Legends & Lore of the Texas Capitol

by Mike Cox

  For years, two ponds graced the capitol grounds, but they have long since been filled in and grassed over. Courtesy of Ken Wukasch.

  The liquid that came from the well was wet, but that was about all that could be said for it. It smelled like rotten eggs and tasted even worse. A state health department analysis in the 1970s found the water contained 1,759 parts per million of dissolved solids. Nearly one-third of those solids were sulfate, a mineral that has a laxative effect. The state study concluded the well water was “not very good chemically” and should not be considered suitable for drinking. Long-standing legend held that it was good for your health to down a hearty dose of capitol fountain water, but in truth, it was beneficial only to those with constipation issues. Still, as late as the early 1960s, people regularly drove up in front of the capitol and got out of their vehicles with gallon jugs to fill with the stinky water. (The well was restored as part of the redo of the grounds in the 1990s and is now connected to city water.)

  In 1908, the state built an elaborate greenhouse to the southeast of the capitol that lasted until 1925, when fire destroyed it. Another greenhouse replaced it, but that structure was eventually moved to the Texas State Cemetery in East Austin.

  A thick carpet of Saint Augustine grass, amply watered thanks to the larger of the artesian wells on the grounds, surrounded the statehouse and of course had to be regularly mowed. Until 1926, mules pulled the mowers, but that year, the state retired the four-legged workers and bought gasolinepowered lawn mowers.

  As the years passed, the grounds grew increasingly garden-like, much of the greenery being nonnative ornamentals. The proliferation of exotic plants, including some that in the twenty-first century would be considered noxious invasive species, bothered those who cherished Texas’s rich botanical diversity.

  One man who saw red in beholding the capitol’s greenery was noted Texas writer and University of Texas faculty member J. Frank Dobie. Invited to speak to a joint session of the legislature on July 28, 1931, the folklorist did a little lecturing with his storytelling.

  “It’s a shame for Texas to import arbor vitae to shade its capitol grounds and ignore the historic huisache, the native mesquite, the noble oaks and stately elm,” he told the lawmakers gathered in the packed House chamber. While stressing that he had not come to advise the legislature, he went on to do just that, recommending more monuments and a state museum. Over the years, more oaks and Texas pecans did get planted around the capitol, but governmental inertia had more to do with the look of the grounds than planning.

  The state built this greenhouse on the capitol grounds in 1908. It made it until 1925, when fire destroyed it. Courtesy of Ken Wukasch.

  Mother Nature did some landscaping herself. A severe thunderstorm in 1972 toppled several of the elms Johnson had planted along the Great Walk decades earlier. The state did not replace the trees, and the rest were removed in the 1990s after they had considerably exceeded their life expectancy. By that time, the capitol’s landscaping, as least when it came to trees, had become a matter of public safety as well as aesthetics.

  “The Capitol grounds have been deteriorating steadily for many years,” read a portion of the ninety-two-page capitol restoration master plan, “a victim of diminishing maintenance budgets and neglect.”

  With the addition of the capitol’s underground extension in 1993, the northern part of the grounds took on its modern appearance, followed by a major redo of the rest of the grounds that came during the 1995–96 capitol renovation. By 1997, nearly $6 million had been spent on the capitol grounds. Today, with the exception of the various monuments erected over the years, the grounds look much as they did prior to 1915, minus the longremoved fountains and ponds.

  One thing the capitol grounds brochure does not talk about is what happened to a big chunk of the ornate fence placed around the capitol shortly after its completion. During the winter of 1956, contract workers tore down the northwest corner of it to make room for the Supreme Court Building, then referred to as the State Courts Building. A minor problem arose: what could be done with the approximately one hundred tons of granite blocks left over from the removal of the fence?

  “After considerable head-scratching,” the Austin American reported on January 11, 1957, “a decision was reached.…A large hole was dug at the site and the granite blocks…were buried.”

  With 200,000 pounds of granite beneath its highest court, it’s hard to argue that Texas justice does not rest on a solid foundation.

  15

  REMEMBERING THE ALAMO AT THE CAPITOL

  In the late 1950s or early 1960s, a worker bulldozing a trench during construction of a new building at the Granite Mountain Quarry near Marble Falls made a discovery that created a mystery still unsolved. The puzzle involves two of Texas’s most-recognized icons: the Alamo and the capitol.

  Four feet down, the machine’s heavy metal blade struck something hard. Climbing from his seat to see what he had hit, the operator saw a chunk of concrete or plaster. Soon he found several other pieces. Brushing the dirt from the larger of the objects, he could make out one word indented on its smooth side: “Thermopylae.”

  Someone took the jagged fragment stamped with that unusual word to Marie Houy, librarian and keeper of a small museum in Marble Falls.19 About ten inches long, it looked like part of some kind of monument or marker. But what did the artifact commemorate, and what was it doing at the Burnet County granite quarry? Neither the librarian, a longtime area resident then in her early seventies, nor anyone else she contacted had any idea.

  The only clue was that one word: “Thermopylae.”

