Site of Second Travis County Courthouse and Walton Building
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1875 in term of County Judge James W. Smith. Former state officials on committees for site and building include Governor E.M. Pease, Secretary of State C.S. West, Attorney General N.G. Shelley, Treasurer James H. Raymond and legislator George Hancock. In era when Texas was gaining world renown, home of outstanding courts, able judges, brilliant bar, one tenant of its fortress-style jail was author William Sidney Porter (O. Henry), after his return to Austin in 1897 to be with his dying wife and face trial on embezzlement charges. In 1931 the county accepted a block of land in exchange for cancellation of its 99-year lease on this site. Courthouse towers and jail were removed. State offices moved in – Game, Fish and Oyster Commission, Department of Education, Banking Department. In public competition for a name, “Walton Building” was chosen for fishermen’s patron Izaak Walton (1593-1683) and for Wm. M. “Buck” Walton (1832-1915), adjutant general in Terrell’s Confederate Brigade, attorney general of Texas, famed for a colorful law career. The massive 3-story Victorian limestone structure with impressive carved entrance was razed in 1964. (1965)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1875, the second Travis County Courthouse was a massive three-story Victorian limestone building whose fortress-like jail once held the writer William Sidney Porter, later famous as O. Henry, when he returned to Austin in 1897 to face embezzlement charges. The county traded away its long lease in 1931, the courthouse was demolished, and state offices moved in under the name Walton Building. That structure was itself razed in 1964.
Why it matters
The site layers the rise of Texas civic institutions with a brush against one of America's best-loved short-story writers, showing how ordinary courthouses gather extraordinary stories.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1875, Texas was coming into its own. The Reconstruction and Gilded Age years were a time of institution-building across the state, and Austin — the capital — was where much of that machinery of government took shape. A courthouse in this era was not just an office; it was a statement that a county had arrived, that law and order and civic ambition had a permanent home.
This was also the age of Westward Expansion, when Texas was gaining a wide reputation as a place of dramatic growth, forceful personalities, and a vigorous legal culture. The courtroom was one of the great stages of frontier and post-frontier life, and the men who filled its benches and bar were public figures in a way that is hard to imagine today.
Into that setting rose a massive three-story Victorian courthouse of limestone, built to impress and to endure. Around such a building clustered the whole apparatus of county authority — including, as the marker reminds us, a fortress-style jail.
People & events
The second Travis County Courthouse was built in 1875, during the term of County Judge James W. Smith, and the committees that chose its site and oversaw its construction read like a roster of Texas officialdom: former Governor E.M. Pease, Secretary of State C.S. West, Attorney General N.G. Shelley, Treasurer James H. Raymond, and the legislator George Hancock. This was a building the state's leading men took personal interest in raising.
But the tenant history remembers best never chose to be there. In 1897, the writer William Sidney Porter — who would become world-famous under the pen name O. Henry — returned to Austin to be with his dying wife and to face charges of embezzlement. For a time, the fortress-style jail attached to this courthouse held him. The author whose twist-ending stories would later delight millions passed through this very site at the lowest, most painful moment of his life.
The building's later years were a slow unmaking. In 1931, the county accepted a block of land in exchange for canceling its long ninety-nine-year lease on the site; the courthouse towers and jail were removed, and state offices moved in, including the Game, Fish and Oyster Commission, the Department of Education, and the Banking Department. A public contest chose a new name — the Walton Building — honoring both Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century patron of fishermen, and William M. "Buck" Walton, a colorful Texas attorney general and Confederate adjutant general. That massive Victorian limestone structure, with its impressive carved entrance, was finally razed in 1964.
Its place in the American story
The site tells the larger American story of how local government put down roots. In the decades after the Civil War, counties across the growing nation built ambitious courthouses as anchors of civic identity — temples of law meant to project stability and permanence. This one, shepherded by governors and state officers, shows how seriously that project was taken.
It also shows how such places gather stories far larger than themselves. That an ordinary county jail briefly held one of America's most beloved short-story writers is a reminder that literary history and legal history are not separate rooms. O. Henry's later fame — built on tales of ordinary people and sudden reversals of fortune — is shadowed by his own reversal of fortune, part of which unfolded right here.
And the building's disappearance carries its own national lesson. The wave of demolitions that swept away grand Victorian civic buildings in the mid-twentieth century erased much of this architectural heritage across the country. A marker standing where two successive landmark buildings once rose and fell is a quiet monument to what has been lost, and to why remembering it matters.
If you visit
This is a site that asks you to see what is no longer there — twice over. First picture the towering 1875 limestone courthouse with its carved entrance and its fortress-like jail; then picture the Walton Building that replaced part of the story; then realize both are gone, cleared away in the twentieth century. The ground beneath you has held and lost two landmarks.
Let the O. Henry connection anchor your imagination. Somewhere on this site, the man who would write some of America's most famous short stories sat confined, having come home to a dying wife and a courtroom reckoning. It's a sobering, human counterpoint to the polished author of legend, and it makes this ordinary patch of downtown unexpectedly moving.
As part of a walk through Austin's historic core, this marker pairs well with the capital's other civic and literary sites. Read it slowly — the inscription packs in governors, a jailed author, a naming contest, and two demolitions — and you'll leave with a vivid sense of how much drama a single county block can absorb over the years.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · William Sidney Porter (O. Henry)
- · William M. Walton
- · E.M. Pease
Themes & tags
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