, a civil engineer in San Antonio, received a letter from the Governor’s Office asking if he might be interested in the project. Interested indeed, Giraud left for Austin by stagecoach almost immediately. Meeting with the governor, he later recalled, he “was told…to make a plan for something [in the way of a statehouse] which would be a credit to the State.”

  Born of French immigrant parents in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1818, Giraud had been in Texas since 1847. Sent off to school at Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland, he went on to study engineering and architecture in Paris. Putting his skills to use after returning to Texas, in San Antonio, he designed some of that city’s landmark churches, as well as the early buildings at St. Mary’s University and the Ursuline Academy. In 1849, he became San Antonio’s city engineer. His credentials were unimpeachable.

  Giraud remained in Austin about a week, “getting the necessary information respecting quarries &c,” before returning to San Antonio to begin drawing plans for “a fire proof building…with an iron dome… estimated to cost $355,000.”

  The engineer apparently stayed so busy that he neglected to keep the governor up to date on his progress. On December 20, executive department secretary Charles A. Harrison wrote to Giraud, “Some of our Honorable Senators are becoming fidgetty [sic] about the plan and estimate for the State Capitol. I therefore told His Excellency that I would write to you by this Evening’s Mail on the subject.” Harrison, who must have met Giraud’s family when he came to Austin to talk with the governor, added, “I hope Mrs. Giraud and family as well as yourself enjoy good health. I request you to present my best remembrances.”

  Five days into the new year, on January 5, 1852, Harrison wrote Giraud somewhat less cordially that “the Senate are [sic] very anxious to obtain as soon as possible the plan and Estimates for the Erection of the State Capitol. Please answer this by return mail and oblige.”

  No copies of the original 1853 capitol plans are known to have survived into the modern era, but this is a vintage drawing of the statehouse’s exterior. Courtesy of Ken Wukasch.

  Giraud finally delivered his drawings three days later, but the “fidgetty” Senate soon decided it did not like Giraud’s vision of a new capitol. And Giraud definitely did not like the Senate’s reaction to his $350 bill for services rendered.5 The body appropriated only $100 in payment. A year later, in a petition arguing for payment of the rest of his fee, the Alamo City engineer wrote, “The Senate appropriated…$100 for my plan of a building costing $355,000 and then voted $500 for the plan of a building which was to cost only $100,000.” Giraud’s claim went to the Senate Finance Committee, which forwarded it to the Select Committee—which declined to pay the bill.

  The San Antonio engineer and the State of Texas both would have been better off if the Senate had opted for Giraud’s plan. As Giraud later pointed out in his defense, Texas ended up spending five times as much money to buy plans for a cheaper building. Those drawings came from one John Brandon, a carpenter. Even Brandon later admitted he earned $500 for a $60 plan.

  On April 21, 1852—the twelfth anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto, which had ensured Texas’s independence from Mexico—the state awarded the capitol construction contract to the low bidders, “Messrs. Moore and McGehee” of nearby Bastrop. As construction proceeded, Brandon’s plan, which had taken him only three days and three nights to complete, got modified as the builders took shortcuts. Allegations later arose that some of the money saved in the construction of the capitol did not make it back to the state treasury, but nothing ever came of a legislative investigation into the matter.

  A young man named Wende, a recent immigrant from Germany, was a journeyman bricklayer and stonemason paid fifty dollars per month by the contractors who built the new capitol. “The building started in the Spring of last year and, with the auxiliary buildings, which are also of stone, will take until Easter of this year,” Wende’s wife, Agnes, wrote her cousin in 1854. “Much is spent on it because it is meant to be the same as in Berlin the ‘Session’ Building.…I believe Austin will become, in time, a Posen and Berlin.”

  But when completed at a final cost of $175,000, the new Texas Capitol stood not as a striking monument to the Lone Star State but as an example of the metaphorical two-headed calves sometimes given birth by a committee: a Greek Revival structure lacking any classical grace. One writer later derisively said the capitol—with a dome too small for the three-story building it sat on—looked like “a corn-crib with the half of a large watermelon on top of it.” In addition to the statehouse having been built by workers following a low-cost, unimaginative set of plans, some of those laborers might not have been operating at peak efficiency. For instance, one of the stonemasons on the project, J.W. Hendrickson of Salado, was better known by his nickname—“Whiskey Jack.”

  Not only did the new capitol look plainer than a wart on a hog’s snout, but also the shoddy construction resulted in structural issues ranging from unsightly cracks to serious concern for the building’s very ability to
remain standing. After requesting a report on the condition of the state’s buildings in 1874, Governor Richard Coke read what he and any other sentient person could tell just by looking: “All the public buildings, except perhaps, that which is used by the Supreme Court, are in a very dilapidated and unsafe condition.” If state officials did not think much of their capitol, Austin’s population of Mexican free-tail bats found it an excellent roosting place. “The odor around the building is almost unbearable,” the Austin Statesman observed, presumably referring to accumulated bat guano and not the political doings that occurred inside the statehouse.

  An early photo of the limestone capitol, the first government building to stand at the head of Austin’s Congress Avenue. Author’s collection.

  Sooner or later, Texas would need a capitol that better matched the size and grandeur of the state it would serve.

  3

  THE GREAT TREASURY RAID

  When the bell atop Austin’s First Baptist Church began clanging that moonlit Sunday evening of June 11, 1865, the town’s civilian home guardsmen knew it signified trouble, not a call to worship.

  With hundreds of battle-hardened ex-Confederate soldiers swarming the town of four thousand, none of the volunteers found it surprising that a need for their services had arisen. But the nature of the emergency would rock the war-weary state.

  When the Civil War effectively ended with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, Texas rapidly descended into near anarchy. Only one Confederate general refused to lay down his arms: Joseph Orville Shelby. Soon he and what remained of his “Iron Brigade” of Missourians headed for Texas. Hoping the South might rise again, Shelby and four-hundred-plus soldiers marched toward Austin en route to Mexico, where they hoped to regroup and at some point resume fighting.