  Checking the library’s not-so-up-to-date encyclopedia set, Mrs. Houy read that Thermopylae had been in ancient times the only northern entrance to Greece. It had been defended bravely if unsuccessfully against invading Persians. While Houy had not heard of that Grecian city until she looked it up, in the nineteenth century, educators stressed the classics much more than they would in the following century. In the 1800s, many well-schooled individuals knew the story of the 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae.

  Given the general similarity between the Grecian fight and the Alamo siege, the figurative ruins of Thermopylae lay ripe for use as metaphor. The Telegraph and Texas Register, in an editorial published on March 24, 1836—only two weeks after the massacre in San Antonio—called the battle “the Thermopylae of Texas.” That comparison having been made, others picked up on it. Republic of Texas vice president Edward Burleson later used the analogy in a speech said to have been ghost-written by General Thomas J. Green. In this talk, Burleson famously recited, “Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none.”

  In 1841, some stones from the ruins of the crumbling Spanish mission in San Antonio were removed and transformed into a monument honoring the dead Alamo defenders. Englishman William B. Nangle, a sculptor, fashioned the piece in partnership with one Joseph Cox, a stonecutter. A tapered shaft resting on an ornately carved base, the commemorative work rose ten feet. Most pertinent in regard to the mystery object found just west of Marble Falls, the Alamo monument bore Burleson/Green’s ten words comparing Thermopylae to the Alamo. The other three sides of the stone shaft read:

  “To the God of the fearless and the free is dedicated this altar, made from the stones of the Alamo”

  “Blood of heroes hath stained me. Let the stones of the Alamo speak that their immolation be not forgotten”

  “Be they enrolled with Leonidas in the host of the mighty dead.” [Leonidas was the warrior-king of the Greek city-state of Sparta. He died in the last stand at Thermopylae.]

  After displaying the piece for a time in San Antonio, Cox (Nangle having died soon after the monument’s completion) took the monument to Houston and then Galveston, where he collected twenty-five cents a head from folks wishing to have a look at it. Next he took the monument to New Orleans, hoping to make more money in a larger city, but residents there did not find it particularly captivating. Cox ended up selling it. Someh
ow after the change in ownership, the ornate piece, which one writer who viewed it called “a credit on any artist of ancient or modern times,” ended up in a discard pile at a Crescent City marble yard. Following its rediscovery in the early 1850s, the monument was returned to Texas and placed in the vestibule of the new capitol in 1855. Three years later, the legislature appropriated $2,500 to buy the monument. The monument remained in place for the next twenty-four years. But in 1881, as Mrs. M.E.M. Davis explained in her 1897 book The Story of Texas Under Six Flags, the “old capitol…was burned, and with it many priceless relics of the earlier days of Texas. Among those was the old monument dedicated…to the heroes of the Alamo.” Collapsing interior beams and walls, not to mention the intense heat, destroyed the monument.

  An engraving of the 1841 Alamo monument destroyed in the capitol fire forty years later. Courtesy of Ken Wukasch.

  The day after the fire, the Austin Statesman reported that some “thoughtful persons tore away the iron railings around the monument, made from the ruins of the Alamo, and carried off the upper portion. The pedestal was permitted to remain, in its position, as it was thought it could withstand the weight of anything which might fall upon it.”

  Another version is that after the fire, Judge John P. White, picking through the ashes and debris hoping to salvage what he could, found the portion of the shaft containing the verbiage on each side. Even though the Alamo memorial was only forty years old at the time, White appreciated its historical significance and kept it for seven years. Then, with the opening of the new capitol in 1888, he conveyed it to L.L. Foster, state commissioner of insurance, statistics, history and agriculture.

  If White assumed the damaged monument would go back on display in the new building, he was wrong. The state kept the remnant in storage until passing it on to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas for display in the museum the organization then maintained in the old general land office building across from the capitol. Exactly when that transfer occurred has not been determined, but the Handbook of Texas online says it was at the museum by 1950. It stayed there until September 1989, when the DRT returned the remnant to the state when that organization moved its museum from the old state building to a new location on the north side of Austin.

  “How the pieces landed here we do not know, unless they hauled it off, after the fire, to get it out of the way at the time they were bringing granite blocks from here to Austin for the new Capitol,” Mrs. Houy wrote of the Marble Falls artifacts in 1963.

  The remnant held by the state includes the Thermopylae wording, which rules out any possibility that the piece found near Marble Falls came from the original Alamo monument. What seems likely, though no documentation has been found, is that during construction of the new red granite capitol, the state commissioned one of the Scottish stonecutters to make a granite replica of the monument. For whatever reason, that did not happen, and what may have been a concrete prototype or casting from the original ended up getting broken up and buried at the quarry.

  One more mystery: the Marble Falls fragment with the word “Thermopylae” has again gone missing. Mrs. Houy died in 1989, just shy of her 100th birthday. The library she once ran in an old downtown building got a more spacious new home in the mid-1990s, and the much-expanded Marble Falls museum, now known as the Falls of the Colorado Museum, is located in the old Marble Falls schoolhouse. While the artifacts Mrs. Houy curated presumably ended up in the Falls of the Colorado collection, no one knows anything about a piece of concrete or plaster bearing the simple legend “Thermopylae.”

