Address: 1100 Congress Ave, Austin, TX 78701
\nHours: Mon–Fri 7am–10pm, Sat–Sun 9am–8pm (free admission)
\nCost: Free
The Texas Capitol is taller than the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. — and Texans planned it that way.
\nTexas burned through capitals the way it burned through presidents. The building you’re standing in front of is the end of a long, chaotic story.
\nWashington-on-the-Brazos (March 1836)\nTexas declared independence here on March 2, 1836 — in an unfinished, unheated building during a norther. Delegates signed while the wind came through the gaps in the walls. The document was barely dry before Santa Anna’s army was marching toward them.
\nThe Runaway Scrape Capitals (Spring 1836)\nThe ad interim government fled west to east as Santa Anna advanced — Harrisburg, then Galveston Island, then Velasco on the coast — conducting the business of a new republic while essentially on the run. The peace treaty ending the Texas Revolution was signed at Velasco.
\nColumbia (October 1836)\nThe first official capital of the Republic of Texas was a small town on the Brazos River (now West Columbia). The first Texas Congress convened here in a two-room building. It was cramped, muddy, and mosquito-ridden. They moved after one session.
\nHouston (1837–1839)\nThe Allen brothers — New York land speculators — founded a city on Buffalo Bayou and named it after President Sam Houston, then sold it to the republic as its capital. Houston (the city) was swampy, yellow-fever-prone, and widely despised. Sam Houston (the man) was reportedly embarrassed to have his name on it.
\nAustin (1839–present)\nPresident Mirabeau Lamar, who succeeded Sam Houston, wanted a new capital on the frontier — both as a statement of ambition and to get out of the Houstons’ city. He chose a small settlement called Waterloo on the Colorado River, renamed it Austin after the Father of Texas, and moved the government there over Sam Houston’s loud objections. Houston called it “the most unfortunate site upon earth for a seat of government.”
\nThen Houston came back as president and tried to take it back.
\nWhen Texas negotiated its annexation to the United States in 1845, it gave up its public lands — but retained the right to keep 3 million acres for public purposes. Those lands were used as payment to the Capitol Syndicate, a Chicago construction firm, in exchange for building the Capitol. The syndicate received the land in the Panhandle and used it to form the XIT Ranch — at one point the largest ranch in the world.
\nThe building you see today is at least the fourth structure to serve as Texas’s capitol in Austin alone. The first was a two-story frame building. A more permanent limestone capitol followed in the 1850s. That one burned. The cornerstone for the current building was laid in 1882.
\nAustin wasn’t the obvious choice. Several other sites came close — and one was actually approved by Congress before being killed.
\nNacogdoches and San Jacinto (1836)\nIn the early debates of the new Republic, the Texas Senate favored Nacogdoches — the oldest Anglo settlement in Texas, in the far east. The lower house wanted a site near San Jacinto, where the revolution had just been won. Neither prevailed. Columbia got the first session; Houston got the next one.
\nLa Grange, Fayette County (1838)\nThis is the one that almost happened. A capital-site commission selected a location near La Grange on the Colorado River in 1838, and Congress passed a bill to build the capital there. Sam Houston — the sitting president and the man who had his own city as capital — vetoed it. His stated reason was that the site was too exposed to Indian raids. His unstated reason was probably that he didn’t want to give up Houston.
\nSan Antonio\nThe largest and most established city in Texas for much of this era, San Antonio had the strongest claim on paper. It was the seat of Spanish and then Mexican government for decades. It was consistently passed over on the grounds that it sat too close to the Mexican border and was too exposed to attack — reasonable concerns in the 1830s and 40s, but it also conveniently kept power away from the old Spanish-Mexican power center.
\nAustin vs. Houston vs. Waco — The Votes\nWhen Texas joined the United States in 1845, the Constitution required that Austin remain the capital only until 1850, when voters would choose the permanent capital. Austin won that referendum: 7,674 votes to its nearest competitor. Twenty years later, in 1872, another election was held. Austin won again: 63,297 votes. Houston received 35,188. Waco received 12,776. The question has not been seriously revisited since.
\nSam Houston, back as president for his second term, had grown tired of Austin’s exposure to Comanche raids and moved the government temporarily east to Washington-on-the-Brazos. He then dispatched agents in the middle of the night to haul the government archives out of Austin by wagon — effectively relocating the capital by stealth.
\nA local woman named Angelina Eberly spotted the agents loading wagons in front of the General Land Office. She ran to the corner of Congress and Pecan (now 6th Street), where a cannon was kept for emergencies, and fired it into the Land Office building to wake the town. Austin citizens gave chase on horseback, overtook the wagons at Brushy Creek, and brought the archives back. Sam Houston never got them. Austin remained the capital. Angelina Eberly has a statue on Congress Avenue today.
\nThe building has seen more than legislation.
\n1903 — The Comptroller’s Murder\nState Comptroller Robert Love was shot twice in the chest in his Capitol office (now office 1N.12) by a man named William Hill, whom Love had recently fired. Hill showed up, put two bullets in Love’s chest, and was then chased down by the state’s chief bookkeeper, who shot Hill dead. Two men dead in the Capitol, both by gunfire, in a single afternoon. The office has been in use ever since.
\n1922 — The Rotunda Fall\nA painter named Ed Wheeler fell from scaffolding inside the rotunda and plunged approximately 160 feet, crashing through the glass-block floor into the basement below. He died from the fall. Many Austin tour guides will tell you the visible crack in the terrazzo state seal on the rotunda floor was caused by Wheeler’s body. This is a good story. It is not true — the current floor wasn’t installed until 1936, fourteen years after his death. The crack is from the floor settling. The real story is still a man falling 160 feet through a glass floor, which should be enough.
\n1977 — The Third Floor\nA young man with reported mental health issues fell — or jumped — from the third floor of the rotunda to his death. No additional details have been widely published. The Capitol remained open.
\n1983 — The Lieutenant Governor’s Fire\nFew Texans know that both the Speaker of the House and the Lieutenant Governor are given private apartments inside the Capitol building. In 1983, a fire broke out in Lieutenant Governor Bill Hobby’s apartment and killed a 23-year-old horse trainer from New Caney who was in the building. The east wing sustained extensive damage.
\n1985 — The Fighting 69th Legislature\nThe 69th Texas Legislature was unusually physical. Among its recorded altercations:
\nTexas Monthly summarized the session: “Passions were spent not on issues but on personal hostilities; there were more fistfights and near fistfights than anyone could remember.”
\nA note on the Servant Girl Annihilator: Austin’s most infamous 19th-century killer operated a few blocks from the Capitol during 1884–1885. See [[Servant Girl Annihilator]] for that story.
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