Eberly's Cannon

A bronze of a woman beside a cannon on Congress Avenue, between Sixth and Seventh streets, marks the night an innkeeper fired the town gun to keep Austin the capital of Texas. In March 1842, after Mexican troops captured San Antonio, President Sam Houston moved the government away from exposed Austin, but the town refused to give up the national archives. On the morning of December 30, 1842, his rangers were quietly loading the papers into wagons when Angelina Eberly saw them, ran to the six-pound city cannon kept loaded with grapeshot and fired. The shot struck the General Land Office building and woke the town. The rangers were under Colonel Thomas I. Smith and Captain Eli Chandler. The wagons got away, but a vigilance committee under Captain Mark B. Lewis took a cannon from the arsenal and overtook them on January 1, 1843, at Kenney's Fort on Brushy Creek. A few shots were fired before the rangers surrendered the papers, which went back to Austin and stayed there until it became the capital again. Eberly, born in Tennessee in 1798, had run an inn at San Felipe de Austin and then the Eberly House in Austin from 1839, where Houston himself chose to board. She died at Indianola in 1860.

The statue is by Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Pat Oliphant, paid for by a small citizens' group called Capital Area Statues. Its plaque calls her a bold woman whose vigilance and short temper preserved Austin as the capital, and its comic style has drawn criticism for making a joke of her.