by Mike Cox
Meanwhile, with the dedication only a few weeks away, an Austin newspaper editor plotted an extortion scheme targeting Wilke. M.C. Harris of the Austin Evening Dispatch threatened to run a long article detailing alleged deficiencies in the new capitol. He had already published several of what Wilke termed “scurrilous attacks against the construction of the new state capitol.” Either Harris or a surrogate made it known to Wilke that the whole issue could go away with a large payment to Harris, a combination of cash and real estate.
When Wilke refused to be shaken down by Harris, the Dispatch came out with a lengthy screed on April 30, even reporting that Wilke had tried to bribe the editor. Instead of going after Harris with fists or gun, as many a lesser man might have done, Wilke confronted him publicly in print with a long letter published in the city’s mainstream paper, the Austin Statesman. In the letter, the subcontractor exposed what Harris had been trying to do. Elsewhere in the same issue the Statesman declared the accusations against Wilke baseless, and the contractor survived the experience with his reputation intact. However, as the Galveston News reported, the Dispatch piece and Wilke’s rebuttal created “a great sensation.” Even so, the matter disappeared from the public prints after May 3. One article did refer to Harris as the “late editor” of the Dispatch, so he might have been fired. Whether authorities pursued a criminal case against Harris has not been determined.
After the dedication celebration, Wilke completed his punch-list work, and the state formally accepted the structure in December 1888. By that time, the contractor already had another job underway, building a new depot in Austin for the International and Great Northern Railroad. That project finished, he and the syndicate’s other key players landed a contract to build the granite jetties extending into the Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of the Brazos River. Wilke moved to the old town of Quintana in Brazoria County to oversee the project.
The Brazos job complete, Wilke and his wife returned to Chicago in 1890. Having become wealthy in Texas, he built them a two-story mansion on Wrightwood Avenue in the city’s Lake View district, so named because many of the elegant houses in that neighborhood looked out on Lake Michigan. Wilke built the house with granite that legend holds came from Texas.
Gus Wilke supervised construction of his mausoleum on Chicago’s north side nineteen years before his death. According to legend, it is built of the same red granite used in the Texas statehouse he built. Author’s collection.
The federal case against Wilke stemming from the hiring of the Scottish stonecutters dragged on until 1893, when Wilke ended up paying an $8,000 fine and court costs. It could have been a costlier matter. Initially, Taylor had also been charged, but the counts against him were dismissed. At the same hearing in Austin, Wilke, having waived jury trial, was assessed a $1,000 fine for each foreign stonecutter he had hired. Though most reports say sixty-two Scots came to Texas, Wilke had been found guilty on sixty-four counts.
By 1896, the forty-three-year-old Wilke had accomplished much since leaving Texas a rich man, and he would be putting up more notable structures, but in an era when the average male life expectancy in the United States was only forty-seven, he must have begun to ponder his mortality. That year, he did what future generations, thanks to twentieth-century funeral industry marketing efforts, would label “preplanning.” He bought property in Chicago’s 119-acre Graceland Cemetery on the city’s north side and oversaw construction of a mausoleum that when the time came would be the final resting place for him and his family. Again, the story is that he had sunset red granite from Marble Falls shipped to Chicago to build what some day would be his last address.
Ten years later, Wilke took care of another piece of unfinished business and became a naturalized U.S. citizen on March 24, 1906.
All the while, his contracting business continued to flourish. Though none of his later projects matched the scale of the Texas statehouse, he put up significant buildings in New York State (the Cullom Memorial Building at West Point, 1898), Indianapolis (the Traction Terminal Building, 1904), Memphis (the Memphis Trust Company, 1905), Denver (the Denver Public Library, 1907), Houston (the Scanlan Building, 1910), Davenport, Iowa (the Putnam Building, 1910) and Cincinnati (the Union Trust Building, 1915).
