Country World

Dec. 10, 2009 - Before it settled in Texas, the state capital was all over the place. That was especially true during its years as a Republic. Military commanders of the day thought it best to keep the capital a moving target. At various times, San Felipe, Washington-on-the-Brazos, Harrisburg, Galveston Island, Velasco, Columbia and Houston all had a turn as the center of state government.
Subsequently, the people chose sides in a power struggle between factions favoring a city named for Sam Houston or a new city, Waterloo, which President Mirabeau Lamar liked because it was pretty and thick with buffalo.
The Republic's provisional government met at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 1, 1836, at the behest of the town's founders, who were dreadfully unprepared when the offer was accepted. A scheduled three-month convention was cut to 17 days, partly because the little community wasn't ready to be a capital of anything. There was little food except fatback and cornbread, and the buildings had no windows or heat. Just when the delegates were settling down to business, a blue norther blew in.
The new government drafted a Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos, appointed Sam Houston commander-in-chief and then found out that Santa Anna had taken the Alamo and was headed east. The delegates left Washington-on-the-Brazos in a hurry and took their capital with them to Harrisburg on the Buffalo Bayou. A steamboat served as site of a de facto state capital when they took a steamboat to Galveston Island. From there, the capitol was located in Velasco.
In May of 1837, the capital was moved to Houston, a town founded on the Buffalo Bayou by A.C. Allen and John Kirby, and named for Sam Houston. The Allen brothers offered to build a two-story capitol building for free if Houston was made the capital of the Republic, and it came to pass -- for a while.
When Lamar served as Houston's vice-president, he took a vacation from Houston, the city, and Sam Houston, the man, because he cared very little for either. Lamar and his secretary, Reverend Edward Fontaine, set out for the frontier where the Comanche still held sway. They got an escort of six Texas Rangers to a small stockade settlement at the mouth of Shoal Creek called Waterloo.
At a site where Congress and Seventh Streets intersect in downtown Austin today, Lamar killed a huge buffalo bull. The party assembled afterwards on a hill where the state capitol now stands and Lamar, stirred by the beauty of the Colorado River valley, declared that this should be the seat of future empire; Lamar was big on empires.
When Lamar became president of the Republic in 1838, one of his first acts was to appoint a commission to locate a site for a new capital closer to the middle of the state. The commission voted unanimously for Waterloo, noting the Colorado River valley's "fertile and gracefully undulating woodlands and luxuriant prairies at a distance from it." This, the commission concluded, was "a region worthy only of being the home of the brave and the free." The Texas Congress approved the measure and renamed the city for Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas.
Old Sam, in his second term as president of the Republic, ordered the capital back to Houston when Mexican troops again menaced the city of San Antonio. This did not go over well with the people of Austin. Officials settled on Washington-on-the-Brazos as a compromise while Houston sent a group of rangers to get the archives in Austin and fetch them back to Houston. He stipulated, however, that the retrieval be bloodless.
A group opposing the move was unprepared for the rangers' raid on the state archives, though a Mrs. Angelina Eberly fired a cannon at Houston's men as they departed. The vigilantes took off in armed pursuit and caught up with the rangers and the archives at Kenney's Fort on Brushy Creek. The rangers put up token resistance before turning the archives over to the angry Austinites.
The Constitution of 1845 provided that Austin be the state capital until 1850, at which time an election would be held to decide the site of a permanent capital. Austin won that election with 7,674 votes. The 1845 document also called for another election, just in case Austin didn't work out.
Austin won that election with 63,297 votes followed by Houston with 35,1887, and Waco with 12,776. The first supposedly permanent capitol building burned in 1881 and was replaced with the present structure in May of 1888.