Austin, C.S.A.
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
An active place during the Civil War, Austin was the site of the secession convention, March 2, 1861, and legislative sessions which lasted until June 1865. City visitors during the early 1860s included lobbyists, cotton speculators, military leaders, and businessmen seeking to aid the war effort. Five stage lines and a pony express to the railhead at Brenham provided communications. Also located here was the Texas Military Board, an agency created to obtain arms and munitions for 33 militia districts. A city arsenal was set up on Waller Creek in southeast Austin. A gun cap factory in the old Land Office on 11th street made 14,000 shells a day, and a foundry produced guns and cannon. Factories for shoes and gunpowder, and a sewing room in the basement of the capitol, furnished good for the Confederate army. The city also maintained a military fort. During the war citizens endured Indian raids, epidemics of fever and diphtheria, rumors of slave uprisings, and a scarcity of food. Hotels refused room and board, even to state legislators, unless payment was made in gold, silver, or goods such as nails and tobacco. As a result, some lawmakers lived in their wagons and cooked over open fires.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
During the Civil War, Austin was no sleepy statehouse town but a working engine of the Confederate effort. Behind the secession convention and the wartime legislative sessions ran a gritty industrial machine: an arsenal on Waller Creek, a gun-cap factory turning out shells by the thousands, and a foundry casting cannon. Citizens paid for it with hardship — fever and diphtheria, food shortages, and hotels that demanded gold or tobacco before they would rent a bed.
Why it matters
Austin shows how the Confederacy tried to industrialize a largely agrarian frontier capital under blockade, and how ordinary residents absorbed the strain of a war economy.
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Related events
- · Texas Secession Convention
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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