Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  Indeed, pressure from the governor and the general public finally swayed the capitol commissioners. That said, University of North Texas history faculty member Mick Miller suggested in his 2010 master’s thesis on the capitol that Taylor might have been using the limestone versus granite issue as leverage in his effort to get the state to release a major portion of the promised Panhandle lands. The syndicate needed to start making money off that distant real estate.

  The capitol under construction sans dome. Author’s collection.

  “It has at last been decided to build the capitol of Burnet granite,” the San Marcos Free Press reported on July 23, 1885. “All the [capitol] board voted for it except [Treasurer Francis] Lubbock. Col. Taylor is allowed an extension of two years, which will make the capitol contract expire in 1890.”

  Taylor had finally agreed to use granite provided that “the state furnish me…such a number of convicts as I may require not to exceed 1,000, I to board, clothe and guard them.” Using prisoners instead of hired laborers would cause additional problems, but Texas ended up with a far more attractive and lasting capitol.

  Given the higher costs involved, even with the convict labor, changing the exterior specifications from limestone to granite led to yet another alteration: to lower costs, planned elaborate porticos on the east and west wings of the building would have to be eliminated. The Corinthian capitals topping the column Myers had envisioned would be replaced with the less ornate Doric style. Other changes, including a switch to a copper roof instead of one made of slate, were approved.

  The capitol not only looks different from what had been planned, but in one sense, it’s also not even the building Texans thought they had. During the extensive renovation set into motion by the February 6, 1983 capitol fire, architects discovered something about the building that didn’t add up, namely its measurements. Not to say that anything inside the capitol is crooked, but nothing in the eighteen-acre building is totally plumb. In fact, some of the column spacing is off as much as six inches. The reason, of course, is that the building went up when craftsmen built things by hand, doing their own measuring.

  Still, minor variances in measurement are not noticeable to the naked eye, the difference in no way as jarring as exterior limestone would be compared with red granite. As the Austin Daily Statesman editorialized during the construction: “The man who can look at the beautiful granite walls of the new capitol, now going up and regret that the change was made to that stone, should be kicked out of Texas.”

  When the capitol opened to the public in April 1888, a publication called the Texas Review put the limestone versus granite issue into perspective:

  “The ‘Indiana Limestone Question’ threatened at one time to array the Press and the People against the members [of the capitol board] who voted to accept the foreign rock for the Texas Capitol. It is hoped that the Board has secured the erection of a stable and grand building, that will last until a new race will muse over ruins, and ponder at the little world of land that, under a former administration, was bartered for its fabled splendor.”

  11

  FORTUNATELY, W.C. WALSH PAID ATTENTION IN MATH CLASS

  From his office in the 1857-vintage general land office building, land commissioner W.C. Walsh had been watching the construction of the new capitol since the low-key tossing of the ceremonial first shovel of dirt on February 1, 1882. Not only did he have a front-row seat to the biggest construction job to that point in Texas history, but Walsh also had an official reason to follow the building’s progress: he sat on the capitol board, the state entity overseeing the project.

  By the spring of 1887, the red granite, Greek cross–shaped functional portion of the future statehouse had been completed. Soon, work would begin on the towering dome that would give the giant four-story government building (the east and west wings are only three stories) its distinctive silhouette. When finished, the Texas Capitol would—except for its color—resemble the U.S. Capitol. Naturally, members of the capitol board and other prideful Texans believed it would look even nicer.

  Born in Dayton, Ohio, on the eve of the Texas Revolution in 1836, Walsh came to Texas with his family when only four. They settled in Austin on New Year’s Day 1840, when all the capital amounted to was an assortment of log cabins lining a broad thoroughfare called Congress Avenue. Following his graduation from Georgetown University in Washington, he returned to Texas and went to work as a clerk in the land office. Walsh stayed there until the beginning of the Civil War, when he signed up to fight for the Confederacy. Wounded three times, he survived the conflict even though he carried a Yankee Minié ball in his hip and had to use a crutch for the rest of his life. Back in Austin, he farmed and ran a rock quarry near Barton Springs until 1873, when he became chief clerk of the House of Representatives. Five years later, Governor R.B. Hubbard appointed him to fill the unexpired term of land commissioner J.J. Gross, who had died in office. Elected to a full term in November 1878, Walsh would serve until 1887.

  W.C. Walsh, who served on the capitol board, worried that the originally planned dome support would not work. He was right, and the plans got changed. Courtesy of Texas General Land Office.

  With the new capitol slowly taking shape, as a member of the body charged with making all the spot decisions that come up during such a large-scale venture, so grew Walsh’s layman’s knowledge of architecture. Now, with construction about to begin on the dome, Walsh became increasingly uneasy.

  “The plans,” Walsh later wrote, “called for a dome of brick, the lower thickness of the walls to be five feet and diminishing gradually to the foot of the lantern.”

  Rereading the specifications, the land commissioner figured the weight of the brick, added the weight of the substructure and went to bed not liking the number he got: 2.25 million pounds. Assuming he had made a mistake, the next night he went over his calculations and got the same result.

