The Texas Constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres of the Panhandle to pay for a new Capitol. In 1879 the legislature had it surveyed in ten counties near the New Mexico line, from Dallam and Hartley south to Hockley. In May 1881 the Capitol Board chose a design by Elijah E. Myers of Detroit and asked for a builder who would take the land as payment. Only two bids came in. On November 9, 1881, the old capitol burned.
Three million acres
Early in 1882 the contract went to Mathias Schnell of Rock Island, Illinois, who within months signed it over to Taylor, Babcock and Company of Chicago: Abner Taylor, Amos Babcock and the brothers Charles and John Farwell. The group became known as the Capitol Syndicate. Babcock spent thirty-six days that spring crossing the grant by army ambulance, more than 950 miles, and his party found an error in an 1859 survey that eventually kept for Texas a strip along the New Mexico line half a mile wide and 310 miles long. Until the land could be sold, the syndicate ran cattle on it as the XIT Ranch.
The red granite
The plans called for native limestone, but the stone near Austin held particles of iron that stained it. Taylor proposed Indiana limestone. The Capitol Board and Governor John Ireland wanted Texas stone, and the owners of Granite Mountain near Marble Falls offered red granite free. In early 1885 the subcontractor, Gustav Wilke, told Taylor that donated granite in a simpler design would cost much less than carved limestone. Taylor kept that to himself. On July 25, 1885, he signed a supplementary contract under which the state supplied the granite, shared the extra cost, built a narrow-gauge railroad to the quarry and furnished convicts to quarry the stone. Taylor agreed to pay sixty-five cents a day to house, feed and guard them.
Aberdeen
Organized labor opposed putting convicts to work beside free men, and the International Association of Granite Cutters voted 500 to 1 to boycott the job. Wilke sent an agent to Aberdeen, Scotland, who signed up eighty-eight cutters with promises of steady work at four to six dollars a day. Bringing workers in under contract had been illegal since February 1885. In New York union men and a federal marshal met the ship. Twenty-four of the Scots refused to go on, and sixty-four went to Texas, where pay averaged about twenty-seven cents an hour. Between July and October 1886 the number of convicts on the job rose from 300 to 350. The syndicate's members were dropped from the case. Wilke alone was fined, $1,000 for each of the sixty-four, and in 1893 he paid $8,000 and costs.
The Goddess of Liberty went up on the dome in February 1888, and the building opened on April 21. The state accepted it on December 6, once the copper roof stopped leaking. The land had been valued at $1.5 million in 1882. A century later it was assessed at almost $7 billion. The ranch's story is told at the XIT Museum in Dalhart.