A bronze statue of the Austin heroine Angelina Eberly is capturing the historical moment of Eberly bringing Austin the win in the Texas Archive War.
Eberly was born in 1798 in Tennessee. Since her first marriage, she operated several inns and taverns with her first husband and later with her second one, in several places in the US till her death in 1860.
In 1842 Texas’s president wanted to set Huston as the capital of Texas. When his campaign failed, he sent a military detachment to Austin to relocate the government archives. When Eberly noticed the men loading their wagons, she fired Austin’s six-pound cannon into the General Land Office Building to alert about the archive theft. The noise woke up the people of Austin who chased the Huston’s troops and saved the archives, preserving Austin as the capital of Texas.
The statue is located at the exact place Eberly fired the canon. It was sculptured by Pat Oliphant and dedicated on September 26th, 2004. On the ground of the statue is a plaque describing the historic event. The last sentence on the plaque states – “This statue honors a bold woman whose vigilance and short temper preserved Austin as the capital of Texas.”