  “The weight shown not only wiped out the ‘factor of safety’ but exceeded the theoretical resistance of the foundation,” he wrote. Simply put, the capitol as planned would not support a brick dome. At some point, either during construction or over the course of time, the building’s distinctive top likely would come crashing down and possibly take much of the rest of the building with it, not to mention those who happened to be inside when it happened.

  Walsh tore up his calculations and burned the scraps. “As far as I could, [I] dismissed the question from my mind for ten days,” he continued. But then, still troubled, he ran the numbers again, coming to the same catastropheportending figure. This time he submitted the numbers to someone else, who reached the same conclusion.

  “I then hunted up [Gus] Wilke, the building contractor, and broached the subject,” Walsh wrote. “He told me the question had been worrying him for months, and he wished I could get some action by the Board.”

  Walsh watched the new capitol go up from his office in the 1857 Land Office Building. The building now houses the capitol visitors’ center. Author’s collection.

  Walsh did just that, but the timing was bad. All the state officials who sat on the board, including Walsh, were about to leave office. Only the state treasurer would be retaining his seat.

  “The general thought was that the outgoing Board had brought the building through troubles and discouragement to its practical completion, and it was now too late for the retiring board to take up the question—besides the new Board ought to have something to worry over,” Walsh wrote.

  Soon a private citizen, Walsh remained concerned. When the new board took no action on the dome issue after its second meeting, Walsh broached the matter with the new governor, former Texas Ranger Sul Ross. The governor asked Walsh to submit his concerns in writing and shrewdly asked if he minded the document being made public. The former land commissioner said he had no problem with that, and soon his belief that the blueprints for the new capitol contained a potentially disastrous design flaw hit the state’s major newspapers.

  When th
at happened, Ross appointed a panel of Texas and Louisiana architects to study the dome issue and prepare a report on the matter. “After thorough study [the architects] reported to the Governor that my contention was correct, that the existing plan was dangerous, and recommended the substitution of steel plates for the brick, above the walls.”

  The capitol’s dome under construction. Author’s collection.

  A new plan for the dome in place, the state again turned to convict labor to save money. The East Texas State Penitentiary (now the Rusk State Hospital) had a foundry where inmates produced cast- and wrought-iron products from iron ore relatively plentiful in that part of the state. Iron produced by prisoners went into the dome and elsewhere throughout the building.15

  Disaster likely averted, Walsh still did not feel totally satisfied. He sent capitol architect Elijah E. Myers a copy of the report on the dome, asking for “at least a personal explanation.” Myers’s secretary replied that his boss was in ill health and unable to answer Walsh. (For his general unresponsiveness and other reasons, the capitol board eventually forced the architect’s resignation.)

  “The only theory I could ever work out was that the upper dome was planned on the theory that the walls supporting it were treated in the estimate as solid, while in fact from basement to top story they were opened on four sides by immense arches,” Walsh wrote. “The mystery will never be solved.”16

  A principled man, at some point after Walsh left his post at the general land office and on the capitol board, the Capitol Syndicate tried to hire him.

  “He was offered two and one-half times…his salary as Land Commissioner to manage the holdings of the company that built the Capitol and received 3,000,000 acres in payment but he declined,” reads an undated typewritten sketch of Walsh’s life in the files of the general land office. His reasoning, the four-page document holds, was that someone might conclude “on account of offers made to him by the contractors, he might have neglected his duty to the State in requiring them to fulfill their every obligation in the erection of the Capitol.”

  By the time Walsh died on August 30, 1924, the ironclad capitol dome had stood for more than a quarter century, and it remains structurally sound well into the twenty-first century.

  12

  “A FIGHT ON WILKE IS A FIGHT ON ME”

  It’s logical to assume Gus Wilke subscribed to the Chicago Tribune to keep up with the news back home while working on the capitol, but if he did not get the paper, surely one of his friends or associates mailed him a clipping from its February 9, 1888 edition.

  “The New Texas Capitol…One of the Finest State-House Buildings in the World,” began the one-column, three-layer headline topping a long article labeled as “Special” from Austin. The final deck of bold type preceding the article concluded: “Constructed by a Chicago Syndicate, the Compensation Being a Tract of Land in the Lone Star State as Large as Connecticut and Comprising 3,000,000 Acres of Land—The Edifice Has Cost $4,000,000—It Will Be Dedicated in May with Imposing Ceremonies.”

  All that was correct except for the price, which had been rounded up a bit, but the story had one glaring omission, at least to any reader who knew anything about what had been going on in downtown Austin for the last six-plus years. Nowhere did the dispatch from Texas mention the name of the man who had overseen its construction. Nor did the name “Wilke” appear in any of the stories published in the Chicago newspapers following the dedication of the capitol.

  While nineteenth-century newspapers competed vigorously, their daily or weekly products ranging from staid to sensational, the sheets of the day—though definitely not devoid of opinion—tended to focus on the classic “who, what, when, where, why, and how.” Personality profiles of newsmakers were not common. In fact, while a search of a large online database of digitized newspapers reveals numerous references to Wilke during the capitol construction project, none of the stories deals with Wilke the man.