Wilke lived nearly another twenty years, dying in Chicago on April 24, 1915, at sixty-two. With Masonic rites, his fellow lodge members laid him to rest inside a Texas granite structure he had known would stand for centuries, just like the capitol he had built in Austin.
13
THE LOST SWORD
Somewhere there is a sword with quite a history.
The long steel blade could be rusting in an old trash dump, it could be hanging on someone’s wall or it could be for sale at a gun show. No one knows, and most likely, no one ever will. What is known is that the sword’s first owner lost it twice. And each occasion made him justifiably angry.
The sword, probably Civil War surplus, was issued in the mid-1880s to Captain Charles Vernon Terrell, second-in-command of Decatur’s volunteer militia company, the Decatur Rifles.17 In the spring of 1888, Terrell’s company, along with other guard units from across the state, converged on Austin to participate in what were then known as “sham battles” and march in the parade following the May 16 dedication of the new capitol. That’s when the twenty-seven-year-old officer got an unusual request, albeit one he couldn’t very well turn down. State senator Temple Houston, son of the first president of the Republic of Texas, wanted to wear a sword as he led the parade. Not having one himself, he asked Terrell’s commanding officer if he could borrow Terrell’s sword.
Though not particularly keen on being the only sword-less captain in the Congress Avenue procession, as a junior officer and a gentleman, Terrell unbuckled the belt and scabbard that held his sword and handed it over to his company commander, Major Tully A. Fuller. The major outranked Terrell when they had uniforms on, but in civilian life, Tully was Terrell’s friend and law partner. Fuller, in turn, took the sword to Senator Houston.
The Panhandle lawmaker, first elected to the legislature in 1884, had not chosen the Decatur militia company at random. Houston had met Fuller when the Decatur lawyer served in the House of Representatives. The two had worked closely together in defeating an effort to impeach a district judge from the High Plains. In the process, they became friends, so it was natural enough that Houston approached Fuller for the loan of a sword.
Temple Houston, Sam Houston’s son, gave the keynote speech at the dedication of the new capitol on May 16, 1888. Author’s collection.
But the grand parade down Congress Avenue would come later in the day. The first order of business was the dedication, an event that began about 11:30 a.m. following a military review. Governor Sul Ross served as master of ceremonies, recognizing all the VIPs sitting at the capitol’s south entrance. Following a prayer, the governor introduced Judge A.W. Terrell (of no direct relation to young C.V. Terrell). As a member of the Senate from 1876 to 1884, Terrell had been a key, if mostly behind-the-scenes, player in stewarding important legislation regarding the capitol. The judge, as the Austin Statesman reported, gave a “rather lengthy” talk covering “a great extent of history.” The governor then introduced the man who gave the shortest—yet most impressive—speech of the day: capitol contractor Abner Taylor.
Modestly, Taylor revealed that he had been told he could choose someone else to speak if he did not care to address the crowd himself. That, he said, he had done.
“I have listened to the gifted speaker who has welcomed you here and shall listen to my distinguished friend [Temple Houston] from North Texas, but when all that has been said…on this occasion may have been forgotten and we have all passed away, the friend who speaks for me will still be here. When the ages have gone by, century upon century…the one who speaks for me will still be remembered.”
Taylor then raised a hand to point at the capitol. “There stands my orator,” he continued, as the gathered thousands applauded and cheered. “Th
at magnificent building speaks for me, and nothing that I can say, or that any tongue can say, will add one word.”
After Taylor formally handed the building over to the state, the governor introduced Sam Houston’s sole surviving son. The senator, born across the street in the governor’s mansion only twenty-four years before, may have been armed with a ceremonial sword, but he sure didn’t use it to cut short his keynote speech.
“The greatest of states commissions me to say that she accepts this building, and henceforth it shall be the habitation of her government,” Houston began. “When the title to the noblest edifice upon this hemisphere thus passes from the builder to Texas, reason ordains a brief reference to the deeds and times that eventuate in this occasion.”
