Texas history is full of instances of the resolution and resourcefulness, but perhaps none more so than that of Angelina Belle Peyton Eberly of Austin during what has become known as the Texas Archive War of 1842.
Despite the popular title, the Texas Archive War was less a war than a dispute, and was less about the actual archives than it was a fight over firmly determining which city would be the capitol of the nascent Republic of Texas: Austin or Houston.
First, a bit of background: during the Texas Revolution of 1836, the papers documenting the formation, operations, and justifications of the interim government accompanied government officials as they scampered about the countryside on step ahead of the Mexican Army. After independence was achieved, the archives were located in the Republic’s initial capital city Columbia before the center of government and the archives were moved to Houston a few years later.
When Mirabeau B. Lamar was succeeded popular Sam Houston as President of Texas in 1839, he led an effort in the Texas Congress to establish a planned city (i.e., Austin) to serve as the seat of government for the fledgling republic. Part of that required employing some 50 wagons to transfer the archives nearly 200 miles from Houston to Austin in 1839.
Opponents of the move—including former President Sam Houston--argued that Austin was an isolated spot on the edge of the frontier, surrounded by hostile native tribes (primarily Comanches) that put the capital at risk (incidentally, a fact proven by several raids from Comanche tribes once the state government settled there). Houston wanted to move of the archives back to the city named in his honor, and thus returning the City of Houston as the capital of Texas.
The citizens of Austin were not having it…any of it.
Which brings us to Angelina Eberly, an unlikely but inspiring hero. Eberly had come to Austin from Tennessee by way of New Orleans. She had operated a tavern in San Felipe de Austin from 1825 until the Texas Revolution, when the town was destroyed to prevent capture by Mexican forces. She married Captain Jacob Eberly in 1836 and together they opened Eberly House in Austin in 1839, located roughly near the intersection of Congress Avenue and Pecan (now Sixth) streets.
Jacob Eberly died in 1841, but his widow Angelina continued to maintain a respectable establishment. President Lamar and his cabinet dined at the tavern, and Houston himself resided there when he returned as Texas president in 1842. Considering Austin as "the most unfortunate site on earth for a seat of government," he refused to move in to the official residence, preferring instead Eberly’s boarding house.
When a detachment of 1,000 Mexican troops led by General Rafael Vásquez, invaded Texas and occupied San Antonio soon after Houston’s inauguration, worried Austinites formed a vigilance committee and recommended residents evacuate. Houston was among those who discretely chose to evacuate the capital city. On his way out of town, he ordered George Washington Hockley, the Republic’s Secretary of War, to see that the archives followed him to the city of Houston.
This irritated several Austinites, including Austin’s military commander, Colonel Henry Jones, who convened several of Austin’s citizens. Their general sentiment was that Austin was safe and that Houston had undermined public confidence in the city, which risked severe negative effects on its continued viability. On March 16, the committee of vigilance resolved that removing the archives violated the constitution and sent a patrol to the town of Bastrop to the east with orders to search every wagon and to seize any government records found. Houston's private secretary, W.D. Miller, wrote to him that Austin residents "would much rather take their rifles to prevent a removal [of the archives] than to fight Mexicans."[1]
Houston responded by calling a special session of Congress on June 27, 1842 to resolve the dispute, but the Congress took no action to move the capital.
In September 1842, another Mexican expedition temporarily occupied San Antonio, prompting Houston to demand that the Seventh Texas Congress to ignore the protests of the "seditious" citizens of Austin and support the removal of the archives. On December 9, "A Bill to provide for the safety of the National Archives" was introduced in the Senate, but the vote ended in a tie, leading Senate President Edward Burleson (a Houston foe) to cast the deciding vote against the bill. The next day, a frustrated Houston privately tasked Texas Rangers Colonel Thomas Smith and Captain Eli Chandler to raise a small troop with moving the archives to Washington-on-the-Brazos. "While [the archives] remain where they are,” Houston rationalized, “no one knows the hour when they may be utterly destroyed.”[2]
On the morning of December 30, 1842, Smith and about 20 men sneaked into Austin and began loading three wagons with archival documents. Angelina Eberly was awoken by the sound of the loading of the wagons and ran barefoot and in her nightgown to Congress Avenue, where a six-pound howitzer had been anchored to defend against Indian raids. Being a resourceful woman, Eberly turned the small cannon toward the General Land Office and fired. She missed the men loading the wagon, but smacked the General Land Office building and made such a noise as to rouse Austinites from their sleep. It it was enough to prompt Smith and his men to high-tail it out of town.
To avoid the armed patrol, Smith’s group circled northeast of Bastrop, but their progress was slowed by rain and poorly maintained roads. The group managed to make it 18 miles before stopping for the night near Kinney's Fort along Brushy Creek.
A group of agitated Austinites took off in pursuit and caught up to Smith's encampment in the middle of the night. Not much is recorded as to what followed, but by the next morning the records were returned to Austin.
In the wake of the incident, committees formed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate investigated. Unpersuaded by Houston’s lengthy justification for his actions,[3] both committees admonished him for trying to move the records from Austin without congressional approval—especially with no immediate threat to the city.
Senators also passed a resolution encouraging Houston to move all the governmental agencies back to Austin. Despite congressional action—or perhaps in defiance of it--most government offices continued to run from Washington-on-the-Brazos. At least one report in March of 1843 described Austin as being practically deserted and most businesses closed, but the Republic’s archives remained where they were.
It wasn’t until July 4, 1845, when the convention proposing annexation to the United States met in Austin, that the governmental records created in Washington-on-the-Brazos were transferred to Austin to create a single location for the archive.
As for Eblery, she left Austin in 1847. After briefly managing a tavern in Port Lavaca on the Texas coast, she moved further up the coast to the seaside town of Indianola to run the American Hotel until her death in 1860, at the age of 62. She was buried in a cemetery outside Lavaca.
Austin continues to commemorate the bold and short-tempered woman who stood up for the city. The Austin History Center Association annually hosts a benefit luncheon in her honor, and the modern Eberly eatery on South Lamar Boulevard was named after her.
Most prominently, in 2004 Capital Area Statues, Inc., a non-profit organization that commissions and raises money for monumental works of sculpture celebrating the history and culture of Texas, commissioned, funded (around $300,000), and donated a bronze statue commemorating Eberly as the “Savior of Austin” on the sidewalk of Congress Avenue in downtown Austin. At more than seven feet tall and weighing more than 2,000 pounds, the statue dominates the sidewalk as pedestrians navigate around.
The statue was designed by the Pulitzer-prize winning newspaper cartoonist Pat Oliphant, who late in his career took up bronze sculptures. Unfortunately, the absence of a contemporary image of Eberly required Oliphant to use his imagination in crafting the design. The statue itself was not without some controversy, with some Austinites complaining of the statue in her night clothes and the ample proportions of her bosom.[4] But no one can discount the memorably stunning image of that husky woman, her mouth agape in rage as she lights the cannon, sculpted in Oliphant’s characteristic spackled textures.
[1] Winfrey, Dorman H. (October 1960). "The Texan Archive War of 1842". Southwestern Historical Quarterly. p. 177. [2] Ibid, p. 179; Sam Houston to William O'Brian, March 20, 1842 Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Retrieved March 26, 2022 [3] Sam Houston to Texas Congress, January 4, 1843, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Retrieved March 26, 2022 [4] Cartwright, Gary (May 2004). "Statues of Limitations". Texas Monthly.
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