TEXAS SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

sources, including interviews with Eberly conducted in 1843. 3The term “fort” was accurate. Austinite William Walsh, writing from memory in 1924, described it as astoutly defensible place of refuge:In our dark days it was arranged that, whenever Indians came, a kettle drum was beaten and all thewomen and children fled to the shelter of the fort. At the west end of the hall was placed our onlypiece of artillery, an eighteen-pounder, which was kept loaded with grape-shot and so situated thatone man could give it a start and it would roll through the hall and out into the street. 4Whether Eberly was managing her own hotel or Bullock’s, she would have had full access to the Bullock Hotelearly on the morning of December 30, 1842.Both of the Texas Historical Commission markers tella story similar to the one on the plaque beside the statue, butthey differ in key details. The “Archive War” marker states:Mrs. Angelina Eberly, a noted innkeeper and one ofthe few women in Austin during the breakup, foundthe men loading the archives in darkness. Runningto the city cannon on Congress Avenue at Pecan (6thStreet), she fired at the wagons. The 26 men departedwith the records. About 68 citizens rode after them,hauling along the city cannon. Some 20 miles fromAustin they retrieved the archives without bloodshed.Because the archives remained here, the Presidentand Congress returned in 1845, preserving Austin asthe capital of the Republic and (later), the state.In contrast, the Indianola marker is more concerned withEberly’s biography:A Tennessean, Angelina Peyton came to Texas in1822. With her husband, J.C. Peyton, she operatedan inn in San Felipe, capital of the Austin colony.Peyton died in 1834; in 1836 the widow marriedJacob Eberly. She and Eberly had a hotel in Austinby 1842, when Angelina Eberly discovered mensecretly removing records from the capital. Firing acannon, she started the “Archives War”, and rescuedthe original records of the Republic of Texas. Latershe lived at Indianola. Her burial place and marker(3/4 mi. NW) were destroyed in a flood in 1875.The “Angelina Bell Peyton Eberly”Texas Historical Commission marker.Photo from Indianola website, public domain.3Jeffrey Stuart Kerr, Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas (Lubbock: Tex. Tech Univ. Press, 2013), 113; Randolph B. Campbell,Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 181; Mary Austin Holley, “Notes and Items ofImportance and Interest About Figures Who Figured in the Early History of Texas,” a/k/a “Notes Made by Mrs. Holley In Interviews WithProminent Texans of Early Days” (re-copied by George W. Hill, Dolph Briscoe Ctr. for Am. Hist., Univ. of Tex. at Austin).4Kerr, Seat of Empire, 246-47 n. 28, quoting William Walsh in The Austin Statesman (April 6, 1924).38