With proper modesty, Houston did not once mention his famous father in summarizing Texas’s history to that point. But the solon’s “brief reference” to “the deeds and times” ran to 3,200 words delivered with appropriate solemnity and at a measured pace respectful of the momentous occasion. In other words, his talk—which lasted thirty-five minutes—seemed to drone on forever. Not that Houston didn’t get off a few prophetic lines:
The survivors of early struggles who view this building realize that all which they did was not in vain. The architecture of a civilization is its most endearing feature, and by this structure shall Texas transmit herself to posterity, for here science has done her utmost. All that enlightenment and art could do has been done.…Here glitters a structure that shall stand as a sentinel of eternity, to gaze upon passing ages, and, surviving, shall mourn as each separate star expires.
The capitol, its walkway still barren of trees, not long after it opened. Courtesy of Ken Wukasch.
The invention of microphones, amplifiers and speakers still well into the future, many of those gathered in front of the statehouse that day could not hear what was being said. “Took in the capitol, and saw Terrell make his speech,” one woman wrote in her diary of that day’s events. She continued: “Though we were within 15 feet of the speaker we did not hear much on account of the vast multitude of people.…[I]t sounded something like about fifteen calliopes all at once, or a large herd of Texas steers or cowboys on a stampede. The speaker said something good every once and a while for those around him clapped their hands.”18
Meanwhile, it had started to rain. The cliché about getting one’s parade rained on had not yet been invented, but that’s what happened that day. Not only did a heavy spring shower fall during the dedication ceremonies, but it also quickly became evident to the gathered dignitaries and honored guests that the roof of the brand-new capitol leaked. The event proceeded, despite the splat of falling water on the floor, but it left attorney general (and future governor) James Stephen Hogg quietly boiling with anger. Of course, the fact that last-minute construction changes to his new capitol office had done away with the heating radiators and a private urinal called for in the blueprints did not improve his mood.
After all the speechmaking and the long parade that followed, Captain Terrell and the other militiamen attended the final dedicatory event of the day: a grand ball in the mopped-up capitol rotunda. At some point, presumably later on the following day, he set out to retrieve his sword. To his chagrin and Houston’s embarrassment, Terrell learned the honorable gentleman from North Texas no longer had the sword he had been loaned. He had lost it, Houston admitted.
Whether Terrell questioned the senator enough to learn that he had gone on a toot the night before or whether the young lawyer figured it out on his own based on Houston’s obvious signs of a hangover, Terrell walked down Congress Avenue to check all the saloons. Sure enough, the militia officer found his military gear at a popular capital city watering hole to which Houston had retired following the formal festivities.
Meanwhile, as soon as he could, Attorney General Hogg exercised his authority to prevent final acceptance of the new capitol from the contractors until the roof had been fixed and certain other punch-list items completed, including installation in his office of heating radiators and what back then was euphemistically referred to as a “water closet.” The capitol’s extensive cooper roof received the solder it needed to become watertight, and following completion of other construction fixups, the state formally took possession of the new capitol on December 8, 1888, six months after the gala dedication.
Austin celebrated for a week following completion of the new capitol. This is the dedication parade on Congress Avenue. Author’s collection.
C.V. Terrell loaned his sword to Senator Temple Houston and almost didn’t get it back. Later, he lost it again, and it’s still missing. Author’s collection.
Back in North Texas, Terrell stayed in the Decatur militia company through the Spanish-American War, but he did not see service in Cuba. Though no longer a citizen-soldier, he kept the belt, scabbard and sword. After all, it had once been worn by the son of the man who assured Texas’s independence from Mexico.
Terrell moved to Austin in 1921 during the administration of Governor Pat Neff to be sworn in as state treasurer. Now Terrell would be officing in the still grand building he had helped to dedicate thirty-three years earlier. In preparing for the move to the capital city, his wife, Etta May, came across the old sword. Having no idea of its historical value, she disposed of the saber without consulting her husband.
