Texas State Capitol rises in front of you, and the first thing that hits you is how big it is. At 308 feet tall, this building is 14 feet taller than the United States Capitol in Washington — a fact no Texan will let you forget. Completed in 1888, the Capitol was built in Renaissance Revival style from distinctive sunset red granite quarried in Marble Falls, Texas, giving it a warm pink glow at sunrise and sunset.
The building replaced an earlier limestone capitol that had burned, and its construction was financed not with cash but with land — Texas ceded three million acres of Panhandle territory to a Chicago syndicate in exchange for the labor and materials. Inside the massive rotunda, the star of Texas gazes down from the dome's interior, and the portraits of every Texas governor line the hallways. The building sits at the north end of Congress Avenue exactly as Mirabeau Lamar intended when he designed the city in 1839 — a visual terminus visible from the Colorado River, projecting permanence and authority.
Texas has been a state since 1845, but this Capitol still feels like it belongs to a republic that answers to no one.