Angelina Eberly statue

Innkeeper Angelina Eberly is credited with saving the Texas capital at Austin. In 1842 alerted citizen vigilantes about a group of Texas Rangers' efforts to move the state archives, which many feared would lead to relocating the republic's capital. Her warning cannon shot blew a hole in the wall of the General Land Office. This monument celebrates her contribution, but its comedic style also mocks the damage she wreaked during the so-called Archive War.

This comic monument in Austin, Texas, offers a subtle critique not only of traditional gender norms and pioneer commemoration, but of the highly traditional Texas Pioneer Woman monument that the Daughters of the Republic of Texas erected a few blocks away on the Texas State Capitol grounds. 

A small group of Austin residents calling themselves Capital Area Statues, Inc. (CAST), erected sculptor Patrick Oliphant's humorous bronze statue of Angelina Eberly. Oliphant’s Eberly monument provides a striking counterpoint to the traditional iconography embraced by Texas Pioneer Woman and so many other Pioneer Mother monuments. Oliphant created a lively and comedic depiction of barefooted innkeeper Angelina Eberly, whom an accompanying plaque describes as “a bold woman whose vigilance and short temper preserved Austin as the capitol of Texas.” 

In 1842, that plaque explains, Eberly discovered a military detachment sent by Sam Houston to relocate the capitol of independent Texas to his namesake city by stealing the government's archives. Eberly alerted the citizens of Austin by firing the town cannon, “blowing a hole in the Land Office building and rousing the populace.” While Eberly's actions directly challenged the Pioneer Mother ideal celebrated by dozens of western monuments erected since the 1920s, both the artist's portrayal and the accompanying plaque emphasized Eberly's “short temper” and clownish misdirection of that cannon, rather than her boldness and her important role in protecting Austin's role as capital city. Furthermore, by depicting a specific woman and event, it stopped short of offering an alternative view of the ideal Texas pioneer woman. The Eberly monument thus offered her as a strong female role model to Austin residents. But the work ultimately reinforced traditional Texas history-telling that emphasized the actions of white men like Sam Houston and glorified Texas’ brief independence. The work did not significantly challenge the traditional gender ideology enshrined nearby.

Prescott, Cynthia Culver. Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.