  So, later-day historians, barring discovery of an introspective diary that would be out of character given what is known about him, are left to speculate how he must have felt about receiving virtually no credit for the giant granite statehouse he steered to completion. He might have felt slighted, or maybe he got all the self-satisfaction he wanted by merely looking up at the monumental building that had gone up under his direction.

  Having spent the first fifteen years of his life in his native village of Ludershaden near the coastal city of Stralsund in what is now Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany, Wilke may well have possessed a stereotypical Germanic no-nonsense, industrious nature. That would fit with the fact that he does not seem to have sought publicity for his accomplishments. Born Gustav Wilke on October 1, 1853, he arrived in New York with his parents on July 21, 1868. Within a year, the family had moved to Chicago. While still in Germany, the young Wilke had been schooled in the building trade, and once in the United States, he quickly learned to speak and write English. As a young man, he worked for his father’s construction company, which saw brisk business following the devastating 1871 Chicago fire. Nine years later, in what might have been their last project together, father and son oversaw construction of the museum building at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

  Wilke’s connection with the Texas Capitol project began in the summer of 1882, when fellow Chicagoan Abner Taylor selected him as subcontractor for the massive building’s foundation and basement. Soon, the swarthy, mustachioed Wilke arrived in Austin for a construction project he assumed would only last a couple years. The job took more than expected, in more ways than one. On July 9, 1884, while supervising the unloading of a huge piece of limestone, a link of chain slipped and, as the Austin Statesman reported, smashed a portion of Wilke’s forefinger, middle finger and right hand into “a perfect jelly.” A doctor had to amputate the subcontractor’s forefinger.

  Clearly, thirty-one-year-old Wilke did not spend his work hours sitting around the construction office. He did, however, find time to patronize Brown’s Saloon, at least until he got a letter from Taylor instructing him to stay out of it. In his defense, the German immigrant grew up in a culture where most saw beer as a necessity equal to water. Another clue to Wilke’s character is the way he handled the laying of the cornerstone. The event, which would include a parade, prayer, speeches and a Masonic leveling ritual, was set for March 2, 1885—the forty-ninth anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico. Confident the final decision would be made to use granite instead of limestone for the building’s exterior, Wilke ordered an eighteen-thousand-pound hunk of granite from Marble Falls. When the state declined to pay for the stone’s quarrying and transportation by wagon and train to Austin, not to mention its cutting, dressing, polishing and engraving, Wilke covered the cost out of his own pocket. The bill came to $1,545.

  Capitol construction office. Contractor Gus Wilke stands second from right. Author’s collection.

  Taylor and the capitol board liked the work that Wilke had done on the foundation and basement. When Taylor returned to Chicago to take care of some personal issues, he awarded Wilke the subcontract for the rest of the job, a $2.3 million deal. (Wilke’s total compensation came to $362,000.) Clearly, Taylor had the upmost regard for his builder. “I shall stand by [Wilke] and a fight on him is a fight on me,” he said in a letter to the capitol architect. Once the limestone-granite issue was resolved in July 1885, Wilke resumed work on the capitol in earnest early the following year. To make faster progress, he had electric lights strung up around the job site so work could continue at night.

  Wilke seems to have had a good sense for public relations. With the rail line completed to the granite quarry, the contractor put together an excursion to the site in the summer of 1886. The capitol board and other state and local dignitaries enjoyed what the Austin Statesman termed “a splendid dinner” and noted, “Mr. Wilke is a prince of an entertainer.”

  One person not so sold on Wilke was the mostly absentee capitol architect. In 1885, Myers had written the
capitol board to suggest that it “should place itself upon record as determining whether Mr. Wilke or the writer is the architect of the capitol.” Wilke was not an architect, and by early 1886, neither was Myers the capitol architect. Fed up with his reluctance to come to Austin and slow response to requested tasks, the board effectively fired him.

  It took four thousand rail cars of granite quarried in Burnet County to build the capitol. Author’s collection.

  As the man ramrodding the capitol job, Wilke took most of the heat when controversy arose. His use of convict labor to remove the granite from the quarry in Burnet County led to a costly dispute with the International Association of Granite Cutters. When the union (referring to the contractor as “Great-I-Am-Gus” Wilke) voted to boycott the capitol job, Wilke responded by hiring nonunion stonecutters from Scotland. That violated a recently passed federal law prohibiting importation of alien labor, and charges were filed in federal district court in Austin against Wilke and Taylor. But that didn’t stop the work.

  By early 1888, the building stood mostly complete. In mid-April, the capitol commissioners reported to the governor that the “solid, substantial, magnificent and imposing State House was now ready for a thorough inspection.” In early May, state officials gave the building a walk-through and noted certain interior elements still needing completion. Wilke said he would take care of them in time for the May 16 dedication ceremonies, and he got it done.

  Referring to complaints about the copper roof (he had opposed using copper but got overruled), he offered to cover the costs of the repairs. In a letter to the capitol board, he wrote: “[N]o matter how it [the roof] got there, it will not be a credit to have built this magnificent building, spending six of the best years of my life in the undertaking. I cannot afford to have anything seriously wrong with this building.”