  A second monument honoring the Alamo defenders went up on the capitol grounds in 1891. Author’s collection.

  The next time the legislature met after the 1881 fire, lawmakers appropriated money for a new Alamo monument. But another decade passed before such a monument finally stood on the grounds of the new capitol. Made of red Texas granite, the piece was produced by the James S. Clark and Company of Louisville, Kentucky, and placed at the right of the main entrance. Sculptor Chrohl Smith shaped the bronze figure of a young Texian soldier armed with a muzzle-loader that stands atop the piece.

  The statue is considerably larger than its predecessor, rising thirty-six and a half feet. It sits on a two-foot gray granite foundation that is nineteen feet square. On each corner is a three-foot-square base topped by a polished seven-foot pillar. Each of those pillars bear arches that come together in a dome. The soldier stands sentinel-like on top of that. The names of the Alamo defenders as known in 1891 are engraved on each of the pillars.

  A long-extinct nineteenth-century publication called Texas Topics did not view the Alamo monument as particularly memorable. “Already two most unsightly monuments occupy conspicuous positions on the front terrace,” the magazine noted. “One of these monstrosities [the Alamo monument] resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned well-house, and notwithstanding it cost the State several thousand dollars, every judicious and self-respecting citizen who visits the capitol would be willing to stand a reasonable tax for the purpose of removing such a piece of burlesque on art and architecture.”

  While not commenting on the monument’s appearance, the State Preservation Board’s website definitely has an opinion on the work’s historical accuracy. The board notes:

  [A]s a product of the 1890s, the Heroes of the Alamo include historical omissions and errors. The Alamo historical site recognizes 189 defenders. The monument includes only 90 from the official list with the correct spelling, 46 misspelled names and 47 other individuals listed but not recognized by the Alamo as having fought at the battle. After consulting with museum and historical professionals, the [board] determined not to alter the monument and leave it as a historic artifact of the period.

  The 1891-vintage second Alamo monument may not be perfect, but at least Texans know where to find it.

  16

  SMOKEY HENDERSON HANGS IN THE CAPITOL, TOO

  Calculated solely on the basis of square footage, the capitol amounts to the largest art museum in Texas.

  The 365,000-square foot original statehouse, augmented by the 667,000-square-foot underground extension opened in 1993, holds a rich inventory of paintings, sculptures and other art objects or historic artifacts. Of course, Texas’s many sizable art museums have much larger collections than the capitol contains, but the list of works in the big granite building on Congress Avenue is not inconsiderable.

  With an initial appropriation of $10,000, acquisition of art began as soon as the state started moving in. In 1887, the legislature created a board to purchase pictures. The board started by commissioning portraits of each of the Republic of Texas’s presidents and then oversaw the painting of gubernatorial portraits to that point in the state’s history.

  The capitol holds some 275 paintings, 175 artworks on paper and 25 sculpture pieces, both inside and outside. By the broadest definition, the building itself is a work of architectural art, from the five-point star hanging on the inside of its dome to its Art Deco terrazzo flooring installed in 1935. The list of paintings hanging in the capitol includes three portraits of colonizer Stephen F. Austin, one of Sam Houston (well, two including the monumental painting of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna surrendering to Houston after the Battle of San Jacinto), Davy Crockett, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barbara Jordan and many more paintings of people and places.

  The portrait collection of former chief executives begins on the fourth floor around the rotunda and continues to the first floor, where paintings of the more recent governors are on display. Each time a new portrait is hung, all the other portraits are moved one space to the left. The addition of a new portrait is always a media event welcome on a slow news day, with a ceremony featuring remarks by the former governor being honored. Former governor Ann Richards quipped that it is “not every day you get to come to a hanging,” but former governor and president George W. Bush improved on that by noting when his portrait went up, in effect, that it’s not every day that you get to go to your own hanging.
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  Among the portraits of well- or relatively well-known governors hangs the likeness of the Lone Star State’s most anonymous chief executive since statehood, though determining just who deserves this singular honor is not easy and open to challenge. Even figuring how many governors Texas has had is something of a mind-twister. Part of the problem is determining the rules. Should only the number of governors since Texas joined the Union be counted? That’s relatively easy, but what about during the days of the Confederacy? Do Rebel governors count? And what about governors appointed during the military occupation following the Civil War?

  No matter the calculus, Texas has had far more governors than the United States has had presidents. As of 2016, the number had reached one hundred. But considering there’s even some confusion over how one of these men spelled his name, the count may not be perfectly accurate. (Was it Governor Tomas Felipe Winthuisen or Winthuysen? Whichever, he served from 1741 to 1743 during the Spanish colonial period.)

  The list of honor begins with one Domingo Teran de los Rios, who served from 1691 to 1692 as governor of the Spanish province that included what we now know as Texas, as would Winthuisen/Winthuysen. In all, thirty-eight men governed Texas until Mexico wrested itself from the Spanish Crown in 1821. Fourteen other men held the title of governor when Texas was under the Mexican flag.