| |
From
his office in the 1857-vintage Land Office Building, Land Commissioner W.C. Walsh
had been watching the construction of the new Capitol since the first shovel of
dirt was tossed on Feb. 1, 1882. Not only was he witnessing the biggest construction
job to that point in Texas history,
Walsh had an official reason to follow the building’s progress – he sat on the
Capitol Board, the state entity overseeing the project.
By the spring
of 1887, the red granite, Greek cross-shaped base of the future statehouse had
been completed. Soon, work would begin on the towering dome that would give the
four-story government building (the east-west wings are only three stories) its
distinctive silhouette.
Born in Dayton, Ohio on the eve of the Texas Revolution
in 1836, Walsh had come to Texas with his family
when only four. They settled in Austin
when all it amounted to was an assortment of log cabins lining a broad thoroughfare
called Congress Avenue. Following his graduation from Georgetown University in
Washington, he returned to Texas and went to work
as a clerk in the land office. Walsh stayed there until the beginning of the Civil
War, when he signed up to fight for the Confederacy. Though wounded three times,
he survived the war. Back in Austin,
he farmed and ran a rock quarry near Barton
Springs until 1873, when he became chief clerk of the House of Representatives.
Five years later, Governor R.B. Hubbard appointed him to fill the unexpired term
of Land Commissioner J.J. Gross. Elected to a full term in November 1878, Walsh
would serve until 1887.
As
the new Capitol
slowly took shape, as a member of the body charged with making all the spot decisions
that come up during such a large-scale project, so did Walsh’s layman’s knowledge
of architecture. Now, with construction about to begin on the dome, Walsh grew
increasingly uneasy. |
 |
“The plans,” Walsh
later wrote, “called for a dome of brick, the lower thickness of the walls to
be five feet and diminishing gradually to the foot of the lantern.”
He
figured the weight of the brick, added the weight of the substructure, and went
to bed, not liking the number he got. Assuming he had made a mistake, the next
night he went over his calculations and got the same result.
“The weight
shown not only wiped out the ‘factor of safety’ but exceeded the theoretical resistance
of the foundation,” he wrote. In other words, the base of the Capitol
would not support a brick dome. At some point, either during construction or over
the course of time, it likely would come crashing down and possibly take much
of the rest of the building with it.
Walsh tore up his calculations and
burned the scraps. “As far as I could, [I] dismissed the question from my mind
for ten days,” he continued. But then he ran the numbers again, coming to the
same catastrophe-protending figure. This time he submitted the numbers to someone
else, who came to the same conclusion.
“I then hunted up [Gus] Wilke,
the building contractor, and broached the subject,” Walsh wrote. “He told me the
question had been worrying him for months, and he wished I could get some action
by the Board.”
Walsh did just that, but the timing was bad. All the state
officials who sat on the board, including Walsh, were leaving office. Only the
state treasurer would still be on the board.
“The general thought was
that the outgoing Board had brought the building through troubles and discouragement
to its practical completion, and it was now too late for the retiring board to
take up the question—besides the new Board ought to have something to worry over,”
Walsh wrote.
Now a private citizen, Walsh remained concerned. When the
new board took no action on the dome issue after its second meeting, Walsh took
the matter to the new governor, Sul Ross. The governor asked Walsh to submit his
concerns in writing and shrewdly asked if he minded the document being made public.
The former land commission said he had no problem with that, and soon his belief
that the blueprints for the new capitol contained a potentially disasterous design
flaw hit the state’s major newspapers.
When that happened, Ross appointed
a panel of Texas and Louisiana architects to prepare
a report on the dome issue. “After thorough study [the architects] reported to
the Governor that my contention was correct, that the existing plan was dangerous,
and recommended the substitution of steel plates for the brick, above the walls.”
|
 |
Disaster likely averted,
Walsh was still not totally satisfied. He sent Capitol architect Elijah E. Myers
a copy of the report on the dome, asking for “at least a personal explanation.”
Myers’ secretary replied that his boss was in ill health and unable to answer
Walsh.
“The only theory I could ever work out was that the upper dome
was planned on the theory that the walls supporting it were treated in the estimate
as solid, while in fact from basement to top story they were opened on four sides
by immense arches. The mystery will never be solved.”
By the time Walsh
died on August 30, 1924, the ironclad Capitol dome had stood for more than a quarter
century and has now made it past 120 years.
© Mike
Cox - July
21, 2011 column
More
"Texas
Tales"
See Texas
State Capitol Building |
The
Capitol Dome
today
TE Photo, 2004 |
|
Books by Mike Cox - Order Now |
| |
