The Texas Capitol is pink because the limestone near Austin had iron in it and stained when it weathered, and because the Capitol Board and Governor John Ireland held out for Texas stone against a proposal to substitute limestone from Bedford, Indiana. The owners of Granite Mountain, George W. Lacy, Nimrod L. Norton and William H. Westfall, then donated outright every cubic foot the building needed. A supplementary contract of 25 July 1885 set out what the state gave in exchange: it would share the extra cost, build a narrow gauge railroad from Burnet to the quarry, and furnish convict labour to quarry the stone, with the contractor paying the state for the convicts and feeding and housing them. That last clause caused a national fight.
The Granite Cutters' National Union voted five hundred to one to boycott the job. The contractor paid the state sixty five cents a day per convict to house, feed and guard him, against an official Austin union wage of four dollars. The contractor Gustav Wilke sent eighty eight granite cutters from Aberdeen; union representatives and a United States marshal met them in New York under the Alien Contract Labor Law of February 1885, and sixty four went on to Texas. Only fifteen of those were still there by May 1887.
Wilke was indicted in March 1886, admitted the charges, and was fined a thousand dollars for each Aberdeen man, sixty four thousand in all, finally settling in 1893 for eight thousand and costs. The boycott stopped neither the convicts nor the non-union hiring. The State Preservation Board counts 188,518 cubic feet of granite shipped out on the railroad built to carry it.
Getting there
30.5882, -98.3006
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Hear it from the road
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