The judge had intended the long-obsolete sword to go on display in a museum someday, but this time, he had no luck in finding it. Just how his wife got rid of it was not reported when the ninety-two-year-old Terrell (he would live on for another six years) relayed the story to a young newspaper reporter in Austin in 1953. While that interview saved the tale for posterity, the sword worn by Sam Houston’s son on the day of the capitol dedication remains missing.
14
WHAT ABOUT THE GROUNDS?
The day before the dedication of the state’s new capitol, members of the Twentieth Legislature, then sitting in special session, realized they had forgotten something.
Sure, Texas had a glorious, red granite statehouse that stood as one of the largest public buildings in the world. In fact, someone had done some research and declared that only six government buildings anywhere on the globe were bigger. (No one seems to have kept the list naming the six larger buildings.) But the grounds around the new capitol looked drab in comparison, offering no reason for pride. It was too late to do anything before the dedication, but the lawmakers voted to hire a civil engineer to see to it that the area around the new building would soon look as attractive as the building itself.
As any capitol visitor picking up a brochure offering a self-guided tour of those grounds today can read, the grounds in the late 1880s “needed considerable attention.” Trash and scraps left over from the construction project still littered the property. Wooden retaining walls dating from the construction period and the original limestone steps from the previous capitol added to the lack of aesthetics.
The state hired Dallas civil engineer William Munro Johnson to pretty up the grounds, and he did, designing a stately, symmetrical Renaissance Revival landscape. That included a black-and-white diamond-patterned Great Walk from Congress Avenue to the building’s south doors. He put a similar walk around the building and laid out carriage drives with limestone curbing. The main walkway leading to the capitol he flanked on either side with elm trees, a feature formally known as an allée. Finally, Johnson surrounded the new capitol with an ornate iron fence set in a granite base. Each of the four carriage entrances to the capitol grounds had large gates mounted on sturdy granite posts, and for a time after they went up, they had to be kept closed. As the Austin Statesman explained on February 9, 1890, “The drive gates can only be opened to the public convenience as soon as the town cow is prevented from running at large and destroying property.”
This postcard from the early 1900s shows the black-and-white checkerboard grand walkway leading from Eleventh Street to the capitol’s south entrance. Courtesy of Ken Wukasch.
In the early 1890s, workers planted an apple tree, ornamental evergreens and two live oaks on the grounds. Still, visitors and locals did not find the acreage around the capitol particularly impressive. The grounds looked better than they had before Johnson entered the picture, but in no way were they comparable to the building itself. Three years into the new twentieth century, the Austin Statesman observed that the capitol grounds looked like “a widow woman’s calf pasture.”
With the nationwide City Beautiful movement underway at that time, the capitol grounds began to acquire park-like features, including flower beds and, southeast of the building, a grotto with a goldfish-stocked lagoon traversed by a small bridge. A small pond on the west side of the capitol, a feature once said to be home to numerous frogs and snakes, had been there before the new building but got prettied up. (It would remain until the 1920s, when the state drained it and grassed over the area; the grotto lasted into the 1970s.)
By 1910, the grounds looked much better. “There are a number of artificial lakes, pools and fountains where aquatic plants are grown in tropical luxuriance and where innumerable goldfish disport themselves,” a promotional brochure touting the capital city said. “A great number and variety of flowers both annual and perennial are grown upon the grounds as well as shrubs and trees of almost every known variety.”
Two ornate spraying fountains had been added in 1904 along with a pair of drinking fountains, one on the east side of the Great Walk, the other on the west side. (Water from the west fountain supposedly came out cold, while water from the east fountain came out hot.) The water for the east drinking fountain flowed up from a 1,554-foot-deep artesian well completed in 1889. “It is quite the fad now to take morning rides and walks to the well in the Capitol yard,” the Austin Evening News noted on November 11, 1893. “Each morning we see crowds of two, threes and fours winding their way to and from the grounds.”