Texana Thursday: The Capital Moves to Austin

A statue of Angelina Eberly stands on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin. The cannon is pointed toward Houston. (Creative Commons license attribution, photo courtesy Patrick Breen)

When Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar became president of the Republic of Texas in December, 1838, he had his own ideas about how to proceed.

Lamar envisioned that Texas would eventually extend from the Gulf Coast and the Sabine River to the West Coast. To have a nation that large, the capital, then in Houston, seemed out of place. Lamar thought it should be moved westward.

Lamar created a commission to study the question of where a permanent capital should be placed. He wasn’t the only one who had ideas about the issue. In fact, a bill was sent to Lamar’s predecessor as president, Sam Houston, suggesting that La Grange, 102 miles west of the city, be made the permanent capital. Houston vetoed that bill.

With Lamar’s influence, the commission suggested that Waterloo, a small settlement on the north bank of the Colorado River, become the capital.

Eventually Waterloo would be renamed Austin, in honor of the empresario who had helped families settle in Texas. Houston himself referred Austin as the “Father of Texas” upon Austin’s death in December 1836. Lamar and his cabinet first met there in October 1839.

Yet not everyone was happy about the move. In fact, some Austinites were fearful that the City of Houston would again become the capital when Sam Houston was again elected president in 1841, succeeding Lamar. In March 1842, a Mexican Army division captured San Antonio and President Houston declared a state of emergency. He ordered two Texas Rangers, Thomas I. Smith and Eli Chandler, to remove the archives and take them to Washington-on-the-Brazos, avoiding bloodshed if possible.

Austinites formed a vigilante group to provide armed resistance to such a move, but weren’t ready when the raid on the archives occurred. A local innkeeper, Angelina Eberly, was ready, though, and fired a cannon in an attempt to stop the raid.

The vigilante group caught up with Smith and Chandler’s group, which returned the papers to Austin without further bloodshed. The episode became known as the Archives War.

The City of Austin eventually commemorated Eberly’s actions with a statue of her, located on Congress Avenue, between Sixth and Seventh streets, in the heart of downtown.

The cannon portrayed in the statue points towards the southeast, directly towards the City of Houston.